Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star PDF
Preview Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star
Boundary Objects and Beyond Infrastructures Series edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Paul N. Edwards Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Lawrence M. Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality Lisa Gitelman, ed., “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron Finn Brunton, S pam: A Shadow History of the Internet Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis, eds., Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik, M onitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Infrastructures James Leach and Lee Wilson, eds., Subversion, Conversion, Development: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design Olga Kuchinskaya, T he Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl Ashley Carse, B eyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal Alexander Klose, translated by Charles Marcrum II, T he Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka, eds., B oundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star Boundary Objects and Beyond Working with Leigh Star Edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-02974-2 (hc); 978-0-262-52808-5 (pb) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Based on the Conference: A Celebration of Susan Leigh Star: Her Work and Intellectual Legacy, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), September 2011, h ttp://www.sscnet.ucla .edu/soc/LeighStar/. Organized by Stefan Timmermans (UCLA), Geoffrey C. Bowker (University of Pittsburgh) and Adele E. Clarke (UCSF). Sponsored by Science, Technology, and Society Program, Division of Social and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation; Department of Sociology, UCLA; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF. Contents Prologue ix Geoffrey C. Bowker Introduction: Working with Leigh Star 1 Stefan Timmermans I Ecologies of Knowledge 1 Revisiting Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology 13 Susan Leigh Star 2 Ecological Thinking, Material Spirituality, and the Poetics of Infrastructure 47 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 3 Don’t Go All the Way: Revisiting “Misplaced Concretism” 69 Nina Wakeford 4 Anticipation Work: Abduction, Simplification, Hope 85 Adele E. Clarke 5 Living Grounded Theory: Cognitive and Emotional Forms of Pragmatism 121 Susan Leigh Star 6 Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology 143 Susan Leigh Star II Boundary Objects 7 Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939 171 Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer vi Contents 8 Sharing Spaces, Crossing Boundaries 201 James R. Griesemer 9 So Boundary as Not to Be an Object at All 219 Brian Cantwell Smith 10 The Concept of Boundary Objects and the Reshaping of Research in Management and Organization Studies 229 Dick Boland 11 Leigh Star and the Appearance of “The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions” 239 Les Gasser 12 The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving 243 Susan Leigh Star III Marginalities and Suffering 13 Power, Technology, and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions 263 Susan Leigh Star 14 Anatomy Is Frozen Physiology, or How I Learned to See the Process That Is Everywhere 291 Gail A. Hornstein 15 Categorizing Life and Death: The Denial of Civilians in U.S. Robot Wars 303 Jutta Weber and Cheris Kramarae 16 Infrastructures for Remembering 323 Janet Ceja Alcalá, Susan Leigh Star, and Geoffrey C. Bowker 17 Triangulation from the Margins 339 John Leslie King 18 Reflections on the Visibility and Invisibility of Work 345 Kjeld Schmidt 19 Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work 351 Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss IV Infrastructure 20 Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces 377 Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder Contents vii 21 Mapping the Body across Diverse Information Systems: Shadow Bodies and How They Make Us Human 417 Ellen Balka and Susan Leigh Star 22 Thundering Silence: On Death, Fear, Science 435 Eevi E. Beck 23 Those Who Are Not Served? Exploring Exclusions and Silences in Transport Infrastructures 459 Jane Summerton 24 The Ethnography of Infrastructure 473 Susan Leigh Star Envoi: When Shadows Become Complex: Weaving the Ŋ anmarra 489 Susan Leigh Star Afterword: On the Distributedness of Leigh 499 Helen Verran Obituaries, Memorial Events, and Selected Publications of Susan Leigh Star 501 List of Contributors 507 Index 509 Prologue Geoffrey C. Bowker I write this with a heavy heart and tremulous hands; with joy and pleasure and love . . . sharing as ever Leigh’s delight in contradiction. I was graced to weave my life together with hers. She had a soft voice, an impish smile, and a lovely laugh. In pain—and pain was ever present, waxing and waning— her voice would drop and in her eyes I could sense her suffering. In strength—and always was there strength—the beauty of her light shone through. Together we drew down the moon, conjured classifications and discovered poetry abounding. This volume brings together friends and colleagues who were touched by and who touched her. Not a self-contained set, but offering a flavor of the way she was in the world: intimately, disconcertingly personal; changing lives; generating ideas; thinking the unimaginable with fierce will and phrasing it with delicate touch. When we made our final move, she had been going through a long and difficult stretch. I am so happy that her last months were full of optimism and renewal. Always a good gauge of her spirit was whether she was writing poetry (or rather, whether she was writing what is formally called poetry): she was, and it was wild and wonderful and copious. Her next project, which we had played with for years, was to be a work on the poetics of infrastructure. She talked of the orphans of infrastructure. People sequestered away from the ways and wires of the world on an old leper colony island in Hawaii; the Dionn quintuplets whose every evacuation was recorded and whose every moment of idle play was annotated. People who did not fit the units of social programs and software and led strangely beautiful lives. She talked of infrastructure as a thing of beauty . . . This volume is not a closure, but a living work through which many who do not know her can come to be touched by her magic and those who did can once again feel the beauty of her spirit. If we collectively have succeeded, then, to quote Leigh, we will “speak Her name clearly into your eyes.”
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