Santa Clara University

Geoffrey C. Bowker

Executive Director

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University. He has written with Leigh Star a book on the history and sociology of medical classifications (Sorting Things Out: Classification and Practice - published by MIT Press in September 1999). This book looks at the classification of nursing work, diseases, viruses and race. His recent book, entitled Memory Practices in the Sciences about formal and informal recordkeeping in science over the past two hundred years, which includes extensive discussion of biodiversity informatics, was published by MIT Press in 2006. More information, including a number of publications and links to current research can be found at his website: http://epl.scu.edu/~gbowker.

For more information on recent publications:

James L. Koch

Founding Director

James L. Koch is founding director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and professor of management at Santa Clara University. He received his MBA and Ph.D. from UCLA. From 1990-96 he served as dean of the Leavey School of Business. In 1995 the school achieved national recognition from U.S. News and World Report as the 12th ranked part-time program in America. From 1981 to 1990, he was the founding director of Organization Planning and Development at PG&E, where his department was the recipient of the National Excellence Award for contributions to organizational development from the American Society for Training and Development. Prior to that he was associate professor of management and director of the MBA and Ph.D. programs at the University of Oregon. He serves on the editorial board for Health Care Management Review. His research and consulting focus on socio-technical systems and high performance organizations. His current work examines information technology and organizational change, social capital, and the psychological sense of community, and the role of technology in improving the quality of life in developing nations.

Pedro Hernandez-Ramos

Assistant Director

Pedro Hernandez-Ramos received a Ph.D. in mass communication research from Stanford University in 1985. He worked as an assistant editor in the creation of the International Encyclopedia of Communications, for which he also coauthored an article. He was a lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communications of the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to several high-tech companies. In 1991 he joined Apple Computer, where he served as education manager for Latin America and Caribbean, then as education business development manager for Apple Pacific, and finally as the research manager for the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) program. Subsequently he worked for Acer America, the IMS Global Learning Consortium, and Cisco Systems before joining Santa Clara University in 2001. He has a joint appointment as program director for Economic and Social Development in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society and as assistant professor in the Department of Education, where his emphasis is on educational technology.

Susan Star

Senior Scholar

Susan Leigh Star ("Leigh") is Senior Scholar at the Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University, where she is also Visiting Professor of Computer Engineering. She has been Professor in the Department of Communication, UC San Diego and Professor of Information Science at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is president-elect of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), an international organization that coordinates research on science, technology and society (beginning in October, 2005). For many years she has worked 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 PhD in Sociology of science and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a feminist activist, poet, and social theorist.
With Geoffrey Bowker, her most recent book is Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999). Bowker and Star explore the history of several large-scale classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Nursing Information Classification (NIC). They develop one of the few social theories of large-scale information infrastructure as a kind of global decision making system. Star's other 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 the history and sociology of electroconvulsive shock therapy.

Allen S. Hammond

Program Director: Law and Public Policy

Allen Hammond is professor of law at Santa Clara's University's School of Law. He is also director of the recently developed BroadBand Insititute of California. Hammond is a graduate of Grinnel College, the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has held a variety of positions in the private and public sectors, including attorney and program manager at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration; general counsel for WJLA-TV; consultant and lecturer at Howard University; visiting associate professor of law at Syracuse University; senior attorney, Media Access Project; senior attorney at MCI Communications Corporation/Satellite Business Systems; and associate general counsel at MCI Communications Corporation. Hammond has published extensively on media regulation and information technology topics.

Jack Gilbert

Director: Biotechnology and Society

Jack Gilbert was a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) prior to joining Santa Clara University (SCU).  Jack will be responsible for the Center's new biotechnology initiative. After consulting with local experts regarding the major societal issues associated with this emerging area of science, he will begin to develop seminars, symposia, and other activities to help examine the impacts of biotech on society. Long term, the goal is to engage a broad set of participants in biotech programming, ranging from industry and academy experts to laypersons with relatively little understanding of this field of science.Educated at the University of Wyoming (B.S.) and Yale University (M.S., Ph.D.), he joined the faculty of UT in 1965.  His research interests are in organic chemistry, with special emphasis on synthetic methodology and reactive intermediates.  He is extremely proud of the postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students he has mentored during his career and is pleased that their discoveries in research have resulted in a useful chemical reagent being named after him.  He received the Advisory Council Teaching Excellence Award for the 2002–2003 academic year.

