Hayward Alker Best Student Paper Award Winner 2017: Michelle Weitzel, for “An Acoustemology of Conflict in Israel-Palestine: Toward a Theory of Sound-Power”

Winner: Michelle Weitzel (Ph.D. candidate, New School for Social Research) for “An Acoustemology of Conflict in Israel-Palestine: Toward a Theory of Sound-Power,” presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, 2016.

This insightful, reflexive, and well written paper stands out for both its originality and methodological sophistication. Weitzel adds an important new perspective to our understanding of power and power relations through interrogating how sound is implicated in the control of territories and populations. Focusing on two case studies from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Weitzel demonstrates, as she puts it, “how an ethnographic attention to sound may advance empirical understandings of contentious politics in particular settings, and, [further], what a sound-centric interpretive methodology in political science might entail.” This highly original analysis utilizes yet critically revises existing theoretical frameworks by integrating sound as an oft-overlooked site of power, thus contributing to interpretivism’s development as a lens for understanding the political in its many forms.

Read more about Michelle Weitzel here.

Award committee:

Kevin Funk, chair

Karen Baird

Jaime Lluch