Susan Leigh Star
Professor, Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego. I teach in the area of Human Information Processing, including reading the web, gender and technology, race and technology, "borderlands," and science studies. I am an active member of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition and the Science Studies Programs at UCSD.
My research is in the sociology and history of information technology, science, and knowledge. Much of my research has been on the social and cultural implications and design of large-scale information technology. Some of this is reported in a book, Sorting Things OUt: Classification and Its Consequences, co-authored with Geoffrey Bowker (MIT Press, 1999). I have written widely on history and sociology of life sciences, feminist theory of science, and material practices in creating information and knowledge. I am currently writing a book on boundary objects and infrastructure.
Visible and invisible diversities
Saturday, 09.00
I will speak about the ways in which infrastructure, in all its complexity, mediates action for and against diverse voices. I will present several cases of types of infrastructure -- long-line, sequestered, tectonic, webbed -- as the beginnings for a textural language for talking about how infrastructure and human behavior are imbricated. Where infrastructure is often presented as a lifeless, boring background to the "real activity," my argument is that it is always mediating action, sometimes in unexpected ways, and deserves to be analyzed as an integral part of all activity systems. In addition, it often impacts human diversity by silent exclusion or implicit inclusion.