The Annette B. Weiner Prize is given once a year in the spring for excellence in the field of Sociocultural Anthropology.
The Annette B. Weiner Prize
"Based on over eight months of fieldwork, Audra’s thesis offers a rare examination of the experience of women in the Litvish Orthodox community. Writing against portrayals of insularity and conservativism of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, Audra argues for the importance of writing from the religious and social perspectives of her interlocutors, highlighting their agency as they navigate professional demands and gender expectations." - Prof. Faye Ginsburg & Prof. Amy Zhang
"Sean Carr’s work on neocolonial power dynamics on the border represents an important intersection between anthropology, activism, and academia. He embodies the spirit of this award for many reasons. For starters, Sean directly immerses himself in his field of study with a passion and drive that is extraordinary and inspirational for an undergraduate scholar. He left a lasting impression on our classes and amongst his co-learners, who were immediately drawn to him because he served as a great resource on all issues related to advocacy networks and public health. He also strategizes ways to break the habit of bias in relations and interactions by continually fostering healthy and productive climates when discussing ways to innovate and apply anthropological methods beyond the classroom.
In his research, Sean focused on proposing solutions to the many restraints and restrictions that impact migrant lives. When he engaged with the problems on the United States and Mexico border, explicitly highlighting the relationship between gender violence, economic crisis, and systemic racism, Sean sought to learn the laws that justified actions and which provided a common language to make arguments to advance human right claims. He did this while also amplifying the voices and experiences of migrant (disconnected) communities. Sean is intellectually and proactively invested in the political and social struggles on both sides of the border, which he crosses in his personal and professional life with purpose. He aims to humanize the structural issues that pervade these spaces and thus develop a shared language around empowerment, human rights, and inclusion as part of this endeavor. It was a dynamic learning experience working with Sean throughout his undergraduate journey. He generously offered his insights, feelings, and understandings, while meaningfully adding value to our department in the process. He will go on contributing to our field and beyond. I am confident that he will continue to apply a powerful lens of representation, voice, and action in the next chapter of his professional development (graduate school.) Sean, you are a force of life, a rising star in the field of public health and human rights, and a dear friend and comrade to all social justice movements. We whole heartdly thank you for your service." - Mel Maldonado-Salcedo
"Cordelia’s honors thesis is a study of the development of community-controlled healthcare for Indigenous Australians in two cases, the Aboriginal Medical Service in Sydney and the remote Central Australian Aboriginal Congress in Alice Springs. She shows these responses to the extraordinarily unequal situation of Indigenous health as mobilized by Aboriginal activism towards “self-determination” and a growing pan-Aboriginal identity but also as drawing on international models of public health such as the Black Panther Party’s approach and that of the “Chinese village doctor,” articulated in the Alma Ata Declaration of the World Health Organization. In her thesis, she brought a deep knowledge of the critical work in Global Public Health to the specific situation of Indigenous Australia. I was impressed by how quickly she moved her ideas along, synthesized information, and found her way in a new literature, and pointed her analysis towards a serious critique of the dominant biomedical health systems that she identified as central to the community-control movement, yet kept her analysis consistent with the cultural focus of the Indigenous Australians. Exceptional work for an undergraduate. Annette Weiner would have been proud." -Fred Myers
"In both advanced seminars and an excellent honors thesis, Louis Dalle was an exemplary scholar: he was curious, and often in pursuit of that curiosity he found questions and analytical insights that are only the product of rigorous reading, contemplation, and creativity. Louis came to anthropology out of genuine admiration for the revelatory potential of the ethnographic method; using field research insights, he often pointed out how ethnography enriches our understanding of many aspects of social life and social change. His honors thesis on New York City's composters was unlike any study I've ever read on this topic. It demonstrates his command of anthropological literature and his thorough approach to the research process itself." Prof. Anne Rademacher
"Michelle Sanders’ inquiry into the dynamics of “last chance tourism” brings together contemporary original fieldwork with a historical inquiry into the political economy of Port Douglas, the jumping-off point to Australia’s Great Barrier Reefs. Her honors essay raises the provocative question of what forms of colonial and planetary amnesia are at work in the global tourism industry, modes of representation that render visitors simultaneously aware of, but ultimately incapable of, radical action in the face of climate change. Michelle has identified fascinating connections between coral reef science and the hope and despair felt by scientists who investigate dramatic ecological changes. Combining clarity of insight with compelling fieldwork, Michelle's research shows just what environmental anthropology can do in the face of climate change. " Rayna Rapp