Media Ruins Wins ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology, written by Margaret Jack and published by MIT Press is the recipient of the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award for 2024. The award’s purpose is to recognize the outstanding book in information science published during the preceding calendar year. The award is given to the author(s) whose book is judged to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of information science during the year.

Per the MIT Press website, the books is about “How a generation of tech-savvy young Cambodians is restoring historical media artifacts from before the war—and, in the process, helping to repair the Khmer Rouge's cultural destruction.

During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), an estimated quarter to a third of the Cambodian population perished from execution, starvation, or disease. The regime especially targeted artists and intellectuals and their work, including films, photographs, and audio recordings. In Media Ruins, Margaret Jack charts the critical role of media in the historical political landscape of Cambodia as well as in its post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Along the way, Jack tells the remarkable stories of resourceful Cambodians in the decades that followed the end of the regime—those who worked to reconstruct their country's media infrastructure and restore their damaged cultural heritage.

Jack describes the crucial role that media has played in helping the nation grapple with the traumas of its past and imagine brighter futures. She explores how tech-savvy Cambodian media creators have engaged in practices of infrastructural restitution—work that is both emotionally cathartic and politically vital. She also examines the ways these media creators have used digital tools to restore and disseminate lost media artifacts, while embracing an aesthetic of material decay as a visible reminder of loss. As these creators reconcile with the past, they are also finding ways to navigate the country's increasingly authoritarian media landscape. Bringing media and technology studies into conversation with trauma and memory studies, the book provides a unique, and necessary, perspective on post-conflict reconstruction.”

Margaret Jack is an industry assistant professor at NYU Tandon in the department of Technology, Culture and Society. Before earning her PhD in Information Science at Cornell University, she worked as a financial analyst in Silicon Valley and with international development organizations such as the WHO, UNICEF, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

Upon learning of her book’s selection as the ASIS&T 2024 Best Information Science Book of the Year, Jack said, “I am honored to receive the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award and I am grateful that you have recognized with it my participants' valiant efforts to repair historical media artifacts in post-conflict Cambodia. I hope that their examples inspire others to find innovative ways to heal in this complex world so that we can build futures that we all want to live in.”

Jack will receive the award at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) which will be held 25-29 October 2024 in Calgary, AB | Canada.