Noortje Marres, MA Msc PhD (Marie Curie Research Fellow)
Research interests: Social studies of technology and politics; object-centred social and political theory; non-governmental politics; American pragmatism; relations between science and democracy; public involvement in techno-scientific controversies; climate change; concepts of the public, publicity, citizenship; information technology and civil society; the material, practical and spatial turns.
Noortje works in the Department of Sociology as a Marie Curie research fellow. She received her PhD from the Philosophy Department at the University of Amsterdam, and was a PhD candidate at the Dutch graduate school WTMC (Science, Technology and Modern Culture). She studied Philosophy of Science and Technology (MA) and Sociology of Science and Technology (Msc), also at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she worked as a theorist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht.
Research interests
My current research project focuses on climate change and material practices of citizenship. It examines how eco-homes, and domestic energy technologies more broadly, work and fail to work as technologies of civic involvement. Asking whether eco-homes can be usefully described as material devices of publicity, I explore how they are used and abused as scenes and props for the enactment of public engagement with green issues, in a variety of in situ and mediated settings. I am particularly interested in how public involvement, with the turn to material practices, increasingly involves the performance of “issue-affectedness,” raising questions about the (under-acknowledged) role of “capacities to be affected” in democracy.
This Marie Curie research project draws on ideas I explored in my Ph D thesis, which discussed pragmatist theories of democracy in a technological society, and related attempts, in political science, sociology and science and technology studies, to come to terms with the rise of issue-oriented forms of public involvement in the 20th century. It also draws on research I have done on non-governmental politics and the Internet, together with Richard Rogers. Seeking to build on the methods we devised for the study and visualisation of issue-networks on the Web, my current work on material practices of publicity combines web analysis and fieldwork.
PhD Thesis
“No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics”
PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2005, http://dare.uva.nl/document/17061
Recent publications
Journal Articles
"Testing powers of engagement: Green living experiments, the ontological turn
and the undoability of involvement," in: ‘What is the empirical?’,
special issue edited by Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, European Journal of
Social Theory, forthcoming.
“The making of climate publics: Eco-homes as material devices of publicity,” in: “The
Technologies of Politics,” special issue edited by Ingunn Moser and Kristin
Asdall, Distinktion, Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16 (2008): 27-46.
"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 (2008): 251-281.
“The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 5 (2007): 759-780.
“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,” Marc Berg, Ole Hanseth and Margunn Aanestad (eds.), special issue, Information, Technology and People 17, no. 2 (2004): 124-149.
“French scandals on the Web, and on the streets: Stretching the limits of reported reality” (with Richard Rogers), Asian Journal of Social Science 30, no. 2 (2002): 339-353.
“Landscaping Climate Change: A mapping technique for understanding science & technology debates on the World Wide Web” (with Richard Rogers), Public Understanding of Science 9, no. 2 (2000): 141-163.
Book Chapters
“Front-staging non-humans: publicity as a constraint on the politics of things,” The Stuff of Politics, Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore (eds.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.
“There is Drama in Networks,” Interact or Die, Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.), Rotterdam: Nai/V2 Publishers, 2007.
“Dilemmas of Home Improvement. Can Clean Energy Technology Mediate Civic Involvement in Climate Change?” Nongovernmental Politics, Michel Feher (ed.), New York: Zone Books, 2007.
“Net-Work Is Format Work: Issue Networks and the Sites of Civil Society Politics,” Reformatting Politics: Networked Communications and Global Civil Society, Jodi Dean, John Asherson and Geert Lovink (eds.), Routledge, 2006.
“Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate,” Making Things Public, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Karlsruhe/Cambridge: ZKM/MIT Press, 2005.
“Recipe for Tracing the Fate of Issues and Their Publics on the Web” (with Richard Rogers), Making Things Public, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Karlsruhe/Cambridge: ZKM/MIT Press, 2005.
"May the true victim of defacement stand up: On reading the network configurations of scandal on the Web," Iconoclash, Image-making in Science Religion and Art, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Karlsruhe/Cambridge: ZKM/MIT Press, 2002.
"Tussen toegang en kwaliteit: Legitimatie en contestatie van expertise op het Internet" (with Gerard de Vries), De publieke dimensie van kennis, H. Dijstelbloem and C. J. M. Schuyt (eds.), WRR Voorstudies en Achtergronden, Den Haag: SDU Uitgevers, 2002.
"Depluralising the Web and Repluralising Public Debate: The Case of the GM Food Debate on the Web" (with Richard Rogers), Prefered Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, Richard Rogers (ed.), Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Editions, 2000.
Book reviews
Review of Eddie Glaude “In A Shade of Blue,” Political Theory, forthcoming.
“A different kind of political realist,” Review of Chantal Mouffe “On The Political,” Area 39, no. 1 (2007): 133–134.
Review of “Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture, and Modernity and Technology,” Krisis, Tijdschrift voor empirische filosofie 7, no. 2 (2006): 75-87.
“Reality is,” review of Annemarie Mol “The Body Multiple,” EASST Review 23, no. 2 (2004) http://www.easst.net/review/june2004/marres
Review of Jodi Dean “Publicity’s Secret,” Space & Culture 7, no. 1 (2004): 119-123.
Some other publications
“Dat ons gevoel over goed en kwaad grotendeels afhangt van de mening die wij daarover hebben,” in “De Titels van Montaigne,” special issue, De Gids 170, no. 7/8/9 (2007): 563-568.
“The Politics of Affectedness,” Centre for the Study of Democracy Bulletin, University of Westminster, 14, no. 8 (2007): 5-7.
“Wezen van de electorale democratie,” De Gids 169, no. 11 (2006): 896-907.
“Public (Im)Potence,” Open, Nai uitgevers/SKOR no. 11 (2006): 78-81.
“Offentligheten uppstår genom sakfrågor,” Fronesis 22/23 (2006): 248-263.
“Zonder kwesties, geen publiek,” Krisis, Tijdschrift voor empirische filosofie 7, no. 2 (2006): 36-43.
“Beter productief wantrouwen, dan misplaatst vertrouwen,” Krisis, Tijdschrift voor empirische filosofie 4, no.1 (2003): 36-52.
“Raising the stakes on critique,” Next Five Minutes 4 Reader, de Balie, Amsterdam, October 2003.
“Pourquoi prendre des chemins de traverse?, Petit exercice de cartographie de la contestation et des problèmes politiques sur le Web,” Multitudes 9 (2002): 142 – 153.
“To Trace or to Rub: Screening the Web Navigation Debate” (with Richard Rogers), Mediamatic 9, no. 4, September 1999.
“Edge Your Way Through Orbital Debris!” (with Alex Wilkie), Mediamatic 9, no. 4, September 1999.