Faculty Fellow Terence McDonnell’s book Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns (University of Chicago Press, 2016) has won honorable mention for the American Sociological Association’s “Sociology of Development Section Best Book Award.”
The book explores the processes of cultural entropy by studying AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana. McDonnell argues that many well-designed public campaigns undergo a process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings and failed interactions, which he defines as “cultural entropy.”