CALACS 2022 Graduate Essay Prize Winner

It is with great pleasure that the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) announces the recipient of the 2022 CALACS Graduate Essay Prize: Allison Petrozziello, for her original paper “Birth Registration as Bordering Practice: Blocked Access to Citizenship for Migrants’ Children in Latin America and the Caribbean”

In this paper, Allison Petrozziello examines how bordering practices enacted in the process of birth registration block access to citizenship for children of people on the move across Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper is conceptually innovative and empirically impressive. It draws on a global inventory compiled by the author herself which includes a dataset of UN treaty body recommendations on birth registration.

This highly original and timely paper demonstrates that multiple forms of discrimination converge, placing birth registration beyond reach—even in countries with jus soli citizenship regimes. By bringing together the feminist theory of intersectionality with migration scholarship on bordering, Petrozziello reveals the processes that lead to exclusion from birth registration and the production of statelessness for thousand of children born to migrants.

The committee was highly impressed by the rich empirical data and the fascinating findings.

Congratulations Allison on this impressive achievement!

The CALACS Graduate Essay Prize aims to provide recognition to the most outstanding essay-length contribution by a graduate student conducting research on Latin America or the Caribbean to be presented at the annual CALACS Congress. The essays were adjudicated by a three-person jury, through a double-blind review process. The jury and CALACS would like to congratulate all nominees for the outstanding quality of their submission and thank them for participating in the competition.