Lori Allen
MES Student Paper Prize Award Winner, 2004

During the second Palestinian intifada (2000- ) martyr funerals and posters were the most predominant form of memorialization. These practices did not constitute simple expressions of nationalist sentiment; they created a public sphere in which participants and observers were hailed as national subjects, while simultaneously generating a forum in which public political debate occurred. This article explores the tensions among different visions of the Palestinian national project that appeared through these commemorative practices as the normative effects of martyr memorialization dissolved into criticism, cynicism, and apathy.

 
In 2004, Lori Allen was a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago. She completed her thesis, entitled "Suffering through a National Uprising: The Cultural Politics of Violence, Victimization and Human Rights in Palestine," as a Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, and went on to become an Academy Scholar at Harvard University, 2006-2008. She developed the paper for which she won this MES prize into an article that will be published in History and Memory.