Dr Noortje Marres
Marie Curie Research Fellow | MA PhD
n.marres (@gold.ac.uk)
Research Interests
Non-governmental politics; pragmatist theories of democracy; information technologies and civil society; public involvement in the politics of science and technology.
In PhD research Noortje returned to the early 20C debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey on the fate of democracy in technological societies in order to develop an issue-oriented account of public involvement in politics. She draws on pragmatist political theory and actor-network theory for an understanding of democratic practices in ontological terms: physical and affective modes of implication in affairs are then considered central to the formation of publics and the performance of citizenship.
Noortje combines this interest in democratic theory with the study of non-governmental politics on the Internet. Together with Richard Rogers, she has devised methods for visualising and analysing issue networks on the Web. The Internet is here seen as a forum that makes legible the emergence of new forms of civic involvement in the complex issues of globalising societies. Her Marie Curie research project seeks to take these approaches further by adding fieldwork to web analysis. The aim is to develop empirical accounts of projects of citizen involvement in climate change as more or less successful enactments of “issue entanglement.”
Recent Publications
- (2007) 'The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy', Social Studies of Science 37,
pp. 759-780 - (2006) 'Net-work is Format Work: Issue networks and the sites of civil society politics,' Reformating Politics: Information Technology & Global Civil Society, edited by Jodi Dean, Geert Lovink and Jon Anderson, New York: Routledge, pp. 3-18
- (2005) 'Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate,' Making Things Public, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Karlsruhe/Cambridge: ZKM/MIT Press: pp. 208-217.
- (2004) 'Tracing the trajectories of issues and their democratic deficits on the Web: The case of the Development Gateway and its doubles,' in “Actor-network Theory and Information Systems,” edited by Marc Berg, Ole Hanseth and Margunn Aanestad, special issue, Information, Technology and People 17 (2): 124-149.
- (2002) 'French scandals on the Web, and on the streets: Stretching the limits of reported reality' (with Richard Rogers), Asian Journal of Social Science 30 (2): 339-353.
- (2000) 'Landscaping Climate Change: A mapping technique for understanding science & technology debates on the World Wide Web' (with Richard Rogers), Public Understanding of Science 9 (2): 141-163.