Handout: King, panel “Cui Bono?”-- talk website: http://growbobjects.blogspot.

com/
Science & Justice Conference: Conversations in Honor of Susan Leigh Star, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 3
Growing Boundary Objects: among transcontextual feminisms
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park/Email: katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/

Star 2010: 610: “As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and users, it became clear that
a kind of communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had studied
these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of ʻdouble binds.ʼ As with Batesonʼs work on
schizophrenics, and what he called ʻthe trans-contextual syndrome,ʼ the messages that were coming at
level one from the systems developers were not being heard on that level by the users and vice versa.
What was obvious to one was a mystery to another. What was trivial to one was a barrier to another. Yet,
clarifying this was never easy…. I began to see this as a problem of infrastructure—and its relative
nature.”

NEPANTLERAS, WIZARDS, ENOUGH WORLDS, GRACE, AND PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATIONS

• “I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom I’ve named
nepantleras.” (Anzalduá 2002: 1)
• “These are what I refer to as ‘wizards’: that is, they are both repositories of local knowledge about the social and technical situations,
and simultaneously, they know enough of more than one layer to perform rare cross-layering coordination. By definition, this work is
‘interdisciplinary’….” (Star 1995: 107)
• “I guess I’d locate my hope in being part of enough different worlds simultaneously. . . . I’ve tried to model a way of being in this
kind of an organization that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me in the ways that it’s been formed by all these other worlds that
I’m part of.” (Suchman & Scharmer 1999)
• "Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined
structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to
the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance
with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of
power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval 2000: 60)
• “People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted.” (Bowker and
Star 1999: 305)

feminist theory, a conceptual and material infrastructure

•its objects such as ideas and tools •its players as theorists, makers, and agents within identity politics
• its sites of production such as schools of thought, particular institutions in time, forms of power • its layered assemblages, accretions
and networks such as disciplines and their critiques, feminist activity in various places, times and generations, political actions and
resistances.

boundary objects, such as standpoint theory, intersectionality, material feminisms

• as spaces for communication • as carefully tacit, deliberatively discreet grounds for collaboration without agreement • as objects
wrought over time through intensive negotiations over practice and terminology • as structured objects that permit recursion at
different levels of system holding paradox in tension • as process points in cycle of standardization, generation of residual categories,
emergent alliances

TRANSCONTEXTUAL
(Star & Ruhleder 1996: 127 quote Bateson 1972: 276; Bateson: 272; Clarke quotes Star syllabus 2010: 589; Star 2010: 610)
• phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome” • More
Bateson: “It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual
confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a ‘double take.’ A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friend…is not
‘just that and nothing more.’”
• Star syllabus: “borderlands are full of motion and emotion.”

UNDER GLOBAL ACADEMIC RESTRUCTURING ….

• movement among knowledge worlds is mandated -- in terms hardly consistent
• interdisciplinarity -- justifies consolidated units and resources
• restructuring promotes an easily assessed instrumental practicality, as if the standard for good interdisciplinary methodology was
easy assessment
• disciplinary chauvinisms – are made urgent, personal and compensatory
• quantitative assessments of productivity and authority -- measures for advancement, status or just getting a job done
• establishing and maintaining authority in an environment in which many knowledge worlds compete
• the empirical, the data-driven, the concrete, and the local are all more manageable, more easily broken up into task, then held
accountable to a very particular set of folks and their properly urgent ethics
• Yet diverging knowledge worlds keep making such management problematic, uneven, partial, at times virtually impossible
• Being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about is a
kind of self-consciousness only partially available for explicit, or direct discussion
• Under global academic restructuring we are obliged to network among all these lively agencies, as we look to see things as they
exist for others, in different degrees of resolution, of grain of detail.

ON AUTHORITY AND COMMITMENTS: SIMULTANEOUS FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Star 1995: 22)

"We honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any others. But I do at the same time argue with
and try to overthrow those I don't agree with! Relativism in this sense does not imply neutrality--rather, it implies forswearing claims
to absolute epistemological authority. This is quite different from abandoning moral commitments.”

