Noortje Marres

University of Warwick · Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

This paper takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method, in the study of science, technology and society (STS) and beyond, and outlines a distinctive approach to addressing a key challenge: the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in on...

This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research...

What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technology and settings in public involvement. It makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the role of things in democracy, but it also offers empirical analyses...

This article presents a situational analysis of the expert advice offered by Independent SAGE, a group of scientists that formed in May 2020 in the UK to provide advice on the Covid response. Based on interviews with the group’s members and partners, we argue that through its interventions Indie SAGE demonstrated an important alternative approach t...

Following the release of large language models in the late 2010s, the backers of this new type of artificial intelligence (AI) publicly affirmed that the technology is controversial and harmful to society. This situation sets contemporary AI apart from 20th-century controversies about technnoscience, such as nuclear power and genetically modified (...

How was testing—and not testing—for coronavirus articulated as a testing situation on social media in the Spring of 2020? Our study examines everyday situations of Covid-19 testing by analyzing a large corpus of Twitter data collected during the first 2 months of the pandemic. Adopting a sociological definition of testing situations, as moments in...

In this article, I give a personal view of Bruno Latour’s work on the politics of ecology going back to his work during the early 2000s on the politics of things. Based on my exchanges with Latour over the years, from the time that I became his student in the late 1990s, I show how he developed his understanding of the politics of ecology through a...

Social media metrics have a genuine networked nature, reflecting the networking characteristics of the social media platform from where they are derived. This networked nature has been relatively less explored in the literature on altmetrics, although new network‐level approaches are starting to appear. A general conceptualization of the role of so...

Automated vehicles (AVs) have the potential to cause profound shifts across a wide range of areas of human life, including economic structures, land use, lifestyles and personal well-being. Most current social science on AVs is narrowly framed. Research on public attitudes has focused on whether people are likely to accept and use AVs. We contend t...

This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms s...

This article discusses a project under development called “Inventing Indicators of Interdisciplinarity,” as an example of work in methodology development that combines quantitative methods with interpretative approaches in social and cultural research. Key to our project is the idea that Science and Technology Indicators do not only have representa...

In an age defined by computational innovation, testing seems to have become ubiquitous, and tests are routinely deployed as a form of governance, a marketing device, an instrument for political intervention, and an everyday practice to evaluate the self. This essay argues that something more radical is happening here than simply attempts to move te...

This paper examines recent street tests of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the UK and makes the case for an experimental approach in the sociology of intelligent technology. In recent years intelligent vehicle testing has moved from the laboratory to the street, raising the question of whether technology trials equally constitute tests of society. To...

What follows is a moderated and slightly edited email conversation on the relation of infrastructures and publics that started in July 2017. Over the course of several months and in a considered follow-up of emails Sigrid Baringhorst (Professor of Political Science, University of Siegen), Noortje Marres (Associate Professor in the Centre for Interd...

The Digital Test of the News workshop brought together digital sociologists, data visualisation and new media researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick on 8 and 9 May 2018. The workshop is part of a broader research collaboration between the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and the Public D...

In this response to Steven Hoffman’s The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery," I insist on the importance of public knowledge, which requires that we distinguish between scientific and public facts. I differentiate between knowledge democracy and populism, as the former entails a refusal of hierarchical vis...

How do we make the case for “knowledge democracy” in the face of the growing influence of right-wing figures and movements that denounce experts and expertise? While the threats to knowledge posed by these movements are real, it would be a mistake to return to a classic intellectual strategy––the politics of demarcation––in the face of this danger....

This chapter evaluates an emerging paradigm for testing intelligent technology in society through the analysis of recent street trials of self-driving cars. Moving beyond laboratory-based test protocols, street trials of intelligent automotive technology evaluate their performance in social environments, on public roads. As such, they appear to exe...

Marres, Noortje (2021) No issues without media : the changing politics of public controversy in digital societies. In: Swartz, Jeremy and Wasko, Janet, (eds.) Media : A Transdisciplinary Inquiry. Bristol, UK ; Chicago, USA: Intellect Books. ISBN 9781789383263

This chapter discusses the emerging body of work in STS that explores the experimental dimension of public participation in contemporary societies. This work moves beyond the original focus of STS on the role of experimentation in the sciences to consider the proliferation of experimental formats in the arts, social movements, economic organization...

This book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technologies and settings in democracy. Examining a range of devices, from smart meters to eco-homes, the book sets out new concepts and methods for analyzing the relations between participation, innovation and the environment.

This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We propose that this approach can help to address an important methodological problem in social media research, namely, the tension between social media as resource for social rese...

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological...

