Review: Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, Edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka

Abstract

Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, co-edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka, is a celebration of Susan Leigh Star's wide-reaching and deeply significant contribution to science studies and associated fields. Star's approach to scholarship was personal, poetic (how many other scholars reference poetry as part of their work?), interdisciplinary, and perhaps above all, focused on unearthing the invisible, the marginal, and the problematic as a central and essential practice of science, technology, and society (STS) studies. As Helen Verran states, “Susan Leigh Star had an extraordinary capacity as an analyst to let herself be inhabited by the world, and in turn to insinuate her being into many of the world's nooks and crannies” (Bowker, Timmermans, Clarke, & Balka, 2015, p. 500). Using a selection of Star's most celebrated work, this publication charts how she “became one of the most influential science studies intellectuals of the last decades” (p. 1), and offers a space for a critical and personal examination of its radiant effects to the study of society and science. Boundary Objects and Beyond is part of the MIT Press's Infrastructure Series, and is co-edited by a group of scholars that knew Star incredibly well both personally and professionally: Bowker is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine; Timmermans is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Clarke is Professor of Sociology & Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco; and Balka is Professor for the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. The contributors of the book, primarily scholars at academic institutions, represent a broad range of scholars whose intellectual development and social circles were much enriched by Star's provocative contributions to science studies. The essays represent the breadth and reach of