Alum Christo Sims' Awarded 2018 Book Award from the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association
Christo Sims's book — Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism — was recently crowned the winner of the 2018 CITAMS Book Award, Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. The CITAMS Book Award recognizes an outstanding book related to the sociology of communication, media, and/or information technology.
Sims was the 2010 BCNM Lyman Fellow when he was a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
According to the Princeton University Press:
Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle.
Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.