
Aaron Su, sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, recently won this year’s Rudolf Virchow Graduate Paper Prize, administered by the Critical Anthropology of Global Health Special Interest Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology. His paper, “The (Im)possibility of Indigenous Politics: Collaborative Medical Design and the Limits of Settler Democracy in Taiwan,” “impressed the committee of five reviewers; the committee found his theorization of how new participatory design policies make Indigenous politics (im)possible by blurring lines between resistance and collaboration, transforming dissent into feedback in an open-ended system of settler democratic governance, impressive. In particular, this manuscript embodied Virchow’s spirit of exposing the limits of inclusion (in all its forms) in modern polities as a life-enhancing or life-affirming choice for those who must be systematically dispossessed for the polity to exist."