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Dr. Geoffrey C. Bowker
Professor Emeritus of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
Keynote Speaker
Geof Bowker is Professor Emeritus of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the most generative thinkers in science and technology studies today. Across decades of work, he has shown how infrastructures, far from being mere technical backdrops, are deeply ethical and political arrangements that shape what counts as knowledge, what is remembered or forgotten, and how we live with and through technology. In recognition of his distinguished career-long contributions to understanding the social dimensions of science and technology, Bowker was awarded the prestigious Bernal Prize in 2024.
Trained in philosophy and STS, Bowker earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne and studied with Bruno Latour in Paris. He has held academic appointments across the UK and the US, including at UC San Diego, Santa Clara University, and the University of Pittsburgh. But it is his long-running collaborations—with students, colleagues, and most profoundly, with the late Susan Leigh Star—that have defined his approach to infrastructural thinking: one that is capacious, collaborative, and attuned to the lived consequences of classification systems, databases, standards, and memory technologies.
His landmark book Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999, with Star) remains foundational not just in STS, but in information science, design, and archival studies. His early monograph Science on the Run (1994) opened up new pathways for studying knowledge work and information infrastructures, while Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005), which received the Ludwik Fleck Prize, has become a touchstone for thinking about the relationship between memory, time, and scientific knowledge.
Bowker has long argued that infrastructures are not just what we build, but also what we forget. At a time when artificial intelligence is both hailed and feared, his recent writings on the “ends of computing” in Ends of Knowledge (2023) raise urgent questions about the future of knowledge, care, and planetary life. His work reminds us that infrastructures are sites of struggle—and that to understand them is to open space for more just and imaginative futures.
Emily Drabinski
Associate Professor and
Chair, School of Information Studies
Queens College,
City University of New York
Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor and Chair of the School of Information Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She is coauthor of Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Library Juice Press) and Organize Your Library! Building the Collective Power of Library Workers (ALA Editions). Emily served as President of the American Library Association (2023–24) and is currently writing a book documenting those experiences. Her scholarship and public work center on knowledge organization, collective power, and critical approaches to librarianship, and she has published and presented widely in these areas. In recognition of her extensive contributions to critical literacy, mentoring, and service, she received the Women & Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Career Achievement Award in Women & Gender Studies Librarianship in 2020, an honor established in 1999 to celebrate distinguished academic librarians who have advanced women and gender studies through scholarship and professional service.
Dr. Fidel Nemenzo
Professor of Mathematics
University of the Philippines
Dr Fidel Nemenzo is Professor of mathematics and former Chancellor of the University of the Philippines Diliman. He studied in UP Diliman and Sophia University in Tokyo, where he obtained his Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees. His areas of research as a research mathematician are number theory, elliptic curves and coding theory. Among the awards he has received are the Lifetime Achievement Award in Mathematics from the National Research Council of the Philippines and the UP Diliman Gawad Chancellor Para sa Pinakamahusay na Guro. He was President of both the Southeast Asian Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Society of the Philippines, and has held research and teaching posts at the National University of Singapore, Sophia University and Tokyo Metropolitan University, the University of Amsterdam, Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Dr Nemenzo chaired the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council of the Philippines and was a member of its Governing Board from 2019 to 2023.
He has also headed the UP Institute of Small Scale Industries, the UP Science and Society Program, and the Data Science for Public Policy Program and served as Vice Chancellor for Research and Development of UP Diliman from 2014 to 2020.
