NSSR Anthropologist Miriam Ticktin Wins Douglas Prize
NSSR’s Miriam Ticktin, winner of the 2012 Douglas Award
In the byzantine world of European immigration, illness can be salutary and misfortune can open doors.
Miriam Ticktin, New School for Social Research associate professor of anthropology, explores the unintended consequences of compassion on migration in her book Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, which has just been awarded the 2012 William A Douglas Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.
Specializing in the effects of universality in humanitarian aims and how they manifest themselves in the political arena, Ticktin’s book focuses on France’s approach to immigration. Ticktin argues that issues such as HIV, sexual violence, and other misfortunes become unlikely benefits for would-be migrants, easing the road towards residency papers. Yet these identities form new lines of exclusion. Ticktin’s analysis also delves into the increasing inequalities between subgroups of migrants because of systems of global capitalism as well as the criminalization versus care for select groups.
Founded in 1986, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe is a part of the American Anthropological Association, and seeks to promote anthropological and comparative study of European societies while strengthening international ties between colleagues. The 2012 Douglas Prize committee was chaired by Society for the Anthropology of Europe President-elect Jeffrey Cole, with Caroline Brettell and Andrea Smith as panelists.
Ticktin, who earned her PhD in anthropology from Stanford and Paris’s École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, will accept her awards during the 2012 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. For more information of Ticktin’s book, click here.