Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Awards

 

We are delighted to present Dr. Nihal Kayali with the MESA Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences for "Uncertain Practices: Healthcare Provision and Access for Syrian Refugees in Turkey," an astute examination of the impact of a state of "permanent temporariness" of Syrians in Turkey following their forced migration from the Revolution of 2011. With exceptional analytical clarity, “Uncertain Practices” plunges from the outset into the bureaucratic rabbit holes that constitute the healthcare provided for, and by, Syrians as they leveraged their precarity to pivot from humanitarian aid to private healthcare services. The committee was struck by the ease with which the dissertation moved between several registers: from narrating individual migrant experiences and sharing her first-person observations (while working as a translator for Syrians seeking healthcare), to contextualizing these particular experiences in the broader organizational and institutional environment. Impressively, the literature review sections consistently connected the ethnographic scenes with the scholarly stakes, and they were written in a way that made sophisticated debates accessible and even exciting to readers far beyond the field of sociology. Beyond its academic implications—found in its introducing ideas of "cosmopolitan embeddedness" to describe the challenging situation of long-term refugees—this dissertation has significant relevance beyond the Turkish case that will inform real-world forced migration policies. 

 

The dissertation was completed at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Gail Kligman.