Geoffrey C. Bowker

{{Short description|American academic}}

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He moved to UCI at the start of 2012, having held the positions of Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information. Prior to that, Bowker was Executive Director and Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor at the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.{{Cite web |title=Center for Science, Technology, and Society |url=http://www.scu.edu/sts/about/leadership.cfm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090116033354/http://www.scu.edu/sts/about/leadership.cfm |archive-date=2009-01-16 |access-date=2009-01-29 |website=Santa Clara University}} Previously, Bowker was chair of the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego and has held appointments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

With his late partner Susan Leigh Star, he has devoted much of his career to examining the values embedded within sociotechnical infrastructures such as databases, visualization strategies, and science and engineering standards. They also discuss the human instinct to classify things.{{Cite book |last1=Bowker |first1=Geoffrey C. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xHlP8WqzizYC&pg=PA1 |title=Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences |last2=Star |first2=Susan Leigh |date=2000-08-25 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-0-262-26160-9 |language=en |chapter=Introduction: To Classify Is Human}}

With Star and Helen Nissenbaum, he founded the NSF-funded Values in Design workshop and research project series to bring together scholars examining these issues across broader sites of study and across disciplines.{{Cite web |last= |first= |last2= |date=2024-04-24 |title=Bernal Prize 2024: Geoffrey C. Bowker (Society for Social Studies of Science) |url=https://ics.uci.edu/2024/04/24/bernal-prize-2024-geoffrey-c-bowker-society-for-social-studies-of-science/ |access-date=2024-09-11 |website=UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences |language=en-US}}