Osman Balkan’s Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) presents a fascinating ethnography of the oft-overlooked transnational implications of migrant deaths, and how those living outside of their birth countries—along with their families—navigate complicated, border-crossing end-of-life issues. Based on in-depth fieldwork in atypical sites (such as funeral homes) and with uncommon interlocutors (such as undertakers) in Berlin and Istanbul, Balkan provides a cogent analysis of the meanings associated with transnational deaths and movements of bodies among Germany’s large Turkish diaspora, as well as how these meanings relate to broader questions concerning identity and belonging. This timely work makes for especially compelling reading during our contemporary age of mass migration, and reveals in nuanced fashion how today’s debates concerning immigration also shape what Balkan refers to as the “afterlives” of immigrants, as well as the lived realities of their next of kin (both at home and abroad). The impressive fieldwork on which Dying Abroad is based also inflects the book’s writing, which is deeply reflexive and includes field notes and a discussion of the author’s positionality. It is the committee’s pleasure to present this year’s Charles Taylor Award to this powerful and politically important “ethnography of transnational deathways,” which makes clear contributions to the interpretivist tradition.  

In Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life  (Princeton University Press, 2023), Asad L. Asad provides a phenomenological account of the lives of undocumented immigrants, delineating how they experience—and the meanings they ascribe to—various forms of surveillance. Drawing from in-depth interviews and ethnographic research, Asad provides a nuanced account of why the undocumented do not simply “evade” state institutions, but also, at different moments, find it advantageous to “engage” with them. The text itself is layered with ethnographic writing and insights—for example, from an immigration court—while the methodological appendix includes a thoughtful discussion of the author’s positionality vis-à-vis his interlocutors. As this well-researched and clearly argued ethnographic work usefully highlights how interpretive approaches can contribute to our understanding of complex and politically salient topics, the committee is pleased to recognize Engage and Evade with the Honorable Mention for this year's Charles Taylor book award.

William H. Sewell, Jr., the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at the University of Chicago, is the 2024 Grain of Sand Award Winner from the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group of the American Political Science Association.

The award honors a political scientist whose contributions to the interpretive study of the political has been longstanding and merits special recognition. Originally trained as a labor historian specializing in the period leading up to the French revolution, Sewell’s work has had wide impact on how scholars understand contentious politics, the history of ideas, the role of culture in historical change, the origins of capitalism, and social theory. In doing so, his work has had major impacts in multiple disciplines, including history, sociology, and political science. Consequently, few scholars in the discipline are as deserving of this recognition as Sewell.

Sewell’s first book, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge UP 1980), is emblematic of Sewell’s influence across multiple disciplines. A foundational work in history’s “cultural turn,” the book showed the impact of changing ideas of liberty on the unfolding collapse of the ancien régime through the French Revolution and on to the insurrections of 1848. It challenged the claim that ideas and cultural practices were epiphenomenal to how and why revolutions take place. Early revolutions, Sewell observed, directly inspired later revolutions through the ideas and meaning-making practices that they propagated.

This concern with meaning-making practices and ideas would continue to shape Sewell’s work over the next four decades. In a later book, Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate? (Duke UP, 1994), Sewell showed the importance of rhetoric in creating new political possibilities. Revolutions are not merely the outcomes of material frustrations, Sewell showed; they are also exercises in imagination. Participants need to feel the possibility of change before they can enact it. Rhetoric is one of the ways change is made to feel possible. Yet, the Abbé Sieyes' rhetoric, and the vision it outlined, was filled with contradictions. These contradictions, Sewell argued, were reproduced in the revolutionary project itself, ultimately precipitating its collapse.

Sewell has carefully tracked how ideas and meaning-making practices are co-implicated with material, organizational, and social changes. In Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago UP, 2021), Sewell documented how new notions of civic equality that helped fuel the French revolution were connected to profound changes in the structure of the French economy and society. As commercial capitalism became the organizing principle for economic life in 18^th century France, it had the unintended effect of introducing a new form of commercial equality that made previously unimaginable ideas of civic equality thinkable in the otherwise profoundly hierarchical French society. Tracking this unfolding process over a myriad of different sites, Sewell demonstrated how emerging capitalism radically transformed the structure of society and the possibility for political agency that French subjects could imagine. This process ultimately allowed them to imagine themselves as citizens.

This concern with the relationship between structure and agency, and how scholars should study it, has been a hallmark of Sewell’s profoundly influential methodological work. Published across a variety of journals and collected in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Sewell’s methodological writings have shown careful attention to the relationship between social structures, the agency of actors to change those structures, and the power of events to shift both. Where Sewell’s work on labor, revolution, culture, and ideas changed how an interdisciplinary group of scholars understand contentious politics, his work on structure and agency have changed how the disciplines understand unfolding historical processes and how to study them. In all these regards, Sewell’s work has itself been revolutionary.

The committee also wanted to extend an honorable mention to Ronay Bakan for the paper “Fieldwork as Carework: Solidarity in the Disaster of the Century/Century of Disasters” that was presented at 2024 APSA Virtual Research Meeting. Ronay is currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins. The committee appreciated Ronay’s paper for diving into the messy complexity of fieldwork and advancing a new argument about carework within fieldwork.

This year’s winner of the The Hayward R. Alker Best Student Paper Award is Jasmine English for the paper: “Dilemmas of Accommodation: Diverse Associations and the Avoidance of Racial Difference” that was presented at the 2023 MPSA Annual Meeting. Jasmine recently completed a PhD in Political Science from MIT, will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the at Stanford (2024-25) before joining Reed College in 2025 as an Assistant Professor. The committee agreed that Jasmine’s paper was exemplary in its rich use of ethnographic methods and theoretically innovative in terms of the argument that it provided regarding avoidance of discussing race in church settings.

