The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Dissertation Awards were established in 1982 to recognize exceptional achievement in research and writing for/of dissertations in Middle East studies. In 1984 the award was named for Malcolm H. Kerr to honor his significant contributions to Middle East studies. Awards are given in two categories: Social Sciences and Humanities.

Matthew DeMaio, a GWU PhD student in the Anthropology Program, received an Honorable Mention in the Social Sciences category for his dissertation Made to Move: Placemaking and Accumulated Attachments among Palestinian Refugees from Syria.

Matthew DeMaio offers an empirically and theoretically rich ethnography of Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Yarmouk was constructed in 1953 out of seemingly permanent materials. DeMaio shows how this imagined permanency was rejected by the Palestinians who found residence there but who were still determined to return home. In this way, it was a place to which Palestinians connected while simultaneously insisting on returning to Palestine, While Yarmouk was a refugee camp, it also thrived as a critical city within the geography of Syria, a major market town not only for Palestinians but for others in Syria as well as in neighboring countries, and a place of making life for Palestinians that took on a symbolic-political meaning as a place in itself. This palimpsestic quality of life in Yarmouk meant that when Palestinian residents were displaced again during the 2011 Syrian civil war, they took a sense of being from various sites of displaced inhabitance (i.e., Palestine and Yarmouk) with them elsewhere, where DeMaio encountered his ethnographic interlocutors. Contributing to critical geographies of displacement, DeMaio offers the concept of “place of significance,” places that continue to carry meaning for people who once inhabited them and which create historical and political relation across geographies.

The dissertation was completed at The George Washington University in the Department of Anthropology under the supervision of Ilana Feldman.