I was saddened to hear the news recently that Olga Amsterdamska had died after a long illness – saddened that we will never meet again at 4S and EASST conferences, and that she had suffered from a long illness.

I can’t claim to have known Olga well, but I did value her acquaintance. I met her at my first 4S conference, in 1987. As I embarked on a late-career doctorate, my supervisor sent me to the conference for an overview over the STS field, into which I was entering. He did not attend that year, so I was on my own. I had no paper as an “introduction” to the community, nor was there a mentoring program at that time. Come banquet night, I wandered in not knowing a soul. Olga must have seen that I looked lost and, generous person that she was, invited me to join her and others at a table. They were good company around that table! Several, including Olga, even greeted me the next year when we met again at the joint 4S/EASST conference. What I took from that first conference experience, not least thanks to Olga, was not only an overview over the field but a sense of the spirit of STS as a community. What struck me about it was its openness – to new members, to multiple disciplines, to new ideas and approaches – the liveliness and at the same time friendliness of its debates. Olga embodied that spirit.

Therefore, I was lucky to have Olga as a member of my dissertation committee. My department knew nothing of the STS field, but they did know of, or somehow tracked their way to Olga when the time came that I needed two outside opponents against whom to defend my thesis. What I knew, that my department perhaps didn’t know, was that Olga had published a thorough and highly critical review of Latour’s Science in Action (Amsterdamska 1990), a work on which my thesis leant heavily and probably somewhat clumsily. So the department’s choice of main opponent made me nervous. Luckily for me, Olga proved once again to embody that spirit of openness that I had sensed on our first acquaintance. I am convinced it was Olga, as the one member of my committee who knew Actor-Network Theory and its position within STS, who rescued me from the brink of failure where my other two opponents had me teetering. Olga was still highly critical of the theory and also a skilled debater, as the defense event itself would show, but her knowledge and spirit of openness were my redemption.

It continued to be a pleasure to meet Olga at 4S and EASST meetings and to hear her papers, always exciting and insightful. I will miss her company and her academic contributions. Olga contributed to the STS community in many ways. She served on the EASST council, as the editor of Science, Technology & Human Values, and as a co-editor of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Her own work bridged disciplinary gaps amongst us, bringing together Sociology and History, citation studies and ethnographic approaches.

Obviously, there are many who will miss Olga far more than I – her family, and colleagues she met and worked with on a daily basis. My heartfelt condolences go out to them. I trust they are doing their best to support and console one another. For those of us who knew Olga only as a generous and cheerfully critical voice within the STS community, perhaps the best memorial we can offer is to continue to build the community in that same spirit.

Amsterdamska, Olga (1990) “Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!” Science, Technology & Human Values 15 (4): 495-504. http://www.jstor.org/stable/689826?seq=1

For other remembrances of Olga, see:

MIT Press

University of Amsterdam

History News Network