Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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of divergent interests and social programs into a common world. According to others, such as Haraway (1989, 1991) and Law (2004, 2009), such an agenda is too conservative and risks favoring those already in charge instead of empowering those at the margins of the political arena (Munk & Abrahamsson, 2012). Sometimes we might want to denounce the injustices of the status quo and even put up a fight against them. Other times, the best we can do is to help actors work out a more reflexive and inclusive compromise (Dryzek, 2002).
Figure 9 Four criteria for estimating the feasibility of a controversy mapping project. The slider indicates controversies that are easier to map (created by the authors; released by the authors under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Choosing a good controversy
Readers may have noticed that, apart from pointing out how contemporary controversies are related to science and technology and made public through media, we have so far abstained from providing a more precise definition. Controversy mapping is a pragmatic method. It cares less about separating what is controversial from what is not, and more about offering ways to study collective phenomena through the tensions that animate them. Anything in social life that cannot be settled by reference to matters of fact can in principle be described as a controversy and studied through controversy mapping (see, for example, Munk & Ellern, 2015). Any newspaper or scientific journal contains dozens of controversial topics and so do blogs and specialized websites, such as those of engineering associations or scientific societies. Wikipedia has several pages dedicated to controversial subjects, which list thousands of articles. It doesn’t really matter if the topic has already been mapped: controversies are fertile research objects that change across different contexts, evolve over time and can be charted in multiple ways.
However, the fact that almost any situation has a controversial angle does not mean that controversy mapping is equally suited to deal with all of them. In order to choose a good controversy to map, we suggest four criteria, illustrated in figure 9.
Binary and multiple controversies
A place to start when choosing a controversy is to consider the number of positions around which the actors coalesce and the balance between these positions. Sociotechnical debates span a continuum from binary and unbalanced discussions (where an established position is challenged by a skeptic minority) to proliferating debates (where a multitude of different positions oppose each other with no one gaining the upper hand). It is advisable to stay clear of both extremes, but for different reasons.
Controversies that are both binary and very unbalanced can put the map-maker in a particularly difficult position. These are situations in which a small group of actors has an interest in keeping a controversy alive and thereby prevent everyone else from reaching closure and moving on. Here, your complicity as a mapmaker involves favoring that small group of actors by giving the controversy visibility. As STS has long shown, there is no such thing as complete consensus in science and technology. No matter how solid a fact appears to be, there will always be actors contesting it. Think, for instance, of flat-earthers who stubbornly maintain their conviction even in the absence of the smallest shred of evidence (Bach, 2018). In most cases, the existence of such minority reports is happily ignored in view of the significant advantages of keeping black boxes shut. Yet, in some cases, well-organized and well-resourced groups have succeeded in keeping a discussion alive despite the marginality of their position. We alluded to this in the introduction when we argued that the increased visibility of technoscientific controversies derives in part from the effort of industrial lobbies to stall legal regulation by the perpetual mediatization of controversies long since closed in the scientific community. The tobacco-cancer connection (Michaels, 2008) or global warming (Oreskes & Conway, 2008) are classic examples of such strategies, but other cases can be found in Agnotology by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (2008).
These controversies can be mapped but require special treatment. Exposing the shallowness of the arguments used by the skeptics often misses the point. Their objective is not necessarily to convince the public that they are right. Instead, it could be to create a climate of doubt in which it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong. In the representation of these controversies, the description of arguments and counter-arguments is thus less important than the investigation of the strategies through which skeptics succeed in acquiring a disproportionate visibility.
Apart from this, truly binary debates are rare. A disagreement may often appear binary only because we fail to appreciate how it is deployed from other perspectives. Take the issue of same-sex marriage, where an apparently simple pro/con opposition can obscure a deeper and much more complicated set of discussions. The question, for example, has different implications in different national and cultural contexts. Is it asked in Denmark, which has a liberal track record, was the first country to allow registered partnerships between same-sex couples, and has a state church controlled by parliament? Or is it asked in France, which has a secular constitution, but a far more vocal Catholic and conservative right? Or in Italy, which harbors the Vatican and the papal seat? On top of that comes the question of what you are actually for or against? Is it the legal right of gay couples to form civil unions? Is it the right to do so in a religious establishment? Is it the prospect of gay couples “qualifying” as parents for adoption? There are many intersecting ways of being for or against same-sex marriage, which is part of the reason why it is a worthwhile controversy to map.
Truly binary controversies are not really in need of mapping. They are like tugs of war with two teams opposing each other and a clear definition of when one team will have lost to the other. As controversies get more multiple, they become more like bar brawls with actors battling each other in shifting coalitions and on several different fronts at once. This is when cartography begins to make sense.
Importantly, in controversies, multiplicity does not only come from the fact that a multitude of actors with a multitude of positions are engaging a multitude of issues. Multiplicity can also be ontological (Mol, 2002), which is to say that the matter of a disagreement is actually different realities that different actors refer to by the same name. Two actors may, for example, both be talking about “a worthy end of life” in a controversy about euthanasia, or about “the risk of flooding” in a controversy about land use and urban planning, but enact those expressions in completely different ways, bringing them into being as materially different things. In the context of a hospice, a worthy end of life could be associated with the ability to uphold meaningful relationships with family and with a sense of self determination, while in a hospital emphasis might be put on a lack of emotional stress and physical pain. Importantly, those two versions are materialized and thus upheld in the equipment and procedures of the hospice and the hospital respectively. Similarly, an insurance company would typically understand flood risk in financial terms and therefore as something that depends on the size of their portfolio of flood-prone policy holders in the same local area, which is enacted in the way they model the risk, while to the individual homeowner it is really the risk of water coming into their particular basement (Munk, 2012). If that is the case, then ontology quickly becomes political (Mol, 1999) because the ability of actors to make their case is not so much a matter of debate as it is a matter of materially constructing the world in a way that makes their position self-evident.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, exceedingly multiple controversies are certainly interesting to map, but can pose a problem in terms of time and resources. We introduced this chapter with a cartographic project that we carried out a few years ago on the climate change adaptation debate. When preparing our submission for the European agency that funded the project, it seemed to us that the topic was rich enough to require the collaboration of six research centers over three years and to justify spending 1.5 million euros (cf.