Andrew Wiebe wins the 2026 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information

October 8, 2026
Media contact:
Rory Litwin, rory@litwinbooks.com

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2026 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. We are granting this year’s award to Andrew Wiebe, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information. His dissertation project is titled, Lii Lozh di Kaastor: What Queer Beavers Know About Surviving Apocalypse.

The award committee stated:

“Wiebe’s project attempts to extend and archival theory and practice to take account of Indigenous oral practices and ways of knowing. Wiebe relates the work of building beaver lodges with intentional acts of resistance and blockade, as an “invitation into Indigenous cosmology” that “honours Indigenous cultures and challenges archival gaps by bridging different memory systems”.

“Wiebe’s ambitious, original, and multidimensional proposal combines a significant theoretical intervention with a concrete, participant-led archival project and embeds its research methods within commitments to community authority, consent, refusal, and data sovereignty. The beaver dam as a blockade offers a memorable framework through which Wiebe reconceives preservation as regenerative world-building rather than the maintenance of existing institutional structures.””

The award consists of $1000 and a certificate suitable for framing.

Since this award is for ongoing research, other applicants who are still working on their dissertations will be eligible to enter their work next year, and we encourage them to do so.

For more information about the award, please visit https://litwinbooks.com/grants-and-awards/doctoral-award/.