Noortje Marres (Professor)

Academic profile

I am a professor in Science, Technology and Society. I was trained in theInstitute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), a Visiting Professor in the Centre for Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (Germany), and I was a member of the REF2021 Sociology sub-panel.

Before joining the University of Warwick in 2015, I held posts at Goldsmiths, University of London (2011-2015; 2007-2009), the University of Oxford (2009-2011), and the University of Amsterdam (2005-2007). I was the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies from 2019 to 2021. Before coming to Warwick, I directed the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP) and convened the MA/MSc Digital Sociology at Goldsmiths (2011-2015). I was a Visiting Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Centre (2014), Mercator Fellow at the University of Siegen (2017-18), and a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2021-2022) and the Universities of Leiden (2018-2021), Vienna (2019) and St Gallen (2020). I served as an elected member of Council of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) from 2018 to 2021. I hold a MSc and a MA in Sociology and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Amsterdam (both cum laude), and conducted my doctoral research at that same university, and at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines (Paris).

Research

Subject area

Noortje's work investigates issues at the intersection of innovation, publics, the environment and everyday life. She has led research projects focused on public controversies about science and technology (climate change, renewable energy, AI), and conducted research on new forms of civic engagement in work on sustainable living and related practices such as everyday carbon accounting, and more recently, automated and connected urban environments. Noortje has also contributed to methods development across social research, digital media and activism, in work on online issue mapping and situational analytics. Her current research focuses on experiments "beyond the laboratory," examining diverse forms of testing in societal settings - street trials of intelligent vehicles, fact-checks in media environments and Covid testing situations - as critical interfaces between science, engineering, nature and society. Much of her work, then, is concerned with experiments in society as forms of knowledge, intervention and engagement that are gaining fresh relevance in our compute-intensive, ecologically challenged age.

Areas of interest: Science, Technology and Society; Digital Sociology; Issue Mapping; Experiments in Participation; Material Publics; Pragmatism

Further information is available on Noortje's personal siteLink opens in a new window.

Selected Publications

Books

Inventing the Social (N. Marres, M. Guggenheim and A. Wilkie (eds.)) (Mattering Press, 2018)
Digital Sociology: the Reinvention of Social ResearchLink opens in a new window (Polity, 2017)
Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday PublicsLink opens in a new window (Palgrave, 2012)

Hidden tab - Do not delete or move - Needs to be on second position Journals

Marres, N., Castelle, M., Gobbo, B., Poletti, C., & Tripp, J. (2024).AI as super-controversy: Eliciting AI and society controversies with an extended expert community in the UK. Big Data & Society,11(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241255103
Marres, N. (2024).Do automated vehicle trials test society? Testing mobility futures in the West Midlands.Mobilities, 1-21. 10.1080/17450101.2024.2356566
Marres, N. (2024).Articulation, or the persistent problem with explanation. The British Journal of Sociology,10.1111/1468-4446.13084
Marres, N., Colombo, G., Bounegru, L., Gray, J. W., Gerlitz, C., & Tripp, J. (2023).Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods.Social Media+ Society,9(3), 20563051231196538.
Marres, N., & Sormani, P. (2023).Testing "AI": Do We Have a Situation? A Conversation. Media of Co-operation Working Paper Series, University of Siegen.
Marres, N. (2023).How to turn politics around: things, the earth, ecology. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 01622439231190884.
Marres, N. (2023)Comment renverser la politique : sur les choses, la terre, l’écologieLink opens in a new window, Symposium sous la direction d'Antoine Hennion, Revue Pragmata, p. 480-508
Marres, N. (2023).Seven moments with Bruno Latour.Social Studies of Science, Vol 53, Issue 2.
Gray, J. and N. Marres (2022) Articulating urban collectives with data. In:Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City,MacKinnon, V. Fast and R. Burns, R (eds), Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Marres, N. (2021)How to think sociologically about the digital society? In:Introduction to Sociology, K. Murji, S. Neal, J. Solomos (eds), London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 18-36
Marres, N.(2021)No issues without media : the changing politics of public controversy in digital societies. In:Swartz, JeremyandWasko, Janet, (eds.) Media : A Transdisciplinary Inquiry. Bristol, UK ; Chicago, USA: Intellect Books
Marres, N. (2020)For a situational analytics: an interpretative methodology for the study of situations in computational settings, Big Data & Society,https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720949571
Marres, N. & de Rijcke, S. (2020).From indicators to indicating interdisciplinarity: A participatory mapping methodology for research communities in-the-making.Link opens in a new window Quantitative Science Studies3 (1): 1041-1055
Marres, N. (2020)Review of Communities at a Crossroads: Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture, by A Pelizza,Information, Communications and Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1781918
Costas, R., de Rijcke, S., & Marres, N. (2020).Heterogeneous couplings: Operationalizing network perspectives to study science‐society interactions through social media metrics.Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Marres, N., & Stark, D. (2020).Put to the test: For a new sociology of testing.The British Journal of Sociology,71(3), 423-443.
Marres, N. (2020).Co‐existence or displacement: Do street trials of intelligent vehicles test society?The British Journal of Sociology,71(3), 537-555.
Cohen, T., Stilgoe, J., Stares, S., Akyelken, N., Cavoli, C., Day, J., Dickinson, J., Fors, V., Hopkins, D., Lyons, G. and Marres, N., Sipe, N., Tennant, C., Waded, Z., Wigley, E. (2020).A constructive role for social science in the development of automated vehicles.Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives,6, p.100133.
Marres, N. (2020)"What if nothing happens? Street trials of driverless cars as experiments in participation,"Link opens in a new window In: TechnoScience in Society, Sociology of Knowledge Yearbook. S. Maassen, and Dickel, S. and Schneider, C. H. (eds.), Nijmegen: Springer/Kluwer.
Marres, N. (2020) As ANT is getting undone, can Pragmatism help us re-do it?The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory. Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias and Celia Roberts (Eds), London and New York: Routledge.
Marres, N. (2018).Why We Can't Have Our Facts Back. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society,4, 423-443
Marres, N., J. Lezaun and M. Tironi (2016),"Experiments in Participation"Link opens in a new window, The Science and Technology Studies Handbook, Volume 4, edited by C. Miller, E. Smitt-Doer, U. Felt and R. Fouche (eds.), Cambridge: MIT Press.
Marres, N. (2015) "Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method." Science, Technology & Human Values 40: 655-686, doi:10.1177/0162243915574602, [articleLink opens in a new window]
C. Lury, and N. Marres (2015) Notes on Objectual Valuation, in: Making Things Valuable, edited by M. Kornberger, L. Justessen, A. Koed Madsen and J. Mouritsen, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Marres, N. and C. Gerlitz (2015)"Interface Methods: Renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology."Link opens in a new window Sociological Review, 14 August, doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.12314
Marres, N., & Weltevrede, E. (2013). Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), 313-335
Marres, N., & Lezaun, J. (2011). Materials and devices of the public: an introduction. Economy and society, 40(4), 489-509
Marres, N. (2007). The issues deserve more credit pragmatist contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy. Social Studies of Science, 37(5), 759-780
Marres, N. (2005) No issue, no public: Democratic deficits after the displacement of politics, Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam

