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Nelly Oudshoorn

Nelly Oudshoorn (born 13 April 1950) is a scholar in Science and Technology Studies. She is well-known for her study of user-technology relations, analysing for example, users of medical technologies and information- and communication technologies. Her work challenges essentialist views of bodies, gender, vulnerability and sheds lights on the agency and resilience of users, problematizing a conception of users as passive victims of technology.

Oudshoorn received an MSc in Biology and PhD in Science Dynamics from the University of Amsterdam. In the 1980s and 1990s she taught at the Women’s Studies in Biology and Science Dynamics Department of the University of Amsterdam. In 1995 she moved to the Science, Technology and Policy Department of Twente University. She has been visiting professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, USA, and the Department of Technology and Social Change in Linkoping, Sweden, among other places. She is a past chair of the board of WTMC, the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (2005-2014).

In her first book Beyond the Natural Body (Routledge 1994), Oudshoorn shows how concepts such as the “hormonal body” may appear as natural phenomena through the cultural and material work of scientists. In later studies, such as The Male Pill (2003), How Users Matter (2003, together with Trevor Pinch), Telecare and the Transformations of Healthcare (2011), and Resilient Cyborgs (2020) she studies the materiality of bodies and technoscience with a special focus on silenced voices and invisible work.

Awards

Oudshoorn is the winner of the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society of Social Studies of Science (2005) and the Diana Forsythe Award of the American Medical Informatics Association (2009). Her book Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare Palgrave Macmillan (2011) is the winner of the Book Prize 2012 of Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness of the British Sociological Association. The New Production of Users. Changing Innovation Collectives and Involvement Strategies (Routledge 2016), a volume co-edited with Sampsa Hyysalo and Torben Elgaard Jensen, has been awarded with the Freeman award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology in 2016. In 2021 she received the Bernal Prize of the Society of Social Studies of Science, which is awarded to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS.

Selected bibliography

Books

• Beyond the Natural Body (Routledge 1994)
• The Male Pill (2003)
• How Users Matter (2003, together with Trevor Pinch)
• Telecare and the Transformations of Healthcare (2011)
• Resilient Cyborgs (2020)

Chapters in books

• Oudshoorn, N. (2000), ‘The Co-construction of Contraceptive Technologies and Users’, In Saetnan, A., Oudshoorn, N., and Kirejczyk, M. (eds) Bodies of Technology. Women’s Involvement in Reproductive Medicine. Ohio: Ohio University Press.
• Oudshoorn, N. (2000), ‘The Birth of Sex Hormones’, in: Londa Schiebinger (ed) Feminism and the Body. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87 – 118. Reprinted from the Journal of the History of Biology (1990), vol 23, nr.2, 42-83.
• Oudshoorn, N. (2001), ‘On Feminisms, Bodies and Technologies’ In Schiebinger,L. (ed) Feminism in 20th-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press.
• Oudshoorn, N. (2019), ‘Placing Users and Nonusers at the Heart of Technology’. Handbook Science, Technology and Society. Perspectives and Directions. Cambridge University Press. Edited by Todd L. Pittinsky, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, 163-175
• Boenink, M., Lente, H. van, Moors, E., Oudshoorn, N., Gardner, J., Balka, E., Green, E., Henwood, F., Lynch, R., and Farrinhton, C. (2020), Innovation. In Health, Technology and Society. Critical Inquiries. Webster, A. and S. Wyatt (Eds). Palgrave MacMillan, pp 15-75.

Articles in Academic journals

• Oudshoorn, N., Rommes, E., and M. Stienstra. (2004). “Configuring the user as everybody: gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies.” Science, Technology and Human Values, 28 (4).
• Oudshoorn, N. (2008). Diagnosis at a distance. The invisible work of patients and healthcare professionals in cardiac telemonitoring technologies. Sociology of Health & Illness. vol 30, nr 2, 272-289.
• Oudshoorn, N. (2009). “Physical and digital proximity: emerging ways of health care in face-to-face and telemonitoring of heart-failure patients.” Sociology of Health & Illness, 31 (3).
• Oudshoorn, N. (2015) How Places Matter. Telecare Technologies and the Changing Spatial Dimensions of Healthcare. Social Studies of Science Volume 42 Issue 1, February 2015
• Oudshoorn, N. (2015). Sustaining Cyborgs. Sensing and tuning agencies of pacemakers and ICDs. Social Studies of Science.  February 2015; 45 (1), pp 56-76
• Oudshoorn, N. (2016). “Vulnerability of cyborgs. The case of ICD shocks”. Science, Technology and Human Values 2016
• Oudshoorn, N. (2018). “Hybrid bodies and the materiality of everyday life: how people living with pacemakers and defibrillators reinvent everyday routines and intimate relations”. Sociology of Health & Illness, 40, 1, 171-187
• Oudshoorn, N. (2021). Graying the Cyborg Revisited. How age matters when technologies move under the skin. Tecnoscienza 11, 2, 13-32