In recognition of her work, the AMEWS Book Award Committee for books published in 2014 awards Smadar Lavie’s Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture an Honorable Mention. Lavie offers an unflinching political analysis and cultural critique of the struggles of Mizrahi single mothers and their relationship with the domestic policies of the state of Israel and the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lavie, a U.S trained anthropologist who is a Mizrahi single mother herself draws on critical race and feminist theorizing to explicate the tangled web of gender, race, and class inequalities between the state of Israel’s non-European majority and European Jewish ruling minority.
In recognition of her work, AMEWS Book Award Committee for books published in 2014 awards Amélie Le Renard’s A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia an Honorable Mention. Le Renard explores young, urban Saudi women’s practices within public spaces in order to shed new light on shifting power relations, social hierarchies and gender norms in Saudi Arabia during a time of declared economic and social reform. Le Renard’s ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over a period of more than one year at the female campus of King Saud University, workplaces and shopping malls in Riyad, provides a fascinating insight into the ways in which young Saudi women renegotiate gender norms through creatively appropriating non-confrontational discourses, such as personal development and the state’s reform project, as well as through the daily repetition of transgressions of official Islamic rules.
Congratulations to both!