with Professor Susan Leigh Star, Santa Clara University.

One of the main questions addressed by Science and Technology Studies is: ‘How is knowledge being (re)produced, represented and embedded in scientific practices and in the production of (knowledge-based) technologies?’ In this process of producing knowledge and technologies, standards and categories such as internet protocols and the International Classification for Diseases, perform important but often invisible work in shaping technologies and deciding what counts as knowledge. Making this invisible work visible is a major objective within STS, and certainly in the work of Professor Susan Leigh Star.

During this Summer School, you will have the opportunity to develop a thorough understanding of Professor Star’s work. She is well known for studying the importance of standards and categories in the production of knowledge, for introducing concepts like ‘boundary object’ and ‘invisible work’, and for posing questions about which and whose work is deleted and who suffers from the stabilization of seemingly stable socio-technical networks. Her research fields include ethics in engineering, qualitative research, information systems, medicine and technology. She has analyzed work practices and knowledge production in a range of venues, including museums, laboratories, hospitals, libraries and high-tech research and development sites.

The question of how knowledge is being produced is not just a subject to be investigated, but it is also immediately relevant to our own practices as STS scholars. Therefore, during the Summer School, we will also reflect on how we as academics produce knowledge. What methodologies and which writing techniques do we use? How do we create observations? How do we categorize these and make knowledge claims? How do we see what we see, and what do we not see as a result of the methodology we have chosen? To what extent is the knowledge we produce formed by the infrastructures available to us? How do organizational and disciplinary constraints and ethical, ideological and political guidelines guide our access to resources, data and research subjects? We will explore these issues during several activities as well as during various lectures by Leigh Star and other STS scholars.

Professor Leigh Star is a senior scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society and visiting professor of computer engineering at Santa Clara University. Her publications include: [with Geoffrey Bowker] Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press, 1999) and Regions of the Mind: Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty (Stanford University Press, 1989). She was editor of The Cultures of Computing (Blackwell, 1995) and Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology (SUNY Press, 1995).

In addition to Professor Star, other confirmed speakers include: Professor Nelly Oudshoorn (Twente), Professor Jozef Keulartz (Wageningen), Dr. Barend van der Meulen (Twente), Dr Katie Vann (Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, KNAW) and Dr Willem Halffman (Twente).

Costs for WTMC members:
- meals 10 EUR /day

Costs for PRIME-, EASST members and everyone else:
-fee:  EUR 555  for PRIME & EASST members, EUR 645 for everyone else.
-accommodation: EUR 45 (incl. breakfast)/night
-meals: EUR 25 for lunch and dinner/day