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Race and Histories of Technologies Prize

 The prize is part of a collective commitment for addressing systemic and epistemic racism at SHOT and in the global intellectual field it represents. The prize is intended for junior scholars and new entrants to the profession worldwide. The prize will be awarded for a single-authored, unpublished essay in any language that is of a length suitable for publication in Technology and Culture (T&C).

Recipient of the 2024 Race and Histories of Technologies Prize:

Xin Peng, University of Cambridge
For: “’The Chinaman and His Phone’: Noise, Gibberish, and the Telephone’s Social Use.”

In “‘The Chinaman and His Phone’: Noise, Gibberish, and the Telephone’s Social Use,” Xing Peng uses the linguistic imagination of an outsider to San Fransico’s Chinatown at the end of the 19th century to defamiliarize the democratization of a social technology. Beginning with a white entrepreneur’s eager thinking around democratization as a way to engage new markets, Peng seizes and teases out a novel way of thinking about race and technology by studying the entrepreneur’s amusement when seeing and hearing the “Chinaman” speak his language over the phone. Peng analyzes the white supremacist logic around language and technology, characterizing the encounter of body, language, and conversational promiscuity facilitated through telephony as queer, threatening, and exciting. Peng pushes us to think with efficiency: while the Chinese language seemed incompatible with message clarity to the white ear, it is also structurally ultra-efficient. However, fear of contagion partitions language as it does people. Peng brilliantly rereads telephony as an embodied practice with people at both ends and in between, sonically connecting across physical bearers of the color line.