Susan Leigh Star (“Leigh”) is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is also faculty in the Department of Sociology and in the Science Studies Program there. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSD, Leigh was professor of Information Science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For many years she has collaborated with computer and information scientists, with whom she has studied work, practice, organizations, scientific communities and their decisions, and the social/moral aspects of information infrastructure. She originally trained as an ethnographer and grounded theorist (with Anselm Strauss), and received her Ph.D. in Sociology of science and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a feminist activist, poet, and social theorist, in addition to being a troubler of categories.
With Geoffrey Bowker, her most recent book is Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Her previous work includes studies of a scientific museum, a community of biologists, the several communities intersecting to form modern brain research and surgery, and methodological pieces on the study of infrastructure from a social science perspective. Among her analytic contributions are the notion of “boundary object”; the development of Gregory Bateson’s work on double binds as applied to infrastructure; and explication of the concept of “invisible work,” especially as applied to the design of information systems.
Star’s current work includes a monograph extending theories of boundary objects, Boundary Objects and the Poetics of Infrastructure (MIT Press, forthcoming). She is as well developing a new project on severe chronic pain and its manifestation in the body, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and categorization schemes. The study of chronic pain extends her interest in residual categories distributed throughout large-scale systems, as it is one of the quintessential phenomena to “fall between the cracks” of modern medicine.
Recently she’s become interested in how infrastructure encodes values and aspects of culture, with the methodological question of how people can better “read” complex infrastructure, including but not limited to information infrastructure (or rather, information broadly construed). She is also a poet, and calls this “the poetics of infrastructure.” Many of the processes that go into building and using infrastructure come to life by thinking of irony, invisibility, fragility, suffering, rage, and love—the language of poetics.