Jeff Pruchnic receives 2014 Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award
Associate Professor Jeff Pruchnic has received a 2014 Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award. In 1974, the Board of Governors, in conjunction with the president, established an annual Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award to be given each year to members of the regular fulltime faculty in recognition of a particular work of merit brought to fruition in the 12-month period immediately preceding the year of the award. Awards made in 2014 are based on accomplishments in 2012-13. The work of merit is a single act or event that constituted an outstanding contribution to scholarship and learning. Since 1975, 201 faculty members have received this award.
Dr. Pruchnic received his award at the WSU Academic Recognition Ceremony on April 24, 2014. According to the program,
The Board of Governors recognizes Jeff Pruchnic for the publication of Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition (New York: Routledge, 2013). Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age is a powerful and important book that will undoubtedly have an impact in fields beyond rhetorical theory. Pruchnic provides a cogent summary of recent discussions and debates concerning technoculture and offers refreshingly new suggestions for dealing with the dilemmas that have arisen in the course of those debates. Adding to the discussion of digital technologies and their effects on society, he illuminates questions by placing them in a surprising new light. His work suggests that rather than devoting our critical energies toward critiquing humanist touchstones, we should instead examine the ways in which media and technology have always worked as crucial cultural forces in shaping ethics and rhetoric. This book argues that our best strategies for crafting persuasive communication and producing ethical relationships between individuals will be those that creatively replicate and appropriate, rather than resist, the logics of dominant forms of media and technology.