ON GROWTH AND DEATH OF BOUNDARY OBJECTS (Star 2010: 613-4)

“Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking back-and forth, and especially, to
standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object.”

INTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: closely negotiated among relatively bounded communities of
practice; such as disciplines-in-the-making, local alliances, threatened units, long-lived organizations; emphasis on rigor and
membership
EXTENSIVE PRACTICES, knowledges, definitions, boundary work: speculative connections, practical coalitions, trial and error
learning; such as transdisciplinary projects, transmedia storytelling, alternative practices-in-the-making; emphasis on peripheral
participation and the edges of standardized practices
• EXTENSIVE investigations perpendicularly analyze relative and relational shifts across authoritative and alternative knowledges
• EXTENSIVE displays can work without displacing INTENSIVE work of specific communities of practice

Boundary objects sometimes mediate among extensive and intensive feminist practices simultaneously. For example, Kathy Davis
(2008) calls intersectionality a “buzzword,” but thinking of it as a boundary object would more carefully allow us to consider both its
simultaneous intensive and extensive uses, allow us to pay attention to its INTENSIVE local tailorings in the plural as well as its
values as a shared representation across EXTENSIVE gatherings, reconciling divergent critiques and solutions to them.

LOCAL TAYLORING AS A FORM OF WORK (Star 2010: 607)

[different forms of materiality, gaps between formal representations and back-stage work] “subtly influenced the development of
boundary objects in the sense of understanding local tailoring as a form of work that is invisible to the whole group and how a shared
representation may be quite vague and at the same time quite useful.”

Extensive explorations of intensive meanings works out in and around GRAIN OF DETAIL
• membership • peripheral participation • intensive knowledge management • extensive knowledge inspections
• distributed author agencies • distributed, niche, emergent “audiences” or uses • scoping out: assemblage and infrastructure •
scaling in: closely negotiated disciplinary interests
• And attention to any particular grain of detail provokes response and affect. And that matters. In the midst of such cognitive
overload, it helps to experiment with strategies for working with overload, rather than denying it.
• Transdisciplinary work befriends and experiences a range of academic and other genres of writing, entailment and analysis,
befriends and experiences their consequent and diverging values.

The “rigor” of transcontextual feminist methods comes into play when we welcome peripheral participations (robust across sites)
as well as work for an exquisite sensitivity to each horizon of possible resources and infrastructures, local exigencies, and
differential memberships (plastic and local). Transcontextual feminisms as I have come to understand them, work to remain
curious, even about and in the midst the affects of affiliation and disidentification, scoping extensively and scaling intensively
among Ecologies of Knowledge.

• Anzaldúa, G. 2002. “(Un)natural bridges.” In eds. Anzaldúa, G. & Keating, A. this bridge we call home, pp. 1-5. Routledge.
• Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler.
• -- 1972. "Double Bind, 1969.” In Steps, 276, 272.
• -- 1979. Mind and Nature. Dutton
• Bauchspies, W.K., & Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2009. “A patchwork of moving subjectivities.” Subjectivity, 28, 334–344.
• Bowker, G.C., & Star, S.L. 1999. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. MIT.
• Clarke, A. 2010. “In Memoriam: Susan Leigh Star.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 581-600.
• Davis, K. 2008. “Intersectionality as buzzword.” Feminist Theory, 9(1), 67-85.
• King, K. 2001. "Productive agencies of feminist theory: the work it does." Feminist Theory 2/1: 94-98
• Sandoval, C. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minnesota.
• Star, S.L. & Ruhleder, K. 1996. ”Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure.” Information Systems Research 7(1), 127.
• Star, S.L. 1991. "On being allergic to onions." In A Sociology of Monsters, ed. J. Law, 26-57. Routledge.
• -- 1995. “The Politics of Formal Representations.” In Ecologies of knowledge, pp. 88-118. SUNY.
• -- 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist (Nov/Dec) 43/3, 377-392.
• Star, S.L., ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. SUNY.
• Star, S.L. 2010. “This is Not a Boundary Object.” Science, Technology & Human Values, 35/5: 601-617.
• Suchman, L. & Scharmer, C.O. 1999. “I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions.”
http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviews/Suchman.shtml