What makes a device-centred perspective on participation so attractive? I have argued that it allows us to reformulate problems of participation, and we are now in a position to do so. Material participation, we have seen, is often presented as a solution to problems of participation. Locating participation in material practice has been promoted as...

To foreground the role of technologies of accounting and measurement in the enactment of public participation raises broader questions about the place of experiments in democracy. Philosophers, historians and sociologists have long reflected on the privileged status that experimental science is accorded as a form of inquiry in liberal democracies (...

The question of the role of technological devices in engagement may be posed of any form of public participation but it acquires special relevance in relation to material participation. The latter form of involvement as I discussed in Chapter 1, can itself be characterized in terms of the attempt to foreground the role of objects, technologies and...

Political participation always takes place in a material location, but it could be said that some sites of engagement are more material than others. Certain settings of public involvement seem designed to make things recede into the background, as in the case of the auditorium, of which the shape and acoustics conspire to let the sound of voices ta...

When, in the late 1980s and early 1990, social and political theorists turned their attention to the issue of non-humans, they focused mainly on the question of whether these beings qualified as actors (Harbers, 2005; Latour, 1992; Callon, 1986b; Cussins, 1996). They proposed that non-human entities deserved more recognition as constituent elements...

To ask about the role of things in political participation is not only to ask an empirical question, one that requires us to go out into the world and examine how participation is done in practice. It equally opens up issues in political theory, as it disrupts a well-established assumption of theories of public engagement: the idea that materials s...

This paper discusses the implementation of methods of controversy analysis in social media research, and proposes that if project is to be successful, we need to address the tension between social media as a resource for social inquiry and as an empirical object in its own right (Thielmann, 2012; see also Hilgartner, 2000). Controversy analysis is...

Wat is de rol van dingen in politieke participatie? In haar boek Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics beantwoordt Noortje Marres die vraag met behulp van actor-netwerk theorie. In navolging van ANT bepleit ze dat alledaagse objecten, technologie en omgevingen een cruciale rol spelen in de hedendaagse democratie:...

This article contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has...

This paper examines the limits and possibilities of topological approaches in the social analysis of technology. It proposes that topology should be considered not just as a theory to be adopted, but equally as a device that is deployed in social life in a variety of ways. Digital technologies help to make clear why: these technologies have facilit...

This book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technologies and settings in democracy. Examining a range of devices, from smart meters to eco-homes, the book sets out new concepts and methods for analyzing the relations between participation, innovation and the environment.

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to th...

This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research...

This paper seeks to contribute to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are currently put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper c...

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement - perspectives...

Global Information Society Watch 2010 investigates the impact that information and communications technologies (ICTs) have on the environment – both good and bad. Written from a civil society perspective, GISWatch 2010 covers some 50 countries and six regions, with the key issues of ICTs and environmental sustainability, including climate change re...

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of t...

This article seeks to enrich material perspectives on environmental citizenship by considering current deployments of eco-homes as devices for public involvement in climate change. It discusses environmental awareness campaigns that centre on the home in the light of a warning voiced in political theory, that attempts to locate citizenship in ‘the...

Studies of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seek to come to terms with a particular problem of political globalization. While global forums are widely attributed the capacity to put in place the conditions for the resolution of local issues, at the same time these sites are seen t...

This paper explores the 'issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however...

De Amerikaanse filosoof Graham Harman kwam in het najaar van 2006 naar Nederland vanuit Caïro, waar hij als universitair hoofddocent verbonden is aan de American University.Krisisredacteuren Noortje Marres en Ruth Sonderegger spraken met hem over zijn filosofische project. Harman probeert een objectgerichte metafysica te ontwikkelen, een post-kanti...

This article explores the ways in which actor-network theory (ANT) invites an alternative account of democratic process, namely in terms of issue-formation, which is particularly well suited to the study of democratic practices facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Engaging with arguments that have been made in political...

Preceded by an introduction by Noortje Marres and Patrice Riemens that stresses the reconstitution of a national communitarianism around the elections, the article analyses the assassination of Pim Fortyn and the rise of a populism of the extreme-right. It is based upon an analysis of the media and of the relative back-wardness of Dutch society wit...

The main argument of this paper is that the Web is well suited for the role of a streetwise informant for protest events. Using special software, we plot the network of Web sites of organisations related to the meat and anti-globalization protests in Milau, France, in June of 2000, and compare our findings about the nature of the actors with the re...

New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here "landscapes" a debate by displaying key "webby" relationships between organizations. "Debate-scaping" plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperli...

This paper turns to sustainable living experiments in order to further explore object-centred understandings of the public developed by Bruno Latour, Andrew Barry and other scholars in science and technology studies. Work in this field has long emphasised the importance of scientific experiments and technical demonstrations as sites of publicity an...