Hayward Alker Best Student Paper Award Winner 2016: Kevin Funk, for “Capitalists of the World, Unite?"

Winner: Kevin Funk (University of Florida), for “Capitalists of the World, Unite?” presented at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2015.

Kevin Funk’s paper “Capitalists of the World, Unite?" skillfully deploys an interpretive approach to interrogate the claim that the twenty-first century's so-called “transnational capitalist class" has a shared, cosmopolitan consciousness. Through a close reading of two ethnographic “vignettes" from his interactions with Latin American economic elites, Funk demonstrates that these elites subscribe to no monolithic set of social identities. Indeed, the contrast between a “territorial” identity and a “denationalized” identity is strikingly evocative of the multiple and creative paths by which individual economic actors navigate the new possibilities opened by Latin America’s growing economic ties to the Arab World. By examining the staging of these scripts and by contextualizing them within a broader neo-liberal paradigm, this engaging and well-written paper insightfully calls our attention to the performative dimension of globalization.

Award committee:

Samantha Majic, chair

Leila Kawar

Jarrod Hayes