Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise

Journal article

Reflecting on conversations between geography and science and technology studies (STS) over the last 15 years or so, this paper addresses their shared interest in knowledge controversies as generative political events. It explores how such events give rise to new ways of practising relations between science and democracy focusing on the case of environmental knowledge claims and technologies. This exploration interrogates three mobilizations of environmental knowledge controversies that have different implications for redistributing expertise, including that of (social) scientists, in the composition of knowledge politics. The first version sets out to map the language commitments of contributors to a controversy with the aim of enabling interested citizens to trace the 'partisanship' of scientific knowlege claims. The second is also a cartographic exercise designed to teach students how to account for the political force of technoscientific controversies by mapping the intense entanglements of scientific knowledge claims with legal, moral, economics and social concerns on the web. The third is concerned less with mapping knowledge controversies from an analytical distance than with an experimental research methodology that sets out to intervene in extant controversies in ways that map researchers' own knowledge claims into what is at stake.

Authors: Whatmore, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Sage Publications
• Journal: Progress in Human Geography
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 587-598
• Publication date: 2009-10-01
• DOI: 10.1177/0309132509339841
• EISSN: 1477-0288
• ISSN: 0309-1325
• Language: English
• Keywords: competency groups; mapping controversies; knowledge politics; technoscience; expertise; environmental knowledge controversies
• Subjects: Geography