• • Home
  • About
  • Contact
• • Undergrad
  • Masters
  • PhD
• • Staff
  • Research & Publications
• • News & Events
  • Current Students

Professor Lucy Suchman

Sociology: Professor, CSS Co-Director

Degree: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Anthropology University of California, Berkeley

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Centre for Science Studies

Current Teaching

SOCL210b Virtual Cultures (not taught 2011/12): an undergraduate course that explores new information and communications media, including the progressive expansion of life online, and the increasingly intimate relations between life online and off.

SOCL908 Anthropology of Cybercultures (not taught 2011/12): a postgraduate course on the social history, cultural and material qualities of digital artefacts, their place in professional and popular discourses, and practices of their design and use.

Previously taught:

SOCL208 Gender, Sexuality and Society: an undergraduate course on contemporary issues considered through the lens of feminist research.

Research Interests

I came to the Sociology Department and the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster after twenty years as a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. My research has centered on relations of ethnographies of everyday practice to new technology design. Drawing on studies of work, science and technology studies, and feminist theorising, I've been concerned to recover the specific, culturally and materially embodied identities, knowledges and practices that make up technical systems. This involves, among other things, reconstructing technologies from singular objects located at the center of a surrounding social world, to heterogeneous assemblages of social and material practices. I've explored these reconstructions both through critical studies and through experimental, interdisciplinary and participatory interventions in new technology design. Along with colleagues at Xerox PARC I carried out a series of projects sited in particular workplaces (an airport, a large Silicon Valley law firm, a state department of transportation) that combined ethnographic studies of work and technologies-in-use with the in situ development of new prototype information systems.

I spent my university years beginning in 1968 at UC Berkeley, receiving a Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology in 1984. My dissertation Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. It provided a critical analysis of constructions of human action and communication assumed in the design of interactive machines, and proposed an alternative perspective drawn from developments in the social sciences. A sequel to that book titled Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions 2nd edition was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. This edition includes an annotated version of the original text, plus five new chapters looking at relevant developments since the mid 1980s both in computing and in social studies of technology. The focus is on humanlike machines and new forms of human-computer interaction on one hand, and recent theorising regarding humans, machines and relations between them on the other.

At my departure from Xerox PARC I held the positions of Principal Scientist and manager of the Work Practice and Technology area, an interdisciplinary research group which I co-founded in 1989. In 1988 I received the Xerox Corporate Research Group's Excellence in Science and Technology Award. I served as Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 1988, and for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems in 1990. I was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and served on its Board of Directors from 1982-1990. I have been a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with the Work, Interaction and Technology Research Group at King's College London, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney's Interaction Design and Work Practice Laboratory, and am currently an Adjunct Professor at the Information Technology University in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm also a Collaborating Editor for the journal Social Studies of Science.

In April of 2002 I received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and in August 2005 the Outstanding Contribution to Research Award from the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2010 I received the Lifetime Research Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

My current research interests center on the project of writing ethnographies of sites of technology production and use, and contributing to emerging reconceptualizations of social/material relations based in anthropology, feminist theory and science and technology studies. I have recently concluded a project titled 'Relocating Innovation: Places and material practices of future-making' funded by the Leverhulme Trust, along with Endre Dányi (Postgraduate Researcher) and Laura Watts (Research Fellow). The project ran from January 2008 - September 2010.

I recently became a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and have begun a blog on media representations of robotics, particularly in warfighting, at http://robotfutures.wordpress.com/.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I'm interested in supervising postgraduate research in science and technology studies, particularly projects involving ethnographic research on any aspects of practices of technology design/production and consumption/use, and in the area of feminist technoscience, particularly with respect to information and communications technologies; robotics, artificial intelligence and the cyborg; human-computer interaction and new media.

Recent publications

2012 (with Jackie Stacey) Animation and Automation: The liveliness and labours of bodies and machines. Body & Society, 18 (1): 1-46.

2011 Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 1-18.

2011 Subject Objects. Feminist Theory 12 (2): 119-145

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Lucy Suchman has 14 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Suchman, L. A. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521675888

Suchman, L. A. (2007) Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial. In: New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-08364-7

Suchman, L. A. (2005) Affiliative Objects. Organization, 12 (3). pp. 379-399. ISSN Online ISSN: 1461-7323 Print ISSN: 1350-5084

Suchman, L. (2003) Organising allignment. In: Knowing in organizations : a practice-based approach. M. E. Sharpe, London, pp. 187-203. ISBN 0765609118

Suchman, Lucy (2002) Practice-based design of information systems : notes from the hyperdeveloped world. The Information Society, 18 (2). pp. 139-144. ISSN 0197-2243

Suchman, L. A. and Blomberg, J. and Trigg, R. (2002) Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the prototype. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2). pp. 163-179. ISSN 1468-4446

Suchman, L. (2000) Embodied Practices of Engineering Work. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7 (1&2). pp. 4-18. ISSN 1532-7884

Suchman, L. (2000) Making a case: knowledge and routine work in document production. In: Workplace studies : recovering work practice and informing system design. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 29-45. ISBN 0521598214; 0521591864

Suchman, L. (2000) Organising alignment:a case of bridge-building. Organization, 7 (2). pp. 311-327. ISSN 1350-5084

Suchman, L. ; and Bishop, L. (2000) Problematizing 'Innovation' as a Critical Project. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 12 (3). pp. 327-333. ISSN 0953-7325

Associated Keywords: Feminist cultural studies of science and technology, Science, technology and society, Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Sociology

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Lucy Suchman.

«Back

Save this page: Del.icio.us Digg It Reddit Facebook Stumble It!