IFDIK2025

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.