Kevin Gotkin receives GAPSA-Provost Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation
Monday, April 16, 2012
Kevin Gotkin
Annenberg doctoral student
Kevin Gotkin has been presented with a 2012 Graduate And Professional Student Assembly (GAPSA) Provost Fellowship. Presented only to a handful of graduate students at Penn each year, the award encourages collaboration of student scholars from different university departments and/or school.
This is the second consecutive year that an Annenberg graduate student has received this honor. Hyun Suk Kim won the award in 2011 for a project he worked on with Minseop Kim, a doctoral student from Social Welfare. The honor was first presented to Penn graduate students in 2006.
Mr. Gotkin’s project abstract:
Are brilliance and abnormality inextricably linked? This project seeks to help answer this perennial question by examining the relationship between technical expertise and disability, bearing in mind the intricate contours of each. It contributes to the nascent interdisciplinary field of disability studies by paying close attention to an under-researched and under-theorized population whose proximity to science and technology renders them a unique entry point to think expansively about both disability and expertise. In particular, the project attempts to make sense of the various disabilities that are repeatedly mentioned in hacker literature: blindness in phone phreaking in the 60s and 70s, Asperger’s syndrome in computer programming, and Repetitive Stress Injuries in many kinds of amateur tinkering.
The project has two goals. (1) A traditional academic journal article will combine ethnographic research on Internet Relay Chat, textual analysis of hacker literature, and archival analysis of Penn’s own historical evidence to arrive at an analytical framework for thinking about the intersection of hacking and disability. (2) The second project will complement this scholarly research by employing the creative potential of film. While visiting a unique disability studies residency in June, I will film workshops and interviews with participants, looking specifically at notions of expertise and disability. This footage will be edited into a short film (10-20 min), which, when coupled with the journal article, will become part of the growing body of work on disability at Penn.
Mr. Gotkin’s project pairs traditional scholarship (i.e. – a journal article) with multimedia methodology (short film). It is an interdisciplinary undertaking, touching on faculty with Communication, English, the Center for Bioethics, History, Political Science, Education, and Anthropology.
“My interest in disability comes from numerous sources, but most directly out of my research on hacker culture,” Mr. Gotkin said. “My senior thesis as an undergrad looked at the pleasures of hacking, seeking to understand why hackers so willingly stay up for marathon bursts of programming. The monomaniacal ‘deep-hack’ is such a tricky subject because it brings together notions of ‘flow,’ feedback loops, and oddly enjoyable frustration. So in trying to explain the pleasures of hacking, I came across all kinds of references to "Aspie" culture, short for Asperger's Syndrome, which falls on the mild end of the autism spectrum. So part of my interest comes from trying to understand how we can talk about the relationship between autism and technical expertise, which is so visible in some sense but also difficult to describe generally.”
During his project Mr. Gotkin will film residences at a University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) called "
Arts Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation." It will involve a meeting of some incredible scholars and artists to workshop ideas and projects, being coordinated by Prof. Heather Love (Penn English Department).