Progress in Human Geography 33(5) (2009) pp.

587598

Progress in Human Geography lecture

Mapping knowledge controversies:

science, democracy and the redistribution
of expertise
Sarah J. Whatmore*
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford,
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK
Abstract: 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 polities. 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 knowledge 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, economic 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.
Key words: competency groups, environmental knowledge controversies, expertise, knowledge
polities, mapping controversies, technoscience.

I Introduction
How can we present a proposal intended not
to say what is, or what ought to be, but to
provoke thought, a proposal that requires no
other verification than the way in which it
is able to slow down reasoning and create
an opportunity to arouse a slightly different
awareness of the problems and situations
mobilizing us? (Stengers, 2005a: 994)

Michel Callons hot situations (1998), Bruno

Latours matters of concern (2003) and
Isabelle Stengers experimental events
(2005a) all provide vocabularies for addressing those moments of ontological disturbance in which the things on which we rely
as unexamined parts of the material fabric
of our everyday lives become molten and

Given at the annual conference of RGS-IBG, London, in August 2008

*Email: [email protected]
The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0309132509339841

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588 Progress in Human Geography 33(5)

make their agential force felt. Such situations,
matters or events render what we think
we know or, more usually, what experts
claim to know about something the subject
of intense public interrogation. Expert
knowledge claims, and the technologies
through which these become hardwired
into the working practices of industry and
government, manifest themselves in the
products and policies we live with and the
sociomaterial environments we inhabit.
Controversies act as force fields in which
such expertise becomes enmeshed with,
and redistributed through, an ever-growing,
ever-more-varied cast of characters (Callon,
1998: 260) sufficiently affected by what is
at issue to want to participate in collectively
mapping it into knowledge and, thereby, into
its social ordering (see Whatmore, 2003).
In the disconcertingly memorable words of
the former US Secretary of Defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, such moments of ontological disturbance alert us to a world made up not
only of apparent familiars or what he called
known knowns (the things we know we
know) but also of known unknowns (the
things we know we dont know) and unknown unknowns (the things we dont know
we dont know).1 For this signal bureaucrat,
and key architect of a political regime defined
by its ideological certitudes, such moments
are inconvenient reminders of the limitations
on any ambition to right order that would
ally science to it. By contrast, Callon, Latour
and Stengers explicitly regard such knowledge
controversies as generative events in their
potential to foster the disordering conditions
in which reasoning is forced to slow down,
creating opportunities to arouse a different awareness of the problems and situations
that mobilize us.
In this spirit, the creative conversations
between geography, political theory, and
science and technology studies (STS) over
the last 15 years or so have been particularly
effective at interrogating the idea and practice of what Annemarie Mol (1999) has called
ontological politics.2 The controversies that

are my focus here refer to those events in

which the knowledge claims and technologies of environmental science, and the regulatory and policy practices of government
agencies that they inform, become subject
to public interrogation and dispute. Such
events take many forms but arise when
the rationales and reassurances of environmental science and policy fail to convince those
affected by what is at issue whose direct experience and/or knowledge of it contradicts
prevailing expertise or to allay their concerns. Among the most potent examples are
those events which in the late 1990s occurred
with such regularity in Europe that they took
hold in the public imagination in the guise of
food scares from GM to BSE (Stassart
and Whatmore, 2003).3
It is now widely acknowledged within
scientific and policy communities that one
of the most far-reaching legacies of such
events has been to unsettle public trust
in scientific expertise and its relationship
to public policy-making, and to furnish a
repertoire of resources that enable more
effective public interrogation. Where once
scientific knowledge claims were called upon
to settle disputes, their contestation has
become a matter of routine. In the event of
knowledge controversies public scrutiny of
environmental expertise intensifies, foregrounding the technologies that transact
between the knowledge production practices
of environmental science and the regulatory
protocols instituted by environmental policy
agencies. Such expert devices include the
predictive models, risk indicators, monitoring instrumentation, environmental services
calculi and cost-benefit analyses by which
environmental phenomena and processes
from flooding and pollution to climate change
and biohazards are mapped into knowledge
and incorporated into evidence-based management strategies.
The anticipation of knowledge controversies is one strand in now well-rehearsed
accounts of an ongoing shift in the relationship between scientific knowledge and social

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Sarah J. Whatmore: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise 589

democracy that slip smoothly between presenting a new way of thinking about science
and a description of some empirically evident attributes of scientific practice today.
At the heart of these accounts is a redistribution of expertise in the face of environmental (and other) uncertainties on two
related fronts. The first is a reconfiguration
of scientific divisions of labour to address
more inter- or transdisciplinary objects of
analysis. The second involves a rekindling
of public confidence in science-based policy
through increased public engagement activities. The ethos of this shift is distilled
nicely in the influential think-tank pamphlet
See-through science which asks how publically
funded science can be made to serve its
public more effectively (Wilsdon and Lewis,
2004: 2). While it is a shift that still excites
anxiety in some quarters, not least the science establishment, its grip is signalled by
the ready reference in academic and policy
circles to the shorthand tag mode 2 science.
A term first coined by Michael Gibbons
and others in The new production of knowledge (1994), a report commissioned by the
Swedish government,4 it has been elaborated
in more academic terms in Rethinking science
(Nowotny et al., 2001). On their account,
this mode 2 regime is characterized by the
replacement of disciplinary research agendas
with interdisciplinary knowledge production
in which expertise is distributed through a
wide diversity of institutional sites, driven
by a logic of instrumental service to public
policy and/or commercial innovation and
evaluated by a culture of societal accountability rather than scientific autonomy.
The redistribution of expertise envisaged/
achieved under this mode 2 regime has
been warmly embraced by many working at
the interface of environmental science and
public policy, not least those promoting the
policy-relevance of Geography as an exemplary interdiscipline, to the point that it is in
danger of settling into a new orthodoxy. Two
examples, with which many geographers
will be familiar, must suffice to illustrate.

The political charge of the mode 2 orthodoxy

is rarely more powerful than in the hands of
the UK Treasury. Its current Science and innovation investment framework (20042014)
makes interdisciplinarity a driving force in the
public funding parameters for UK science, in
recognition that:
Over the next decade many of the grand challenges in research will occupy the interfaces
between the separate research disciplines
developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. (HM
Treasury, 2004: 22)

One of the more notable Research Council initiatives taking up this agenda to institutionalize interdisciplinarity has been the
Rural Economy and Land Use programme
(www.relu.ac.uk). Described by its directors
as providing insights into the challenges that
interdisciplinarity and accountability present
to established science institutions (Lowe and
Phillipson, 2006: 165), the RELU programme
requires applications for project funding to
demonstrate a collaboration between natural and social scientists. It is a programme
in which geographers have been among the
most prominent beneficiaries.
A second example finds science being
harnessed to the knowledge economy, particularly the processes of innovation, through
the science policy remit of the Department
of Trade and Industry. Here, the public engagement agenda of mode 2 science comes
to the fore in recognition that:
consumers do not stand at the end of the scientific pipeline passively waiting to consume
new products. They are agents in the process of innovation. Innovations only succeed
when they are taken up by consumers, who
in the process of using a new product often
discover or even create uses for it that the
original inventors never deemed possible.
(DTI, 2000: 48)

This recognition builds directly on the wellestablished involvement of consumers in

industrial innovation, so-called collective
innovation, and the work of leading STS
scholars that has brought it to bear on the

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590 Progress in Human Geography 33(5)

science policy process. 5 Research Council
responses can be found in the entrenchment
of economic relevance as an assessment
criterion for all research funding applications
and the more recent incorporation of mandatory knowledge exchange statements
or impacts plans by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council,
respectively.
In their critical interrogation of this apparently hegemonic interdisciplinarity,
Andrew Barry et al. (2008) associate it
particularly with the twin logics of accountability, in which publically funded science
must service government policy priorities,
and of innovation which harnesses science
to commerce and national economic competitiveness. It is with this mode 2 regime
that we can associate the first of the mobilizations of environmental knowledge
controversies that I want to consider here.
Attentive to the normative redistribution
of expertise in which scientific knowledge
production is outed from the ivory towers
of the academy and positively allied to commercial and governmental agendas, it is a
mobilization that seeks to equip interested
citizens with the means with which to map
the partisanship of environmental science
in terms of its wider sociopolitical affiliations.
II Mapping knowledge controversies 1:
partisan science
The Bush administrations imperviousness
to the weight of scientific knowledge claims
about climate change inspired a famous
Doonesbury cartoon (Garry Trudeau, 5 March
2008) in which knowledge controversies
are mobilized as political obfuscation devices.
The cartoon depicts the story of Stewie,
a confused young researcher frustrated by
his inability to get his calculator to produce
the right answer or, as he mutters aloud,
to get the pesky scientific facts to line up
behind [his] beliefs. A white-haired, whitecoated figure enters the frame suggesting
that he should simply challenge them.

Stewie recognizes the figure as the White

House situational science advisor Dr Nathan
Null. Situational science, Null explains,
is about respecting both sides of a scientific
argument, not just the one supported by
the facts. He illustrates the purchase of this
approach with a series of controversies in
which the science is disputed the evolution
controversy, the global warming controversy, the tobacco controversy and so on.
Ill never trust science again its just too
controversial! Stewie concludes. Stewie gets
it now, folks!, says the advisor, addressing the
reader with a conspiratorial smile, Do you?
The first version of mapping controversies, to which a Google search drew
my attention, is a Wiki site on mapping
con-troversies which kicks off with this
cartoon (http://wiki.issuecrawler.net/twiki/
bin/view/Dmi/MappingControversies;
last accessed July 2008). 6 The somewhat
sketchy and disjointed nature of the material
to be found here reflects the Wiki modus
operandi of open access, such that anyone
can edit the material on the site. The site
is subtitled citizen equipment for seconddegree objectivity, described as an objectivity
that does not seek to settle a controversy by
reference to the cold facts but rather to
locate the sources of the controversy and,
thereby, to expose the partisanship of
the knowledge claims articulated in it. This
exercise in controversy mapping begins,
we are told, with controversy selection
based on a series of indicators of a subject
matters controversiality [sic]. This is
made through entering the subject matter
in a query machine. The machine provides
a series of outputs whereby the user has a
sense of the subject matters composition,
in terms of coverage. These include listings
of actor types (eg, the quantity and freshness of NGO, governmental, corporate and
scientific contributions) and of significant
key terms around which the controversy
may revolve.
From this, an actors contributions can
be positioned in relation to those of others in

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Sarah J. Whatmore: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise 591

terms of similarities and differences in their
language commitments. This positioning can
be variously mapped to depict patterns of
association between contributors and their
stance on an issue exemplified here by the
climate change controversy. It is this map,
the Wiki goes on, which becomes the equipment (organized information) that enables
citizens to form a strong view, one that is
sociological, as opposed to epistemological,
in the sense that it is based on relations
between actors and issues organized cartographically. Such controversy maps are
described as Lippmannian devices in the
sense that they translate Lippmanns (1922)
influential doubts about the possibility of a
genuinely democratic public realm in a media
age into the design of web-based tools, such
as Issue Crawler (indicated by the locator for
this Wiki). These tools are smart enough to
interrogate the partisanship of the media
coverage of controversies including, for
example, that of search engines with respect
to the links included and/or prioritized in their
coverage of climate change.
This is controversy mapping with some
unhappy affinities to the situational science
of the Doonesbury White House. In the
face of scientific uncertainty or dispute, both
turn their attention away from a closer interrogation of the substantive differences
between knowledge claims in terms of the
knowledge practices, and the demands of the
phenomena and processes enmeshed with
them, on which these claims rely. They focus
attention instead on tracing the organizational affiliations and language commitments
of competing contributions/contributors to
ground an evaluation of different positions
on the issue. In this, as the Wiki states, 2nd
degree objectivity equips citizens to form
a strong view that is sociological not epistemological. But the strength of view it
equips is based on a sociology of networking
rather than of knowledge-making that invites
a descent into mapping conspiracies instead
of controversies. As Noortje Marres and
Richard Rogers note (2005), such exercises

bear more than a passing resemblance to the

monitoring of issue-networks first identified by the American political scientist
Hugh Heclo in 1978 as part of a conservative
critique of the rising influence of pressure
groups in public affairs which was seen to
threaten to undermine the representative
system of democratic government.7
Despite its consonance with the normative redistribution of expertise of the mode 2
imaginary, in which scientific knowledge
production is positively allied to commercial
and governmental agendas, this version of
controversy mapping does not equip mode 2
citizens very well. More importantly, perhaps, it raises questions about the adequacy
of the redistribution of expertise imagined
in the mode 2 regime itself in terms of the
extent to which its normative leanings
divest knowledge controversies of the very
potentiality for disordering that makes them
generative political and scientific events for
Callon, Latour and Stengers. As Barry et al.
(2008) go on to argue in their critique of this
mode 2 analysis, interdisciplinarity is neither
historically novel nor just an orchestrated
response to the demands of science policy
(and funding). Rather than a hegemonic
regime or historic modality, they argue
that interdisciplinarity is better understood
as a field of multiplicity characterized by
diverse experimentation and inventiveness. Moreover, through their case studies
of interdisciplinary working in practice, they
go on to identify a third and less familiar
logic of interdisciplinarity to those of
accountability and innovation. This is the
logic of ontology, which they attribute to the
hybrid nature of sociotechnical and socioenvironmental phenomena and problems
that demands close and multidimensional
framing of what is at issue. Environmental
sciences, including geography, are closely
bound up on Barrys account with the logic
of accountability (Barry et al., 2008: 32) and,
curiously, less attuned to the ontological
demands of the complex phenomena they
study. It is to these ontological demands

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592 Progress in Human Geography 33(5)

that I now turn, by looking at two other attempts to map environmental knowledge
controversies which take these demands
more seriously and with greater attention
to the knowledge practices of social scientists
in the redistributions of expertise such events
can generate.
III From knowledge economy to
knowledge polity
The logic of ontology involves a shift in
register from that of the knowledge economy, with which both the logics of accountability and innovation are caught up, to
that of a knowledge polity if the potential
of environmental knowledge controversies
as generative events is to be mobilized effectively. Such a shift requires a different
treatment of the political to that at work in the
mode 2 analysis and partisanship mapping
examined above, on at least two counts. The
first of these is to avoid equating democratic
politics with the institutions of representative government and the machinery of policymaking, and to be more attentive to the
multiple and emergent constitution of publics
and their political capabilities. Here, one
can point to a variety of efforts to articulate
an associative politics concerned with the
capacity of citizens to band together and act
in concert but in the manner of a swarm,
rather than in consequence of some prefigured category of political interest (eg,
stakeholders) or class (see Hinchliffe and
Whatmore, 2005). For Stengers, these new
kinds of publics are allied to Deleuze and
Guattaris notion of minoritarian politics in
which they can produce not as their aim but
in the very process of their emergence, the
power to object and to intervene in matters which they discover concern them
(Stengers, 2005b: 161).
The second count is to recognize that,
by redressing the endemic humanism of
political theory (see Whatmore, 2006), such
emergent publics are not exclusively human
achievements. Jane Bennett is the political
theorist who has done more than most to

