Recipient of the 2023 Arcus | Places Prize: Myrl Beam

We’re excited to announce that Myrl Beam has been chosen as the recipient of the 2023 Arcus | Places Prize.

Established in 2014, the prize is a collaboration between the Diversity Platforms Committee of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and Places; it is funded by the Arcus Endowment, which was launched in 2000 with a gift from the Arcus Foundation. The Arcus | Places prize supports forward-thinking public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment.

Beam is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Macalester College, where he studies queer and trans social movements and the affective economies of neoliberal capitalism. His project will home in on an intersection in Minneapolis — specifically, the location of the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, which protestors burned down in 2020 in the uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd.

“I’m thrilled to be the recipient of the 2023 Arcus Places prize, a series that has supported work that I deeply admire and from which I have learned so much,” Beam shared with us. “My project, centered on the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha in South Minneapolis, is rooted in a place and community near and dear to my heart. But that intersection has a much longer, queerer, and more contested history than has been documented, and it remains a space in which questions about the future of policing, community control of land and resources, and the power of activism to shape a shared vision of common thriving are still very much alive.”

As recipient of the Arcus | Places Prize, Beam will produce a major piece of public scholarship, to be published in Places, and a related public lecture, to be presented in the College of Environmental Design.

“My hope is that this project, and the collaboration it will support, can do more than simply document these struggles, but can also be a space of connection: between ideas, across time, and among people,” Beam added.

Previous recipients include Alice T. Friedman, for “Queer Old Things,” in 2014; Jack Halberstam, for “Unbuilding Gender,” in 2018; Lucas Crawford, for “The Crumple and the Scrape,” in 2019; and Susan Stryker, for “At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor,” in 2021.