States of Subsistence is a journey that leaves the reader sensing the smell of khubz ‘arabi and pondering how the state is performed in Jordan and beyond. Through an ethnographic study of subsidized bread, Martínez pursues “the conundrums that come with being governed by something we can feel, hear, smell, and discuss, but never see” (5). He works at bakeries, interviews policymakers, and spends time with average citizens to understand how subsidized bread is entangled with weighty issues of state authority. Drawing on this long-term immersion, the book shifts attention from the institutions and events that have dominated the study of bread politics to the routines of food production and distribution as sensory rituals connecting citizens to the state. Taking bread and bakeries as an analytical vantage point, Martínez shows how political subjectivities are shaped through embodied relationships to the state, and how the state itself is “a set of relations and practices that must be constantly renewed” (12). States of Subsistence is a pertinent example of how systematic engagement with the ordinary can lead to unexpected yet profound insights, demystifying that most consequential abstraction in political thought and life—the state.

Freedom Inside? is a deeply careful and caring book, humanizing the lived experiences of those subject to the systemic injustices of mass incarceration. In this unique ethnographic study of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons, Godrej asks whether yogic traditions as they are taught in prisons pacify the incarcerated to accept their lot or urge them to resist the penal system’s messaging. Embedding herself in volunteer organizations teaching yoga and meditation in prisons, with the rare access to the incarceration system that this entailed, Godrej arrives at a more surprising and complex answer than that suggested by the binary of political passivity versus resistance. She argues that yoga practices foster dignity and internal strength for practitioners behind bars, enabling them to “pursue forms of inward-oriented spiritual pursuit denied (or possibly unknown) to many people in society” (278). This insight is developed through close engagement with the voices and ideas of those who have experienced confinement and those who volunteer to teach them yoga, making Freedom Inside? a model of the co-production of knowledge between the author and interlocutors. Through an immersive, embodied, and consistently self-reflexive examination, this book makes profound contributions to our understanding of personhood in incarceration and internal dimensions of resistance, as well as to interpretive ethnographic methods. Freedom Inside? speaks to audiences beyond academia, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of self-care practices in “total institutions” of social control.

On behalf of the Interpretive Methods and Methodologies Section, I am proud to announce this year’s winner, Professor Timothy Mitchell of Columbia University. Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. As a trail blazer in the fields of political science and postcolonial theory, Mitchell’s widely cited research has explored the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the management and disciplining of collective life.

As one may also learn from his website: Mitchell was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honors degree in History. He completed his PhD in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years 2 at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he offers courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.

Mitchell is the author of the pathbreaking book Colonising Egypt (University of California Press, 1991), in which he charted the emergence of modern modes of governance in Egypt’s colonial period. An influential theoretical investigation into the forms of truth, reason, power, and knowledge that helped make modernity what it is, the book was also a methodological tour de force. Inspired in part by a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, Mitchell examined the felicitous conditions under which colonialism’s specific “will to power” gained traction— and the kinds of work it accomplished refashioning subjects and reproducing the rule of Europeans abroad. The book was simultaneously an imaginative and sophisticated foray into the theory and methods associated with Bourdieu and with Derridean deconstruction. Mitchell’s insights into the peculiar ways in which the colonial encounter required that colonized populations be put on display—made visible, exoticized, and sanitized for western consumption—opened vistas for fruitful new research and attunements in the study of both politics and history.

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.

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.

Partha Chatterjee begins Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) with an epigraph from Bertold Brecht’s Galileo: where “there are obstacles the shortest line between two points may well be a crooked line.” This is a fitting metaphor for Chatterjee’s subject of political revolution.

Mobilizing in Uncertainty is a model of clear and impactful interpretive social science. It leads the reader into the anguished processes by which ordinary citizens decide whether to take up arms, take sides, hide or flee a coming war, through a sociohistorical study of mobilization during the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-1993.

Bread and Freedom is a remarkable book. It brings alive the profound uncertainty and myriad aspirations that people living through times of radical political upheaval experience, and the ways such lived contingency becomes forgotten as unruly realities tamed through narratives of fait accompli.

Through her extensive research, mentorship, and teaching, Dr. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein has intentionally and imaginatively explored issues including (but not limited to) ethnic politics, social movements, feminism, and mass incarceration. By epitomizing how political scientists may elucidate and critically challenge enduring political questions and concepts for and with many communities, Mary’s work is exemplary within the interpretivist community.

“Engaged Silences” illuminates how marginalized people exercise strategic agency in oppressive contexts. The chapter presents, more concretely, a close examination of how the poor widow of a Hutu participant in the Rwandan genocide navigates life post-genocide.

Natasha Behl’s Gendered Citizenship presents a fascinating and moving analysis of gendered violence. From an interpretive vantage point, this study asks why there exists pervasive genderbased discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian constitution seemingly builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality.

In this meticulously researched book, Diana Kim asks: why did Western colonial powers, which had long profited from the Southeast Asian trade in opium, opt to shut it down?

Focusing on Indigenous people’s struggles against settler colonial rule, Theft is Property! is at once a genealogy of dispossession and an effort to highlight and engage with Indigenous scholarship and activist work from the nineteenth century to the present.

The book is a tour de force. Combining both archival and ethnographic methods masterfully, Riofrancos’ book stands out for its sophisticated treatment of a topic of abiding concern to political science, namely the study of resource politics. But unlike conventional accounts, Riofrancos refocuses our attention onto the field of political struggle.