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Lee Ann Fujii Award Winner 2023: Sarah E. Parkinson, for Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon
Lee Ann Fujii Award Winner 2023: Sarah E. Parkinson, for Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon

Based on extraordinary ethnographic fieldwork, Sarah E. Parkinson’s Beyond the Lines demonstrates how insurgent groups survive in the face of state repression. Parkinson moves the reader between intimate, anecdotal excursions, informed by her ethical, interpretative lived experiences in Palestinian communities in Lebanon. In so doing, Parkinson provides a practical approach to studying militant organizations through careful relationship building, to learn with and from people she met in the course of fieldwork through their everyday social networks. Beyond the Lines also presents a challenge to political science as a discipline - to capture the complexity of the human experience in and beyond mass violence, to prioritize people’s contradictory and sometimes incomprehensible lived experiences. Parkinson’s findings illustrate the felt effects of violence, in its physical, emotional and structural forms in ways that speak to the goals of the Lee Ann Fujii award.

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The Lee Ann Fujii Award

Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence

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Lee Ann Fujii Award Honorable Mention 2023: Farah Godrej, for Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State
Lee Ann Fujii Award Honorable Mention 2023: Farah Godrej, for Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State

Farah Godrej’s Freedom Inside? brings together a sustained attention to methodological, epistemological, and ethical challenges of studying violence within the carceral state. The book opens up the methodological entanglements at every step of the research process as Godrej navigates her own experience as a prison volunteer and participant-observer teaching yoga inside prisons. She examines these entangles as they relate to IRBs, interviewing and accessing formerly incarcerated persons, and ethnography in prison environments. Godrej carefully thinks through key methodological concepts, such as consent, confidentiality, anonymity, member-checking, without providing simple answers or resolutions. She also pushes the boundaries of who is considered a legitimate knowledge producer and what counts as scientific inquiry by co-authoring with two formerly incarcerated persons. Godrej also thoughtfully examines the role of race and gender within mass incarcerations, prisons, and population control, thus centering racial and gendered violence in a way that speaks to the Lee Ann Fujii Award.

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The IMM Group gives the Lee Ann Fujii Award annually to recognize published works that most innovatively study political violence from an interpretive perspective, memorializing Dr. Fujii’s approach to political research and her overall contributions to interpretive research methods. In keeping with her own efforts both to expose more hidden and systemic types of harm (racial and gender discrimination, in particular) and to understand what drives people to kill, the nominated work may take any type of political violence, broadly construed, as its concern. The award recognizes works that not only report on findings, but which engage the methodological entailments and/or methods challenges of studies of political violence, broadly construed. Consideration will be given to interviewing, as in Dr. Fujii’s research, but also to other methods.

How to Nominate

Nominations for the 2024 Lee Ann Fujii Award are currently closed.

Nominations are welcome from anyone. Authors may nominate their own work, as may readers and publishers.

The award committee will consider not only books and journal articles, but also chapter-length publications. In addition to considering chapters from edited books, eligibility will also extend to chapters from monographs that do not focus on political violence as a whole, but which include an outstanding and innovative methodological chapter (including, e.g., methodological appendices) that could lend itself to the study of violence.

The Group will announce and present the Award at the annual APSA conference during its business meeting or reception.

Previous Recipients