Materials and devices of the public: an introduction
By Noortje Marres, J. Lezaun. 2011
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract 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 that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.
Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eaf47d3ac86b6b59c5093b07e75bd6dd9056c088
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In Computer Science Applications
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies? (2013, background): “This investment is far from inscribed into a particular manner of being – it is far from being ‘ontological’, in the philosophical interpretation of the term – but tends to be a precarious, transient and often ambiguous achievement (see also Marres and Lezaun, 2011).”