Geoffrey Bowker, informatics professor and EVOKE Lab and Studio director, has been named a UCI Chancellor’s Professor. Granted for a five-year term, the distinguished title recognizes UCI professors who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and who continue notable achievement in scholarship.
A leading international scholar of informatics and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bowker’s research focuses on web and digital resource uses and how these new classification systems transform our understanding of classic knowledge. He is noted for merging literary and social theory, art and history, and policy studies with computer science to create new technologies and digital experiences.
Bowker has published numerous award-winning scholarly articles and publications, including Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, which won the 2016 Best Information Science Book Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), and Memory Practices in the Sciences, which was awarded the 2007 Ludwik Fleck Prize for contributions to the area of science and technology studies. He also co-wrote a book with Susan Leigh Star titled Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.
He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne, Australia in history and philosophy of science, followed by an extended postdoctoral position at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. Over the years, Bowker has held transformative positions at several leading academic institutions, including professor of and senior scholar in cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool, and serving as executive director of Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society.
In addition to his duties as a professor in UCI’s Department of Informatics, Bowker also serves as director of UCI’s EVOKE Lab and Studio where he leads a team of scholars, makers and designers in small experiments, exciting new innovations and large-scale studies on major issues like social justice, big data and digital privacy.
Bowker’s term as Chancellor’s Professor began in July 2017. He joins a growing list of nine other Chancellor’s Professors in ICS: Pierre Baldi (computer science), Rina Dechter (computer science), Paul Dourish (informatics), Nikil Dutt (computer science), David Eppstein (computer science), Michael Franz (computer science), Michael Goodrich (computer science), Richard Taylor (informatics) and Gene Tsudik (computer science).