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

Professor Lucy Suchman

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

NOTE: From January to June 2009 I will be a Visiting Professor in the Anthropology Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I will return to teach at Lancaster in January 2010.

SOCL101 Block 3 TechnoLives: an introduction to studying technologies as sociological, and the social world as technological.

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

SOCL210b Virtual Cultures (Lent term): 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 offered 2009/10): 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.

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 theorizing, 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.

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 am working on a book titled Reproducing the Centre: Performing Innovation at Xerox PARC, which was developed with funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Science in Society Programme. I am also beginning 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 runs from January 2008 - September 2010.

I'm interested in supervising PhD work 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.

Download Curriculum Vitae

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I am interested in working with doctoral students on a range of projects in cultural anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), with an emphasis on digital/virtual cultures, critical innovation studies, feminist research, and generative ways of re-thinking relations of subjects and objects.

ePrints Publications Repository

Lucy Suchman has 14 publication records in the Lancaster University ePrints repository. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title.

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. Information Society, 18 (2). pp. 139-144. ISSN 1087-6537 (electronic) 0197-2243 (paper)

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 14684446

Suchman, L. (2000) Embodied Practices of Engineering Work. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7 (1&2). pp. 4-18. ISSN 1074-9039; e-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 0030-4883

Suchman, L. ; and Bishop, L. (2000) Problematizing 'Innovation' as a Critical Project. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 12 (3). pp. 327-333. ISSN 0953-7325; e-ISSN 1465-3990

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

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

«Back

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