Ellen Balka – författare

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues.

Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star''s most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation.

Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star''s work.

ContributorsEllen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet Ceja Alcalá, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber

This volume presents the proceedings of ECSCW’09, the 11th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Each conference offers an occasion to critically review our research field, which has been multidisciplinary and committed to high scientific standards, both theoretical and methodological, from its beginning. These proceedings represent discussions and contributions to ongoing challenges. One challenge comes from emerging new technologies connected to ‘social computing’, gaming, as well as applications supporting citizen participation in their communities. As boundaries between home and work erode with the increased movement of work into home environments, and new applications further blur the once separate conceptions of work and leisure, our intellectual community faces challenges in the ways we think about and study work. Other challenges result from transformations of the world of work itself and the role of IT in these. They have been taken up in in-depth studies of design practice, software development, and manufacturing, as well as in the growing body of research on health care contexts and applications. Finally, there is the question of what is the European perspective in our community and whether it is worthwhile to anchor our research more firmly in such a perspective. Of high relevance to our field is the strong grounding of technology development in an understanding of human activity.

The nineteen full papers, four short papers and one discussion paper selected for this conference deal with and reflect on some of these challenges, thus representing the lively debate currently ongoing in our field of research.