Ideology and Utopia revisited: On the 'infrastructuralisation' of knowledge in postnormal times
5:30pm - 7:30pm /
Wednesday 6th May 2026
/ Venue: SLSJ Events Space - Ground Floor School of Law & Social Justice
Type: Lecture /
Category: Department
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Speaker: Noortje Marres (University of Warwick)
Contemporary social life is marked by what the sociologist Charles Thorpe (2022) calls 'chronic uncertainty'. We live in postnormal times: the infrastructures underpinning everyday life, from affordable housing to clean water, can no longer be taken for granted, and disruption has become a background condition of everyday life.
In this lecture, I will argue that these changing circumstances not only affect daily life, but transform conditions for public knowledge. In postnormal times, the suspension of the taken-for-granted can no longer be expected to trigger a process of learning, as 20th century social theory had it. Rather, endemic disruption is increasingly met with denial.
To make sense of this situation, I return to a classic work in the sociology of knowledge, Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim. I will argue that struggles between ideology and utopia today unfold through infrastructure, turning everyday environments like streets into 'critical sites' and raising challenges for knowledge politics: how to centre the demand for truth under conditions of the 'infrastructuralisation' of public controversies?
Bio
Noortje Marres is Professor in Science, Technology and Society at the University of Warwick and a Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (Germany). She studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole des Mines (Paris). Noortje has published two monographs Material Participation (2012) and Digital Sociology (2017) and has led various research projects investigating public engagement in technological societies, in areas such as sustainable living and automated mobility. She is currently completing a third book which examines technology trials beyond the laboratory—of automated vehicles, facial recognition and Covid testing —as tests of society.
Contemporary social life is marked by what the sociologist Charles Thorpe (2022) calls 'chronic uncertainty'. We live in postnormal times: the infrastructures underpinning everyday life, from affordable housing to clean water, can no longer be taken for granted, and disruption has become a background condition of everyday life.
In this lecture, I will argue that these changing circumstances not only affect daily life, but transform conditions for public knowledge. In postnormal times, the suspension of the taken-for-granted can no longer be expected to trigger a process of learning, as 20th century social theory had it. Rather, endemic disruption is increasingly met with denial.
To make sense of this situation, I return to a classic work in the sociology of knowledge, Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim. I will argue that struggles between ideology and utopia today unfold through infrastructure, turning everyday environments like streets into 'critical sites' and raising challenges for knowledge politics: how to centre the demand for truth under conditions of the 'infrastructuralisation' of public controversies?
Bio
Noortje Marres is Professor in Science, Technology and Society at the University of Warwick and a Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (Germany). She studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole des Mines (Paris). Noortje has published two monographs Material Participation (2012) and Digital Sociology (2017) and has led various research projects investigating public engagement in technological societies, in areas such as sustainable living and automated mobility. She is currently completing a third book which examines technology trials beyond the laboratory—of automated vehicles, facial recognition and Covid testing —as tests of society.