Hayward R. Alker Best Student Paper Award Winner 2026: Maxine Both, for “Border Encounters: Mapping Socio-Spatial Identity in Immigration Detention in Canada and Italy.”

Winner: Maxine Both (University of Oxford), “Border Encounters: Mapping Socio-Spatial Identity in Immigration Detention in Canada and Italy”

The 2026 Hayward R. Alker Best Student Paper Award goes to Maxine Both. Drawing on ten months of political ethnography with lawyers, activists, politicians, healthcare professionals, and families mobilizing around immigration detention centers in Canada and Italy, the paper proposes relational map-making as a method to reveal how identity is shaped by the intersection of space and social position. It shows how encounters with immigration detention destabilized, reinforced, and transformed participants’ sense of who they are. 

What made this paper exceptional to the committee was the originality and integrity with which Maxine develops and deploys this method: by asking participants to draw their relationships to immigration detention, and then reading those maps alongside their narratives, she demonstrates how a novel methodological tool can reveal dimensions of socio-spatial identity that otherwise remain hidden. The paper also stands out for the intellectual honesty with which it is presented, walking the reader through design decisions, acknowledging what did and didn’t work, and reflecting candidly on the ethical challenges of research in emotionally demanding contexts. This is precisely the spirit that the Alker Award was created to recognize and we congratulate Maxine for such fantastic work. 

Selection Committee:
Antonia Jülich (Chair), Harvard University
Devon Cantwell-Chavez, University of Copenhagen
Jose Perez, Texas A&M University – San Antonio