Research meeting of the Department Science, Technology, Policy Studies, University of Twente with guest speaker Professor Noortje Marres.
Prof. Marres will give a 30 minute presentation followed by questions and discussion.
You are welcome!
Abstract
In an age defined by computational innovation, testing has become ubiquitous, as 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. In this talk, which is based on an essay co-authored with David Stark (Marres and Stark, 2020), I argue that this development cannot be understood as long as we uphold the “laboratization thesis”. This thesis, advanced by actor-network theory in the 1980s, states that experiments present powerful instruments for transforming society, insofar as they reproduce the controlled conditions of the laboratory in social environments (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1988). The tests that proliferate across society today - in the form of living labs (Engels et al., 2019), pilots in crime control (Gromme, 2019) and test drives in intelligent vehicles (Marres, 2020) – present a different type of phenomenon. Here, tests are introduced into distinctively social spaces - the city square, a shopping street, the road – and in such a way that the social attributes of these spaces - open-endedness, complexity, stranger relationality – are preserved. Furthermore, these tests do not operate on society indirectly, through the manipulation of object-relations, as ANT would have it, but rather enable science and engineering to extend engineering logics into distinctively social phenomena –trust, collective behaviour, identity. The challenge that a new sociology of testing must address is that the very relation between science, engineering and sociology is changing: engineering is today in the very stuff of where society happens. It is not that the tests of 21st Century engineering occur within a social context: the very fabric of the social is being put to the test.
Prof Noortje Marres, Director Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) University of Warwick, Visiting Professor Centre for Science & Technology Studies (CWTS) University of Leiden
