Annual Book Award
IHR Transdisciplinary Book Award:
Established in 2008, the IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award is presented for a non-fiction work that exemplifies transdisciplinary, socially engaged humanities-based scholarship. The award recognizes and celebrates humanities faculty authors from ASU and around the U.S. and the substantial body of transdisciplinary humanistic research reflected in their publications. Every year the IHR honors a work of academic non-fiction by a humanities faculty member, alternating years between ASU faculty and faculty from around the world with the Transdisciplinary Book Award.
A book that is transdisciplinary in methodology and scope works between, among, and within foundational models set-up by disciplines and transforms or transcends those disciplines by: restructuring conventional idea systems and practices; developing new knowledge frameworks or domains; or constructing new paradigms or focal concepts. In keeping with the mission of the IHR, the book should also focus on compelling topics of social or cultural importance—past, present, or future. Edited collections are not eligible.
Book Awards
We are pleased to announce the recipient of the 2012 IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award:
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
By Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of “slow violence” to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.
In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
2011
Designing Things: A Critical Introduction to the Culture of Objects
Prasad Boradkar
Boradkar, Associate Professor and Program Director of Industrial Design at Arizona State University was awarded the 2011 IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award for "Designing Things: A Critical Introduction to the Culture of Objects"
2010
Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas
Silvia Spitta
Spitta, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, is the recipient of the 2010 IHR Book Award for "Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas" (The University of Texas Press, 2009).
2009
Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Sadowski-Smith, Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University and the editor of "Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders," is the recipient of the 2009 IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award for "Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States" (The University of Virginia Press, 2008).
2008
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma to Ground Zero
Marita Sturken
Sturken, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University, is the recipient of the IHR's first Transdisciplinary Book Award for "Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma to Ground Zero" (Duke University Press, 2007).