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Lauriston Sharp Prize

A headshot of Margaret Jack
September 14, 2021

SEAP is pleased to award this year's Lauriston Sharp Prize to Margaret Jack!

Margaret Jack is a postdoctoral scholar on NSF Project 1928573 “Augmenting Work” with Ingrid Erickson (Syracuse University) and Melissa Mazmanian (UC Irvine). She is a research affiliate at the Digital Life Institute at Cornell Tech and an adjunct professor at NYU Tandon. She holds a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, with a minor PhD concentration in Anthropology. She uses qualitative research methods like ethnography, interviews and historical analysis to contribute to questions of work and technology, memory and media, and the geopolitics of technology. 

This recommendation recognizes both her exemplary service to Southeast Asian studies in the development of programs in Cambodian studies, and her strong dissertation, "Infrastructural Restitution: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology.” Dr. Jack’s dissertation is a profound and powerful work that examines the restitution of Cambodia's media infrastructure in the aftermath of colonial interventions, civil war, and genocide. Dr. Jack's term, "Infrastructural restitution," is not simply a forward-looking technological fix, but an emotionally cathartic means to reckon with cultural memory such that artistic heritage and histories of conflict inform future visioning, including vernacular innovation, creativity, and technology.  


 

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