Award-Winning Book: Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France

Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France, by Khalil Habrih and Robert Desjarlais Wins The Prestigious 2023 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.

In Traces of Violence. Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France, Khalil Habrih, doctoral student in anthropology at the École d'études sociologiques et anthropologiques, and Robert Desjarlais present a dialogic narrative of the persisting effects of the terroristic attacks that took place in Paris in November 2015. Locating these events in the larger history of state violence in metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors interweave theory, narrative storytelling, and photography to explore an array of interrelated phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on terrorism, the politics of memory and archival work related to the attacks and state violence, the politics of "securitization" and the police violence that emerge from it, as well as the histories of wounding and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality of lives and deaths in Paris and elsewhere.

This book offers an innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and sociology with distinct texts essayed by both authors working in dialogue with each other. It has been awarded The William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology: a prestigious prize that honors the best book published annually in Europeanist anthropology as determined by a panel of senior Europeanist anthropologists, chaired by the Society's President-elect.