Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor of

Informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the centra ...

at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Irvine, California, United States. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, U ...

. He moved to UCI at the start of 2012, having held the positions of Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information. Prior to that, Bowker was Executive Director and Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor at the Center for Science, Technology and Society at

Santa Clara University Santa Clara University is a private university, private Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California, United States. Established in 1851, Santa Clara University is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California. The university' ...

. Previously, Bowker was chair of the Department of Communication at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

and has held appointments at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

. With his late partner Susan Leigh Star, he has devoted much of his career to examining the values embedded within

sociotechnical Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in wiktionary:Workplace, workplaces. The term also refers to coherent sys ...

infrastructures Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and pri ...

such as

databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

, visualization strategies, and science and engineering standards. They also discuss the human instinct to classify things. With Star and

Helen Nissenbaum Helen Nissenbaum is professor of information science at Cornell Tech. She is best known for the concept of "contextual integrity" and her work on privacy, privacy law, trust, and security in the online world. Specifically, contextual integrity h ...

, he founded the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party * National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political g ...

-funded Values in Design workshop and research project series to bring together scholars examining these issues across broader sites of study and across disciplines.

Selected works

* ''Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences'', MIT Press, 1999 (co-authored with Susan Leigh Star). * ''Memory Practices in the Sciences'', MIT Press, 2005. * ''Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design'', National Science Foundation, 2007 (co-authored with Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, and Cory P. Knobel).

References

External links

UCI faculty pageEVOKE Lab
Year of birth missing (living people) American philosophers of technology Living people University of California, Irvine faculty University of Pittsburgh faculty Santa Clara University faculty University of California, San Diego faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty {{US-academic-bio-stub