Patrick Gavin Receives the 2014 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information

Award Announcement

July 1, 2014

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2014 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. We are granting this year’s award to Patrick Gavin of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, based on his dissertation proposal, titled, “On Informationalized Borderzones: A Study in the Politics and Ethics of Emerging Border Architectures.” Award Committee member Ron Day had the following comments on Gavin’s work:

“The modern documentary tradition transforms spaces into places and people into identities. Modernity is synonymous with this event and is unthinkable without it, but the violence is even more ancient in its cult of group and personal identities and the documentary functions of writing. The modern documentary tradition itself, however, is a tremendously important event, which Patrick Gavin’s dissertation analyzes in terms of the tradition’s contemporary technocracy and devices in establishing and reinforcing ‘real’ borders, ramping up forces of truly apocalyptic governance, power, and greed that ancient tribal identities and patriarchs could only have wished for. Today, in an era when information technologies have threatened to break down borders, all sorts of ancient and modern ‘traditions’ and ‘states’ and their modern patriarchs and protectors have become unglued and are issuing their greatest, most reactionary, most venomous and violent powers and armies to harness this trans-modernity. ‘Information,’ as a liberating force, is becoming reharnessed into the convoluted stasis of religious zealots, modern nation states, and capital markets, roping information and its speakers back into the modern documentary tradition of the past two centuries and its borders, even as information was born out of this and threatened to break away in the communication, ultimately, of life itself. Gavin should be congratulated on his well chosen and well analyzed dissertation, whose theme is timely again and again, and invites consideration by a wide body of readers interested in information, communication, and the meaning of the technical turmoils of a late modernity, that is, after all, a synonym for contemporary human consciousness at its logical and necessary wit’s end.”

The award consists of a certificate suitable for framing and $1000 check.

Since this award is for ongoing research, other applicants who are still working on their dissertations will be eligible to enter their work next year, and we strongly encourage them to do so.

For more information about the award, please visit https://litwinbooks.com/award.php.

Rory Litwin
Litwin Books, LLC
PO Box 188784
Sacramento, CA 95818