This section from Material Participation by Noortje Marres brought home the sociological significance of lifestyle experiments to me. I’d been prone to framing things like lifestyle minimalism as a form of neo-asceticism and I can easily see a more charitable framing along the lines of pg 91 here: They can […]
From Material Participation by Noortje Marres pg 57-58: By defining the public in terms of a problem of relevance, pragmatism undid two persistent attempts to solve the problem of material publics by conceptual means: the tendency to either internalize or to externalize the problems of the public. They warned against […]
From Material Participation by Noortje Marres, pg 6: This field of work finds its starting point in the rejection of the critique of objects that has been dominant in twentieth-century social science: the idea that things, technology and materiality render engagement impossible. This work suggests that this negative critique has […]
My notes on Marres, N. (2018). Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4, 423-443. “We want our facts back” is a semi-joking remarking Noortje Marres overheard an academic say which captures a wider response to what has been called ‘post-truth’. Many feel increasingly inclined […]
How did the Goldsmiths MA/MSc in digital sociology come about? Is it difficult to unify the disciplines that are represented on the course? How would you describe the aims of the course? What sort of students are attracted to the course? Do you think digital sociology courses like this will become more common over […]
