Event overview
Organised by the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process
This talk will consider the conceptual figure of the 'environmental public,' and its role in what is often construed as the failure of the environment to effectively engage wider audiences. It unpacks an influential version of this concept, that of the 'community of the affected,' by returning to one of its earlier instantiations, in the 1920s writings of the American
pragmatist Walter Lippmann. In this work traces can be found of an alternative perspective on 'material democracy,' which we will explore, and especially the problem of the public that Lippmann drew attention to: in technological societies publics have to deal with quite impossible cartographies of relevance.
Noortje Marres is Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford. She has a background in science and technology studies, and did her doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole des Mines, Paris, on issue-centred concepts of democracy in technological societies. Previously she was a Marie Curie
fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths, where she worked on material forms of publicity emerging in relation to climate change, especially in and around the home.
Gay Hawkins is a Professor of Media and Social Theory in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia. Her 2006 book 'The Ethics of Waste' explored how the vitality of waste as matter makes claims on us. She is currently working on a major collaborative and international study of the biopolitics of bottled water.
'Plastic Water ' will be published by MIT press in 2011.
Lisa Blackman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, and works at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural theory. Her most recent book is The Body: Key Concepts (Berg, 2008). She is currently working on Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Relationality and the Problem of personality (Sage, 2011), which investigates the importance of
suggestion and contagious communication for thinking about affect, the body and subjectivity within social and cultural theory.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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29 Apr 2009 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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