Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability of Involvement

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Marres, Noortje. 2009. Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability of Involvement. European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1), pp. 117-133. ISSN 1368-4310 [Article]

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Official URL: http://est.sagepub.com/content/12/1/117.abstract

Abstract or Description

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of ‘being intimate in public’ to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement.

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008099647