Cabot ’93 Receives Research Award

Heath Cabot ’93 is the recipient of a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is an associate professor of anthropology in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences. Cabot, who earned a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2010, researches citizenship, ethics, and rights in Europe, with a focus on Greece.

In recognizing her work, the award selection committee wrote that it was “impressed by how you channeled your ethnographic work with migrants, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, lawyers, and refugees into a monograph that now serves as the foundation for work on solidarity.” Cabot’s peers wrote of her research, “Dr. Cabot is one of the most active and important young voices in anthropology today, with an impressive body of work on asylum, solidarity, and crisis that is also informed by a thoughtful program of advocacy and activism. She has no weaknesses: she is a brilliant writer, a brilliant ethnographer, a brilliant editor, a brilliant theorist and analyst, and a brilliant communicator.”

Cabot is the author of On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece, which examines political asylum on the European Union’s most porous external border. Between 2005 and 2013, Cabot conducted 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork on asylum adjudication in Greece, social and legal support in the NGO sector, EU policy-making, and migrant and refugee political mobilizations. This work showed that while asylum law and humanitarian aid enact exclusion, they also speak to emergent configurations of Greek, European, and more global citizenship, often transforming knowledge, ethics, and judgment. 

Cabot's most recent research, on the all-volunteer social solidarity clinics and pharmacies that emerged in Greece several years ago in response to government austerity measures, is fueled by critical ethnography, a qualitative research method that embraces listening to individuals and exploring how biases embedded in social systems can lead to unequal power relations. Her work probes how the solidarity structures explicitly operate outside of state, nongovernmental, and corporate entities. She’s found that they not only aim to “fill gaps” in official social support systems—but as they cobble together caring spaces, they also challenge the bureaucratic systems to respond to ever-growing forms of social suffering.
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