The Cultural Studies Department is proud to announce the winners of this year’s Gregory R. Frith Memorial Prize and Andrew Wernick Essay Prize. The Frith Prize, awarded for outstanding work in the arts, goes to Eryn Lidster. The Wernick Prize, awarded to the student with the best essay of the year, goes to Noor Ibrahim.
Eryn produced a film, "Blink" (16mm, black and white, sound), for Professor Kelly Egan’s Workshop in Documentary Film that was marked by careful editing, focus, and pacing. The work was obviously intimate, focusing as it did on the face of the filmmaker, but this intimacy opened onto broader issues of visuality and subjectivity. At the same time, the reference to the blink of the eye alluded to the technical work performed in several different ways by the camera, suggesting something about the brief elisions that both escape and constitute vision and filmmaking alike.
The Wernick Prize goes to Noor Ibrahim, who wrote a paper titled "'Build-a-map': A Consolation to the Dilemma of Spatial Detachment" for Professor Joshua Synenko's Contemporary Topics in Media Studies. The paper connected the “illegibility” of the contemporary urban environment to city-building strategy games, suggesting that residents’ desire for a comprehensible cognitive map leads them to attempt to satisfy that desire through games. Following Fredric Jameson, it rightly pointed out that these “build-a-map games” are therefore helpful for understanding not only urban environments or videogame design, but social and economic features as well. This was already a strong theoretical foundation for a symptomatic critique, but Noor then complicated it with a discussion of its informatic features, incorporating Wendy Chun’s argument about the way that graphical user interfaces give us the illusion of mastery through partial perception. Noor's paper painted a complicated picture of what initially appeared to be a trivial pop cultural phenomenon, and proved a rewarding read.
The Department offers sincere congratulations to Eryn and Noor, and wishes them luck in their future work.
More information on the Frith and Wernick Prizes, including a list of previous recipients, can be found on our Academic Prizes page.