Bernal Prize 2024: Geoffrey C. Bowker (Society for Social Studies of Science)

The Society for Social Studies of Science annually awards the Bernal Prize to an individual who has made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. The 2024 Prizes go to Geoffrey C. Bowker and Annemarie Mol.

The 2024 Bernal Prize Committee: Anne Pollock, Chair, Monamie Bhadra Haines, Warwick Anderson, Wen-Hua Kuo, and Nassim Parvin

Geoffrey C. Bowker

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the University of California – Irvine, Geoffrey C. Bowker has transformed our understanding of information technology and cyberinfrastructures. After receiving his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Bowker studied with Bruno Latour at the École des Mines, Paris, before holding posts at the University of Keele, the University of Manchester, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UC – San Diego, Santa Clara University, and the University of Pittsburgh. His early study of information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, Science on the Run (1994), pioneered STS research in information infrastructures. With his late partner and intellectual collaborator, Susan Leigh Star, Bowker reshaped and extended knowledge of sociotechnical infrastructures such as databases, modes of visualization and classification, and scientific and engineering standards. Their co-authored Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999) continues to exert a major impact in science and technology studies and beyond, in fields such as information technology and design studies. The transformative work they did together serves as a model for collaborative enterprise in our field. With Helen Nissenbaum and Leigh Star, he developed a suite of international graduate workshops on Values in the Design of Information Systems and Technology. Bowker continues to open new vistas in STS through books such as Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005)—awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize—and Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensons, and Design (2007). In an era when digital technologies such as artificial intelligence are influencing our lives and sense of ourselves as never before, his innovative and illuminating research becomes ever more compelling and necessary. His recent paper on the ‘ends of computing’ in the appropriately titled Ends of Knowledge volume (2023), explores these issues.

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