During his tenure at UT Austin, he held several administrative positions and has served on a number of committees at all levels of the university.  He was chairperson of the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry and then of Human Ecology, where he learned the ins and outs of fashion design, among other things.  Interestingly, for the final two years of his term in the latter department he also held the position of associate dean and frequently found himself, as chairperson, writing himself, as associate dean, seeking financial resources, which were invariably granted!  He chaired the Faculty Council of the university, and the Faculty Building Advisory Committee, one of the most important and active standing committees of the General Faculty. 

Katie Vann

Senior Research Fellow

  Katie Vann has degrees in Continental Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Social Science, and a PhD in Communication Studies (University of California, San Diego).  She was a resident of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition from 1995-2003, and has been a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Virtual Knowledge Studio since 2003. She joins the CSTS this year as a Senior Research Fellow.    

Her research, writing, and editorial projects address political and philosophical issues at the interface of science and technology studies and critical organization studies. She is most interested in how representational practices work in the construction of institutions and in the constitution of political subjects. Also fundamental to her work is research on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, because they have significant bearing on how the meaning and implications of representational practices in social institutions are conceptualized and researched.  Her empirical studies tend to focus on the practices and political predicaments of those in hi-tech, knowledge intensive occupations in both the private (e.g., designers, engineers, and managers) and public sectors (e.g., scientists and public administrators).    

Her dissertation, The Duplicity of Practice (2001), was based on a three year institutional ethnography that focused on work process innovation and the division of labor within a work organization engaged in the design, engineering, and manufacturing of programmable logic remote control systems.  With respect to this organization, her analyses focused on the relationships between formal and informal occupational hierarchies, process technologies, and career paths, and the ways in which these relations led to conflicts of authorship, authority and economic justice among employees. The dissertation also dealt with the methodological question of how “labor” ought to be understood as a category of social life and as an object of social research. She interrogated a concept of “practice” as it had been developed within phenomenological sociology, how it had been linked to “work” as an activity of irreducibly creative actors, and how it had become an aspect of post-industrialist management discourses that posit the specificities of the knowledge economy.    

In 2005 she began a new long-term field study In the Web and on the Ground: the global circulation and local achievements of a prospective shift in governance, which focuses on circulation, translation, and monitoring of a transnational water management paradigm –“Integrated Water Resources Management”.  This project also seeks to shed light on how emergent discourses of justice and economic sustainability come into conflict and cross-cut contemporary anti-hegemonic water management experiments. This project, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research in affiliation with the Shifts in Governance Programme and the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, weaves together a number of related thematic questions, such as how digital media are deployed in the globalization of provincial western norms and the consolidation of discursive repertoires of accountability for developing nation states, how evidentiary techniques are created for the purposes of transnational monitoring, and how modes of dissent (in Western India and in Southern Africa) emerge which counter the prevalence of modes of legitimacy that are upheld by meta-national organizations such as the World Bank and the UN.    
Vann’s critiques have appeared in the journals Ephemera: theory and politics in organization; Social Epistemology, Psychologie & Gesellschaftskritik; Mind, Culture, and Activity; and The Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology.  She has also published book chapters in anthologies, including The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader (Eds Ash Amin & Nigel Thrift), New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production (Ed. Christine Hine), Mixing Methods in Psychology (Ed. Zazie Todd) and, most recently, an essay on Gilles Deleuze’s comparative political critiques of the works of Marquis de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, will be forthcoming (2007) in Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology and Anthropology (Eds. Bruun Jensen and Rödje).