We are pleased to announce the results from this year’s Payne Prize competition. Congratulations to Dennis Ohm on his winning paper:

Architectures of Queer Memory. Alvin Baltrop’s Photographic Archive of the Piers – Dennis Ohm (he/him); Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, McGill University

Additionally, an honorable mention goes to the following paper:

Surface Breathing: Interstitial Spaces of Queer Activism in China’s Ballroom Scenes – Ian Liujia Tian (he/they/ta), Doctoral Candidate, Women and Gender Studies & Collaborative Program in Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

The Kenneth W. Payne Student Prize is presented each year by the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) to a graduate or undergraduate student in acknowledgment of outstanding anthropological work on 1) a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans* topic, or 2) a critical interrogation of sexualities and genders more broadly defined. The Prize includes a cash award in the amount of $500. Submissions are permitted from graduate or undergraduate students in any of the four fields of anthropology. To be eligible for consideration, work should have been completed since June 2023 and while the applicant was still enrolled as a student. Research papers as well as visual media (e.g. documentary film) are eligible for submission for this competition.   

Members of the 2024 Payne Prize Committee included: John Song Pae Cho (University of British Columbia), Anahi Russo Garrido (Metropolitan State University of Denver), Michael Connors Jackman [Chair] (Freie Universität Berlin), Paula Martin (University of Chicago), Manu Multani (California Institute of Integral Studies), and Zhiqiu Benson Zhou (New York University Shanghai).