Hayward Alker Best Student Paper Award Winner 2011: Konstantin Kilibarda, for “Clearing Space - An Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala”

Winner: Konstantin Kilibarda (York University), for “Clearing Space - An Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala,” presented at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2010.

Konstantin Kilibarda's “Clearing Space - An Anatomy of Urban Renewal, Social Cleansing and Everyday Life in a Belgrade Mahala” is a theoretically sophisticated examination of politics in hard-to-see spaces. Training his lens on the Roma of the Gazela Bridge in Belgrade, Kilibarda lays bare the process by which a translocal embrace of neo-liberal economics marks the Roma for displacement to make way for better transport links.

The paper is thoroughly researched: using textual and other evidence, Kilibarda produces a powerful analysis of the discourse of both transnational and local institutions—how they construct the Roma as “passive, defeatist” objects in need of the social improvement policies sponsored by these institutions. At the same time, he reconstructs the voice of the Roma themselves through texts like hip hop lyrics and press conference transcripts. Lucidly written, the paper showcases the best features of interpretive research--problematizing what otherwise might seem unproblematic, laying bare multiple layers of power relations and their disconcerting consequences, and showing that the outcome only “makes sense” when one considers some very intensely political practices of meaning-making.

Award committee:

Ido Oren, chair (University of Florida)

Ed Schatz (University of Toronto)

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (University of Utah)