The Controversial Lion. A Tale on the Mapping of Sociotechnical Debates

Résumé 0

Controversy analysis has been around since the 1970s as a technique to investigate the role of science and technology in society as well as the role of politics and economy in technoscience – and in fact the impossibility to separate the two. In the last two decades, this established STS approach has been revived by the encounter with digital methods and the way in which electronic media and online platforms increase the visibility of controversies and facilitate their traceability.In a recent field guide (Controversy Mapping. A Field Guide. Polity, 2021), we inspect the roots of controversy mapping in actor-network theory and digital methods; explore its cast of actors and issues; introduce a series of quali-quantitative techniques for curating digital and non-digital records; discuss how to represent sociotechnical debates; and how to intervene in them. This short essay offers an amuse-bouche and a snappy introduction to our book. It summarizes some of its key ideas with an embellished metaphor, almost as a bed-time story.