L Suchman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4433 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Suchman |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Suchman |
| SIGNATURE | SUCHMAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9752-4684 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 384 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Basic research, lethal effects: Military artificial intelligence research funding as enlistment
In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorithmically based warfighting. We draw from a corpus of DoD grant solicitations from 2007 to 2023, focusing on those addressed to researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Considering the implications of DoD funding for academic research, the paper proceeds through three analy…
“Their Is No Such Thing as a Machine That Acts Outside of Relations With Humans”
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not …
Knowing War
This commentary reflects on contributions to the pariss special issue Datawar. My readings highlight the implications of war’s remediations for practices through which it is rendered knowable. Critical engagement with martial epistemologies requires an articulation of the irremediable locatedness and partiality of knowledge practices, and the fallacy of data-solutionism as the latest promise of an end to ‘the fog of war.’ I conclude with some ref…
The uncontroversial 'thingness' of AI
This commentary starts with the question 'How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies "it" may engender?' Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a 'hardening of the categories', processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context wh…
Imaginaries of omniscience: Automating intelligence in the US Department of Defense
The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time 'situational awareness' across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of 'closed world' discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant schola…
Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies
The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data - brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impa…
Toward a Critique of Algorithmic Violence
Questions about how algorithms contribute to (in)security are under discussion across international political sociology. Building upon and adding to these debates, our collective discussion foregrounds questions about algorithmic violence. We argue that it is important to examine how algorithmic systems feed (into) specific forms of violence, and how they justify violent actions or redefine what forms of violence are deemed legitimate. Bringing t…
Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assasination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, mor…
Demystifying the Intelligent Machine
Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
Naoki Ueno’s Transformative Practice
Reflecting upon scholarly engagement with Naoki Ueno beginning in the 1990s, this commentary recalls the particular commitments of Ueno’s research practice and their relations with studies conducted under the auspices of the Work Practice and Technology research group at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Those lines of connection are further traced through the contributions to this special issue, emphasizing the eclectic, and also synthetic, con…
Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security
This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopo…
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan: In Memoriam
No abstract available
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan
Robot visions
This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the 'almost human'. We take as our model (in)organism 'Lucy the Robot Orangutan', roboticist Steve Grand's project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. One aspect of Lucy's figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway's analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and m…
Animation and Automation - The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines
Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated throu…
Subject objects
The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing - or truncate…
Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design
This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation-that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe so…
Organization Studies: The Sixth Organization Studies Summer Workshop “Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In” 25—28 May 2011, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, Paris, France
Wajcman Confronts Cyberfeminism
Like any artefact, a book configures its audience. However explicitly or implicitly, an author imagines her reader(s) in the particular ways that she crafts her text. And, as readers, we find ourselves and our interests variously present or absent, represented or overlooked in the texts that we take up. Whether for our own projects or for the edification of our students, reading for many of us involves a process of asking who might be addressed b…
Affiliative Objects
Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the 'affiliative object' to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the…
Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World
This paper offers re ections on information systems design based in everyday practices. Drawing on experience in what I name the hyperdeveloped world of industrial research and development in the United States, I outline a series of concerns, organized under the themes of information ows, local improvisations and work practices. I then offer a set of alternative understandings of change and innovation that underwrite a practice-based design appro…
Working artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype
This paper follows recent science studies in theorizing information technologies as socio-material configurations, aligned into more and less durable forms. The study of how new technologies emerge shifts, on this view, from a focus on invention to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. This view is developed in relation to the case of the 'prototype', an exploratory technology designed to effect alignment b…
Embodied Practices of Engineering Work
This article explores relationships between activity theoretic and ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of artifacts-in-…
Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice
This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in the…
Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design
This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation-that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe so…
Working artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype
This paper follows recent science studies in theorizing information technologies as socio-material configurations, aligned into more and less durable forms. The study of how new technologies emerge shifts, on this view, from a focus on invention to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. This view is developed in relation to the case of the 'prototype', an exploratory technology designed to effect alignment b…
Affiliative Objects
Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the 'affiliative object' to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the…
Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice
This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in the…
Subject objects
The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing - or truncate…
Animation and Automation - The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines
Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated throu…
The uncontroversial 'thingness' of AI
This commentary starts with the question 'How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies "it" may engender?' Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a 'hardening of the categories', processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context wh…
Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assasination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, mor…
Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security
This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopo…
Imaginaries of omniscience: Automating intelligence in the US Department of Defense
The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time 'situational awareness' across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of 'closed world' discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant schola…
Toward a Critique of Algorithmic Violence
Questions about how algorithms contribute to (in)security are under discussion across international political sociology. Building upon and adding to these debates, our collective discussion foregrounds questions about algorithmic violence. We argue that it is important to examine how algorithmic systems feed (into) specific forms of violence, and how they justify violent actions or redefine what forms of violence are deemed legitimate. Bringing t…
Robot visions
This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the 'almost human'. We take as our model (in)organism 'Lucy the Robot Orangutan', roboticist Steve Grand's project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. One aspect of Lucy's figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway's analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and m…
Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World
This paper offers re ections on information systems design based in everyday practices. Drawing on experience in what I name the hyperdeveloped world of industrial research and development in the United States, I outline a series of concerns, organized under the themes of information ows, local improvisations and work practices. I then offer a set of alternative understandings of change and innovation that underwrite a practice-based design appro…
Representing practice in cognitive science
Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies
The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data - brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impa…
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication
The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces
The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human- Computer Interfaces. Peter J. Thomas. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 268 pp
Critical Practices
Representing practice in cognitive science
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication
Les formes de l’action: Sémantique et sociologie
L’analyse de l’action est remise au premier plan par certains courants actuels de la philosophie et des sciences sociales. L’étude de la sémantique de l’action (intention, volonté, motif, désir, etc.) a fait apparaître le rôle important du langage dans la constitution du champ pratique. Elle a permis d’éclairer sous un jour nouveau les rapports entre langage ordinaire et analyse sociale. Cet ouvrage restitue l’état du débat suscité, en sciences s…
General/Theoretical Anthropology: Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists . Sharon Traweek
Do Categories Have Politics? The language/action perspective reconsidered
Do categories have politics: The language/action perspective reconsidered
Working relations of technology production and use
Speech acts and voices: Response to Winogradet al
Cognition and Communication at Work
This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract probl…
Reflections on a Work-Oriented Design Project
This article reports our experiences in developing a work-oriented design practice. We sketch our general approach to relating work practice studies and design, including our use of case-based prototypes. We go on to describe our entry into the law firm that was the setting for this project and our decision to focus our design efforts on two forms of work at the firm. We discuss our experiences in developing a case-based prototype to support the …
Centers of Coordination: A Case and Some Themes
The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces: The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human- Computer Interfaces
The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces
The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human- Computer Interfaces. Peter J. Thomas. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 268 pp
Diana E. Forsythe (11 November 1947-14 August 1997)
Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice
This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in the…
Critical Practices
Embodied Practices of Engineering Work
This article explores relationships between activity theoretic and ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of artifacts-in-…
Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World
This paper offers re ections on information systems design based in everyday practices. Drawing on experience in what I name the hyperdeveloped world of industrial research and development in the United States, I outline a series of concerns, organized under the themes of information ows, local improvisations and work practices. I then offer a set of alternative understandings of change and innovation that underwrite a practice-based design appro…
Working artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype
This paper follows recent science studies in theorizing information technologies as socio-material configurations, aligned into more and less durable forms. The study of how new technologies emerge shifts, on this view, from a focus on invention to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. This view is developed in relation to the case of the 'prototype', an exploratory technology designed to effect alignment b…
Affiliative Objects
Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in anthropology and science and technology studies, I adopt the trope of the 'affiliative object' to describe the relational dynamics of association (and disassociation) that characterize the…
Wajcman Confronts Cyberfeminism
Like any artefact, a book configures its audience. However explicitly or implicitly, an author imagines her reader(s) in the particular ways that she crafts her text. And, as readers, we find ourselves and our interests variously present or absent, represented or overlooked in the texts that we take up. Whether for our own projects or for the edification of our students, reading for many of us involves a process of asking who might be addressed b…
Organization Studies: The Sixth Organization Studies Summer Workshop “Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In” 25—28 May 2011, Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, Paris, France
Subject objects
The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing - or truncate…
Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design
This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation-that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe so…
Animation and Automation - The Liveliness and Labours of Bodies and Machines
Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated throu…
Computer Science (30 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Political science (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Engineering (13 works) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works)