Table Of ContentBoundary 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.”
