On August 12, AAA announced the 2026 award recipients. Two recipients, Alejandro Ivan Paz and Michael Min-Torresday, are SLA members! Awards will be presented to honorees at the 2026 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. Honorees will also be featured in the Annual Report. We are so proud and excited to celebrate their achievements in St. Louis!
And the winners are…
Alejandro Ivan Paz
Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology
This award honors the legacy of Sam Dubal, MD, PhD — anthropologist, activist, medical doctor, professor, and beloved contributor to many intellectual communities — through a gift from the Dubal Family. Alejandro I. Paz, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, receives this year’s award for scholarship and organizing at the intersection of language, citizenship, media, and justice in Palestine/Israel. His current research examines Israeli English online journalism and its impact on North Atlantic reporting, and he has built a partnership with three colleagues and six organizations to study Palestinian journalism abroad and train student journalists in Palestine and Canada to cover the ongoing occupation. His earlier ethnographic research on non-citizen Latin Americans in Israel produced his book Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship and an article that won the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Graduate Student Prize, and his broader work has addressed Israeli settlement in Palestinian East Jerusalem. At the University of Toronto, Paz helped found the Palestine studies initiative Hearing Palestine and was among the founding steering committee members of the Jewish Faculty Network.
Michael Min-Torresdey
Dissertation Fellowship for Historically Underrepresented Persons in Anthropology
This annual $10,000 fellowship supports minority doctoral candidates in anthropology as they complete their dissertation research. Michael Min-Torresdey, a PhD candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, receives this year’s fellowship for his dissertation on how Indigenous Kumiay/Kumeyaay communities in the Mexico–U.S. borderlands sustain collective belonging and cultural-linguistic continuity amid bordering and enclosure that have fragmented Indigenous lands, kin relations, and everyday mobility. Drawing on long-term, community-engaged research, Min-Torresdey examines how everyday interactions in spaces of language reclamation, political advocacy, and intercommunity organizing cultivate social solidarity and renewed formations of community, subjectivity, and agency grounded in land and kin. By centering mobility as a relational practice and triangulating oral, archival, and contemporary sources, his work brings linguistic anthropology into sustained conversation with critical border studies and Indigenous resurgence scholarship, situating the border as the latest phase in a colonial continuum of enclosure.
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We are already proud of all of our fellow SLA community members, but if you would also like to be published in the AAA Annual Report, learn more about how to apply for (and win!) AAA Prizes and Awards.