Online talks and other materials

(2024) After the Automation of Methods: the Case for Situational Analytics. Annual Lecture of the National Centre for Research Methods, with Carrie Friese (LSE) and Rachel Coldicutt (Careful Industries) as respondents, Royal Society, London, 21 May.
(2024) Not my Existential Risk! The politics of controversy in an age of AI, public panel with Matthias Spielkamp (AlgorithmWatch), Brenda McPhail (Canadian Civil Liberties Association), Mark Scott (Politico), & Gloria González Fuster (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Museum of Kommunication, Berlin, 30 January.
(2022) Why we still can't have our facts back, online lecture, Scientific assessment in a post-truth society, Symposium hosted by thePBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 6- 7 October [video]
(2022) "Social Science is Explanation or it is Nothing,"Online debatewith M. Savage, M. Mills and J. Go, chaired by M. Krause, London School of Economics, 13 October [video]
(2021) Dreams, delusions and data, debate with K. Cukier and J. Bryson, chaired by L. Mason, HowTheLightGetsIn, Festival for Music and Philosophy, 11 June [video]
(2018) Situational Analytics, Oxford Internet Institute, October 18 [video]
(2018) Is Big Data a Big Mistake?, HowTheLightGetsIn, Festival for Music and Philosophy, 26 May [video]
(2016) Infrastructuring Publics or Societies? On street trials as experiments in interpretation, University of Siegen, 12 December [video]
(2015) What makes a public affair? Haus der Kunst, Munich, April 16, [videoLink opens in a new window]
(2014) Marres, N. interview with M. Carrigan on Digital Sociology, LSE Impact Blog, December 3, [interviewLink opens in a new window]

Projects

AI in the street, scoping study funded by the AHRC Bridging Divides in Responsible AI (BRAID) Programme.
A possible model for real-time public science? A social study of Independent Sage, Research England Participatory Research Fund.
Beyond the lab: an empirical philosophy of intelligent vehicle testing, Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
Shaping 21st Century AI: Controversy and Closure, with Dr. Michael Castelle and Dr. James Tripp, funded by the ESRC (ORA Programme).
Creating the Possiblewith Prof. Sarah Pink et al (Emerging Technologies Lab, Monash University), Monash-Warwick Alliance Catalyst Project.
Sampling sounds of the future: What does the future of Coventry sound like? A participatory project supported by the Warwick Engagement Institute for Coventry City of Culture.
Inventing Indicators of Interdisciplinarity, collaboration with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), University of Leiden.
Scoping issues in autonomous vehicle research at the science/society interface, Research development Project, University of Warwick, 2016-2017.
Issue Mapping Online, funded by the ESRC Digital Social Research Programme.

Teaching

Modules

At CIM, I teach the following modules

Office hours by appointment.

Supervision

I have supervised the following research students at the University of Warwick:

Loup Cellard (completed)
Helena Suarez Val (completed)
Oihane Etayo (completed)
James McNally
Matias Valderrama Barragan
Cynthia Ng
Martina Mallett
Greta Timaite
Tibebu Taye Gulilat
Luke Robert Mason

Contact details

Email:

N.Marres@warwick.ac.uk

Phone:

+44 (0)2476 573628

Mailing address:

Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Room B0.12

University of Warwick

Coventry

CV4 7AL