Description
About controversies
What is controversy?
Although the term often carries the sense of a lively polemic, it is employed here in the more restrained sense of a "debate surrounding a technique or scientific fact that has not yet been determined". An example would be GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) and the correlating issues around hybrid foods, though many other debates exist outside the mainstream. The course's primary goal is to confront you with forms of knowledge that are still unstable, around which there exists no clear guide. Therefore our research will focus on situations where the social, political, and moral uncertainties are rendered more complex, rather than less, by scientific knowledge or established techniques.
Why focus on controversies rather than established scientific facts?
Scientific and technical knowledge is always presented in its final form, without ever offering insight into how its certitude has been achieved; yet those intermediate stages, corresponding to the actual research process, best highlight the connections between scientific work and other types of activities). In this course, we will unseat your certainties as much as possible, by confronting you directly with a situation of conflict, created partly by research and partly by the social and political circumstances surrounding that research. This type of double uncertainty corresponds more and more to the actual situation in which you will work as professionals. General competence will always be needed, but more and more the capacity to analyze highly controversial situations for which there is no previous modeling, is required (technology risks, scientific uncertainties, a multiplicity of possible scenarios, and conflicts of moral value).
Why this course?
The fundamental skill required of technologists, scientists, and researchers is no longer to choose the most appropriate or optimized technical solution, but rather to assist employers and other stakeholders in identifying all possible solutions, as well as to highlight the social, moral, economic, and organizational reactions that may ensue. In this class, we will map the range of currently held positions on controversial issues, no matter how aberrant, and without directly taking sides. In doing this, students will develop an essential form of objectivity: a second degree of objectivity, which is the ability to grasp and understand all the conflicting issues and themes behind controversial and highly technical subjects. This insight will, in turn, enable us to map, and therefore understand in a more tangible way, the different positions at stake. We will also concentrate on developing cogent explanations for underlying reasoning and assumptions; we will offer an interpretation of the dynamic of the conflict, propose a definition of any offered proofs, and finally present a hypothesis about its resolution. The discipline of examining scientific controversy in this manner corresponds more and more to the actual situations in which you will find yourself as professional. The capacity to efficiently analyze highly controversial situations, while assessing multiple scenarios and factoring in moral and technological risks, is a competency critical to success in the science and research fields of the 21st century.
How will the class be structured?
The first part of the class will introduce you to the existence of controversies in science and technology. Drawing on famous and well-detailed historical cases, we will highlight the complexity of scientific and technological innovations, as well as the multiplicity of demonstration cultures in the history of science and technology. The class continues on a more practical note: you team up with 4 to 7 classmates (a coordinator, a statistician, a webmaster and 2 to 3 reporters) and locate a specific ongoing controversy for which you will accumulate complete documentation, gathered from various media outlets (news papers, newsmagazines, web, scientific journals, expert reports) as well as interviews. The corpus of material must then be attentively analyzed. That is where the initial exposure to STS will support restraint from siding with any of the actors involved, and instead strive to account for the whole range of positions, the temporal dynamics of the debate, the engaged arguments, their dissemination and transformation through the various media, as well as for the reasons of these evolutions.
In this class you will learn how to choose a meaningful controversy (intense, accessible, manageable). The controversy can be a local (windmills in Cape Cod) or more global one (the risk of burying nuclear plant waste): the only requirement regards its descriptibility. The issue needs to be public and the data need to be retrievable. After three to five weeks of intensive research, the instructor begins meeting with the groups on a more frequent basis in order to discover which website structure best fits the chosen topic. This part entails both the structural elements of the site (which software to map collaboration between scientists, which database architecture to allow queries, which interactive timetable to draw) and the design of the web site. It is an essential element of the course to teach students to explore and articulate the relation between the representation (the website structure) and the content (the issue).
Inventing new ways of description of complex socio-scientific and socio-technical issues is challenging. The aim of the course is to lead you to a deeper understanding of the difficulties associated with accounting for disputes involving science and technology in the making, for which no agreement or settlement has yet been found.
Tutorial
Videos
The description of controversies (short in English)
The description of controversies - TBD (short in French)
The description of controversies - TBD (long in French)
The DEMOSCIENCE project (English Version)
An exemple of controversy mapping (English Version)
The MACOSPOL Project (in French)
The MACOSPOL project (English Version)