At the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium Annual Meeting, held at the UCLA Conference Center, Lake Arrowhead, June 3-5, 2016, the recipients of this year’s Hayman Foundation Fellowship Awards, in the amount of $10,000 each, were announced.

This year, we awarded the Fellowship to two graduate students.  Tanzeen Doha  (UC Davis, Department of Anthropology) and Matthew McCoy, UCLA (Dept. of Anthropology).

Doha’s project focuses on the psycho-racial and libidinal structure of the War on Terror with a specific focus on the May 2013 massacre of Islamic practitioners in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The project investigates how foundational Islamic texts (Qur’an, Sunnah, Hadith, Sharia) have been mobilized to confront the problems of secularization, modernization, and economic crisis, it also traces the inner lives of both postcolonial secular and Islamic subjects through a critical psychoanalytic and ethnographic engagement.

McCoy’s project—”Experiencing the Peace Walls: Ethics, Security, and Segregation in Post-Conflict Belfast”—is an ethnographic examination of a segregated, working-class interface community in east Belfast that suffers from the legacy of “the Troubles,” an ethno-nationalist conflict which disproportionately affected this small area.  In the community under study, Protestants and Catholics are surveilled through CCTV and armored patrols and kept separate from one another by security infrastructure called “peace walls.” Through person-centered and psychoanalytically informed research, his dissertation describes the psychological and embodied experiences of residents who live in spaces circumscribed by an array of walls made of concrete, slatted steel, barbed wire, and weld mesh as they commemorate the past, heal in the present, and prepare for an uncertain future in their precarious State.

We would like to congratulate Tanzeen and Matthew on their Fellowships, and hope to see them at the 2017 UC/NCP ICP Arrowhead Meeting!

Jeffrey Prager
Professor of Sociology, UCLA