Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Named Joint Winner of the 2021 Sharon Stephens Book Prize
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins. Photo by Joshua Reno.
The American Ethnological Society has named Associate Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins as a joint winner of the 2021 Sharon Stephens Book Prize. The Sharon Stephens Book Prize is awarded biennially for a junior scholar’s first book in recognition of Sharon Stephens’ commitment to scholarship of the highest intellectual caliber informed by deep care for the world. Stamatopoulou-Robbins won for her book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press 2019), which has already received three book awards.
The Prize Committee was unanimous in their praise for Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ Waste Siege: "which provides a nuanced perspective on the difficult topic of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste.”
Her book has also won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, American Library Association's Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, and the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section (MES) Book Award.
Post Date: 10-12-2021
The Prize Committee was unanimous in their praise for Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ Waste Siege: "which provides a nuanced perspective on the difficult topic of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Through a careful sifting of the various sites at which waste from Israel threatens to overwhelm physical settings and the ordinary lives of Palestinians, Stamatopoulou-Robbins leads us to appreciate the structural impossibility of Palestinian self-government as a rejoinder to utopian fantasies of a two-state solution. The tracing of the afterlives of bread in the midst of the hurly burly of urban lives and waste management projects, incomplete of necessity, suggests alternative geographies of food infrastructure and mutual aid. We are treated to people who are fully fleshed-out and multi-dimensional and whose voices of rueful honesty, of humor mixed with anguish, continue to ring in our ears long after we put down the book. A community under siege is connected to the rest of the world by waste.”
Her book has also won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, American Library Association's Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, and the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section (MES) Book Award.
Post Date: 10-12-2021