Dr Noortje Marres
Lecturer | MA, PhD
tel: +44 (0)20 7919 7571
n.marres@gold.ac.uk
Research interests
My work investigates various intersections between technology, environment, knowledge, and the public. I have a background in the social studies of science and technology, and my recent work is mainly concerned with the role of devices, environments and things in the enactment of participation (in public life, innovation, research, change). I take a special interest in digital forms of social research, with a focus on the development of methods and tools of controversy analysis and issue mapping. Finally, I have done work that brings together science and technology studies with political theory: I have written about issues of democracy in the technological society, and (neo-)pragmatist contributions to our understanding of it, through concepts of material participation and public experiments.
Selected publications
Scraping the Social? Issues in Real-time Research (with Esther Weltevrede), submitted to the Journal of Cultural Economy, March 2012
Material Participation: Technology, Environment and Everyday Publics (Palgrave, forthcoming)
'Re-distributing methods: digital social research as participatory research.' Working paper, Submitted to Sociological Review, September 2011
(in press) The Experiment in Living. In C. Lury and N. Wakeford (Eds). Inventive Methods: The Happening of
the Social. London: Routledge.
(2011) The Cost of Involvement: Everyday Carbon Accounting and the Materialization of Participation. Economy and Society 40 (4).
(2011) Materials and Devices of the Public. Co-authored with Javier Lezaun. Introduction to Special Section of Economy and Society 40 (4).
(2010) Frontstaging Non-humans:The Politics of 'Green' Things and the Constraint of Publicity. In B. Braun and S. Whatmore (Eds.). Political Matter: technoscience, democracy and public life (2010) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(2009) Testing powers of engagement: Green living experiments, the ontological turn and the undoability of involvement. In L. Adkins and C. Lury (Eds.) Special issue on ‘What is the empirical?, European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 117-133.
(2008) The making of climate publics: Eco-homes as material devices of publicity. In I. Moser and K. Asdal (Eds.) Special Issue on The Technologies of Politics. Distinktion, Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16: 27-46.
(2008) Subsuming the Ground: How local realities of the Ferghana Valley, the Narmada Dams, and the BTC pipeline are put to use on the Web (with Richard Rogers). Economy and Society 37, 2: 251-281.
(2007) The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy. Social Studies of Science 37, 5 (2007): 759-780.