Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor of Informatics at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

. 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 A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Un ...

. 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 Jesuit university in Santa Clara, California. Established in 1851, Santa Clara University is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California. The university's campus surrounds the historic M ...

.Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University
/ref> 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 or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is th ...

and has held appointments at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Uni ...

. With his late partner

Susan Leigh Star Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was an American sociologist. She specialized in the study of information in modern society; information worlds; information infrastructure; classification and standardization; sociology of science; sociology of wor ...

, he has devoted much of his career to examining the values embedded within sociotechnical infrastructures such as databases, visualization strategies, and science and engineering standards. "To classify is human," as it says in their mutual work, meaning that it's a human instinct to classify things. With

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 integrit ...

, he founded the NSF funded Values in Design network 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

). * ''Memory Practices in the Sciences'', MIT Press, 2005. * ''Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design'', 2007.

References

External links

HomepageEVOKE Lab
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people University of California, Irvine faculty {{US-academic-bio-stub