Noortje Marres - The Democracy Test: Street Trials as Experiments in Interpretation

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL - THE NOISE OF BEING
Noortje Marres - The Democracy Test: Street Trials as Experiments in Interpretation
25 February 2017 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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The Democracy Test: Street Trials as Experiments in Interpretation (lecture)
We have become increasingly aware of the fact that everyday environments such as the street or the home are sites of technological innovation that are in need of our engagement. However, efforts to deploy digital devices to envision material forms of participation have introduced us to threats to democracy in the form of surveillance, third-party data ownership and asymmetric value extraction. Noortje Marres discusses how this challenge has been taken on in street trials of ‘intelligent’ vehicles, and examines whether and how these initiatives open up different answers to the question ‘what counts as democracy?’
Noortje Marres is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick (UK). She studied Sociology and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole des Mines in Paris. Her work investigates issues at the intersection of technology, politics and the environment: problems of participation in technological societies; the role of objects and materials in contemporary democracy (with a focus on sustainable living); the changing relations between social science and society in the digital age.