CUAA Best Ph.D. Student Paper Prize
The Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA) is delighted to announce that Junnan Mu (Harvard University) is the winner of the 2025 Best Graduate Student Paper Award for her outstanding essay, “Story za Jaba: Ecologies of Hype Around Kenya’s Smart Cities.” The prize comes with a $300 cash award.
Drawing on 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork around Konza Technopolis—Kenya’s flagship “smart city”—Mu’s paper offers a brilliantly original exploration of how digital urban futures are imagined, embodied, and sustained amid infrastructural delay and economic uncertainty.
Following the convergence of Jaba (khat) chewing and smart-city speculation in the town of Mtimoja, Mu conceptualizes “ecologies of hype” as the interwoven relations of survival, speculation, and social vitality that animate Kenya’s techno-urban frontier.
Through vivid ethnographic storytelling and theoretical insight, “Story za Jaba” illuminates how ordinary Kenyans metabolize the promises of digital transformation—transforming waiting, laughter, and endurance into forms of belonging and critique. The paper powerfully expands the anthropology of urban futures, governance, and affect, exemplifying the creative and critical spirit of urban anthropology today.
Please join us in congratulating Junnan Mu for this exceptional contribution to the field!
The Best Ph.D. Student Paper Prize competition committee for 2025 consisted of Claire Panetta (Anthropology, Sewanee University of the South); and Marta-Laura Haynes (Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY).
CUAA’s Best Panel Presented by Ph.D. Students and Recent PhDs
The Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA) announces that the panel “Politics of Spatial Absence: Ghosts and ‘Places Out of Joint’” has been selected as winner of the Best PhD student/recent PhD Panel of the Critical Urban Anthropology Program at the 2025 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. The prize comes with a $1,000 award to be shared equally among the panel’s presenters — Idil Onen (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center), Irina Shirobokova (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center), Nehal Amer (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center), and Jesse McLaughlin (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center).
The panel calls attention to the spatial dimensions of unresolved histories, unspoken memories and unfinished struggles. Drawing on panelists’ original research, it explores how memory shape the political meaning that emerge from absent or disrupted spaces-sites whose spatial continuity has been violently fractured. The selection of this panel for the prize is based on its cohesiveness and productive engagement with the Annual Meeting’s theme “Ghosts” as a means to challenge and unsettle institutionalized memories of place – from the mounds of rubble of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir and the fractured neighborhoods of Cairo to the cooperative utopias of Sointula, Canada and the pre-industrial memories of shorebird flyways in the American continent.
We honor the panel’s presenters Idil Onen, Irina Shirobokova, Nehal Amer, and Jesse McLaughlin for the originality of their proposal. A special shoutout to Idil and Irina for their role as organizers and chairs, and to Setha Low for her role as discussant.
The Committee for the competition for Best Panel Presented by Ph.D. Students and Recent PhDs in 2025 was Omnia Khalil (Anthropology, City College of New York) and Julio Gutierrez (Anthropology, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill).