An annual essay competition for new scholars that awards the three best essays each year, judged on originality, coherence and rigour.
Nesreen received the award for her essay titled ‘Patagonia: Rearticulating an Experience as a Site of Estrangement.’ The essay focuses on Patagonia (1992 by Brith Gof; reworked in 2008 by Pearson/Brookes); a performance that approaches a historically and culturally conditioned experience in a form of a disconnected narrative. The essay demonstrates that this form of mobilising structures of presentation has the potential to question linearity of meanings and to overcome imagined totality of a place. It reflects the mixing of effects embodied in one place, as in the Welsh Patagonian experience from the nineteenth century, which is a phenomenon of cultural hybridity common to contemporary societies that are often constituted by different layers of histories, peoples and cultures. The essay points out that in bringing to the fore the otherness of the past and the heterogeneity of experiences, the performance’s text that combines a multiplicity of multivocal narratives does indeed create an open and inclusive performance experience, but that is potentially alienating. It encourages active interrogation and self-reflexivity. It questions the linearity of dominant discourses of history, culture and identity, but at the risk of distancing the audience by rearticulating a culturally specific experience embedded in collective memory as a site of estrangement.