We are pleased to announce the results from 2025’s Payne Prize competition. Congratulations to Berkant Caglar on his winning paper:

The Woman Who Fell from the Window: Suicide, Moralization of Femicide and Trans Precarity – Berkant Calgary (he/him); Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Additionally, an honorable mention goes to the following paper:

Queering Safety in a State of Penetration: Intermittent State Violence and a Politics of (In)Visibility – Johnathan Norris (he/they), Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Boston University 

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 2025 Payne Prize Committee included: John Song Pae Cho (University of British Columbia), Michael Connors Jackman [Chair] (Freie Universität Berlin), Paula Martin (University of Chicago), Shunyuan Zhang (Trinity College), Manu Multani (California Institute of Integral Studies), and Zhiqiu Benson Zhou (New York University Shanghai).