Thursday, October 28 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room
Geoffrey Bowker is Executive Director and Regis and Diane McKenna Chair in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University. His books include Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 (MIT, 1994) and Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Susan Leigh Star. His forthcoming book, Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT), discusses geology in the 1830s, cybernetics in the 1950s, and biodiversity science today. His talk, on the study of informatics in biodiversity, raises the possibility of a more unstable ontology, a view of natureculture that promises a way to rethink current ethnocentric tropes in biodiversity.
Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster