# Susan Leigh Star

Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was an American sociologist. She specialized in the study of information in modern society; information worlds; information infrastructure; classification and standardization; sociology of science; sociology of work; and the history of science, medicine, technology, and communication/information systems. She commonly used the qualitative methods methodology and feminist theory approach. She was also known for developing the concept of boundary objects and for contributions to computer-supported cooperative work.

## Biography
### Life and education

Star grew up in a rural working class area of Rhode Island. Her family was of Jewish, English, and Scottish descent and she described herself as "half-Jewish". Starved for philosophy, she befriended an ex-nun during high school and eventually obtained a scholarship to Radcliffe College, where she began taking philosophy classes. Feeling she didn’t fit in at Radcliffe and deterred from getting a religion degree, Star dropped out, married, and moved to Venezuela, where she co-founded an organic commune. There Star began to ask many of the questions that formed the basis of her later research.
Her work is guided by interests in both technology and feminism, and it was during this time that the women's movement and Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics inspired her to explore and research technology and the effects that both good and bad technologies have on individual users and on the world.
Star later returned to school and graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe in 1976 with a degree in psychology and social relations. She then moved to California and began graduate school in the philosophy of education at Stanford University. The program was not the right fit, so she pursued her graduate education in sociology at the University of California. She completed her dissertation, under Anselm Strauss, in 1983. While doing research with Carl Hewitt about the scientific community’s decision-making process as a metaphor for artificial intelligence, she became interested in computer science.
From 2004 to 2009 she held a position as a professor at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.
In 2010, Star died in her sleep of unknown causes. At the time, she held the Doreen Boyce Chair at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences and was authoring the book This is Not a Boundary Object with her husband, Geoffrey Bowker.

### Academic work

From 1987 to 1990, Star was an assistant professor at UC Irvine's Department of Information and Computer Science. She taught a variety of subjects including: social analysis of technology and organizations, computers and society, research methods and gender and technology. In 1987-1988 Star held a fellowship at Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation in Paris and worked with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. They worked on French/American approaches to technology and science.
After Irvine, Star held a Senior Lectureship and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Keele. In 1992, Star and partner Geoff Bowker went to the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Illinois until 1999. After leaving the University of Illinois, they moved back to California and into the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego where they remained until 2004. Star and Bowker moved north in 2004 and worked at Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology and Society. In 2009 they moved to the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences, where Star was awarded the Doreen Boyce Chair.
In addition, she has been an invited speaker at many universities and industrial firms, such as: Harvard, MIT and Xerox PARC. She was also co-Editor-in-Chief of Science, Technology, and Human Values and was president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science from 2005 to 2007.
Star has been particularly influential in the area of information infrastructure, frequently noting that although the study of infrastructure often entails examining things that seem commonplace, those everyday items have widespread consequences for humans and human interaction. Star has worked to develop ways of understanding how people communicate about infrastructure, and has helped develop research methods aimed to examine the role infrastructure plays in mediated human activities. But her work extends far beyond the realm of information infrastructure. Star's interest in the connection between technology and lived experience led her to work in a wide array of disciplines, including library sciences, computer sciences, neuroscience, philosophy and women's studies.

#### Boundary objects

In the article “Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39”, Star and her co-author Griesemer introduce the concept of boundary objects. In this article, Star and Griesemer analyze the formative years of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology by expanding the model of interessement developed by Latour and Callon, to form their concept of boundary objects. Star and Griesmer initially defined boundary objects as “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites...The objects may by abstract or concrete.” For the purpose of this article, Star and Griesmer defined four kinds of boundary objects: “repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms,” however Star later commented that she never intended this to be a comprehensive list; rather she imagined the article as starting “a kind of catalog of some of the characteristics of boundary objects”.