Susan Leigh Star:

"Susan Leigh Star ("Leigh") is Senior Scholar at the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University, where she is also Visiting Professor of Computer Engineering. She has been Professor in the Department of Communication, UC San Diego and Professor of Information Science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is president-elect of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), an international organization that coordinates research on science, technology and society (beginning in October, 2005). For many years she has worked with computer and information scientists, with whom she has studied work, practice, organizations, scientific communities and their decisions, and the social/moral aspects of information infrastructure.
She originally trained as an ethnographer and grounded theorist (with Anselm Strauss), and received her PhD in Sociology of science and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a feminist activist, poet, and social theorist.
With Geoffrey Bowker, her most recent book is Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999). Bowker and Star explore the history of several large-scale classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Nursing Information Classification (NIC). They develop one of the few social theories of large-scale information infrastructure as a kind of global decision making system. Star's other work includes studies of a scientific museum, a community of biologists, the several communities intersecting to form modern brain research and surgery, and methodological pieces on the study of infrastructure from a social science perspective. Among her analytic contributions are the notion of "boundary object"; the development of Gregory Bateson's work on double binds as applied to infrastructure; and explication of the concept of "invisible work," especially as applied to the design of information systems.
Star's current work includes a monograph extending theories of boundary objects,
Boundary Objects and the Poetics of Infrastructure (MIT Press, forthcoming). She is as well developing a new project on the history and sociology of electroconvulsive shock therapy." (From Santa Clara University homepage)

Selected publications:

Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequneces, with Geoffrey C. Bowker. (1999, MIT Press)

Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology, editor, (1995, State University of New York Press)

The Cultures of Computing, editor (1995, Blackwell Publishers)

Regions of the Mind: Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty (1989, Stanford University Press)

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