interrogate and recast political theory in this

vein, through her extensive body of work
on the political force of things.8 Drawing
an instructive contrast between the demos
(polity) of contemporary political theorists
like Ranciere and that of Latour (Bennett,
2005), she argues that democratic political
theory has to grasp that politics are about
more than the disruptive power of people
to disagree, indifferent to what is at stake
in the disagreement. As Stengers would
be the first to insist, emergent publics are
induced by generative events, like knowledge
controversies, in which the phenomena or
problems that slow down reasoning make
a difference or, as Latour (2003) might put
it, matter to the assemblage of political attachments and capabilities. In combination,
these two theoretical moves are best allied
in the political vocabularies of Callons hot
situations, Latours matters of concern and
Stengers experimental events signalled at
the outset. I want now to examine a couple
of attempts to put these vocabularies to work
in political devices for mapping environmental
knowledge controversies in ways which more
effectively redistribute expertise between
scientists (natural and social) and affected
publics. The first of these shares several
technical attributes with the exercise in controversy mapping outlined earlier, but works
with them in very different ways and achieves
very different effects.
IV Mapping controversies 2:
Demoscience
The second version of mapping controversies I want to explore is a pedagogic initiative
called Demoscience designed to prepare scientists and engineers for a complex world
in which a deep understanding of the political and social dimensions underlying science
and technology is a prerequisite skill for
professional practice in the twenty-first
century. It was first drawn to my attention by
a Swiss colleague9 as an experimental mapping exercise being trialled and developed
through student projects associated with

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Sarah J. Whatmore: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise 593

an institutional collaboration between engineering and STS programmes at MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Science Po
in Paris.10 Here the understanding of knowledge at the heart of knowledge controversies, and of the complicity of web-based
mapping technologies in their generative
political potential, is more effective than
those outlined in the earlier version. In this,
the initiative owes much to the work of
Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers (2005) in
their recipe for tracing the fate of issues and
their publics on the web.11 If a Lippmannian
device was employed in the practice of
mapping partisan science, this version might
be thought of as employing a Deweyian
device in the practice of mapping knowledge polities.12 It seeks to put to work Deweys
(1927) definition of the public as a set of
actors jointly affected by a problem who, in
the absence of an institution or community
providing a settlement, organize into a public
to ensure that the problem is addressed
(Marres and Rogers, 2005: 929). On this
approach, the question of what is at issue is
more effectively mobilized in the exercise of
tracing issue-networks. Devices for mapping
them, web-based tools like Issue Crawler,
are ways of disclosing an assemblage
of actors jointly implicated in an issue (p.
929). The point of the exercise here is to find
out whether and how issue-networks may
organize publics (p. 929).
The primary goal of Demoscience, according to the website, is to account for, and
map, technoscientific controversies in which
uncertainties are rife and technoscientific
knowledge practices are intensely entangled
with legal, moral, social and economic questions. The exemplary case here is that of
genetically modified foods. Uncertainty in
the event of knowledge controversies is
understood in Demoscience as deriving both
from the normal practice of science and
from the social and political circumstances
in which its knowledge claims circulate.
Thus, rather than dealing with scientific
and technical knowledge presented in its

final form in which its certitude has been

achieved, students are invited to focus on
those intermediate stages, corresponding
to the actual research process, [which] best
highlight the connections between scientific
work and other types of activities. It is this
type of double uncertainty that the site
suggests corresponds more and more to
the actual situation in which you will work
as professionals and that requires students
to develop an essential form of objectivity:
a second degree of objectivity, but invested
here with very different epistemological and
sociological purchase than that achieved
in the partisanship of science.
The Demoscience approach to mapping
controversies sets out to equip students
with just such an ability to navigate the uncertainties and entanglements of technoscience. It involves the creation of websites
constructed from a set of standard analytical
components. These include: a homepage; a
preliminary analysis of the extent of dissent
and contextualizing elements; a chronology,
multiform documentation and outline of key
scientific knowledge claims and evidence
base; a bibliography; and a glossary. The
point of the exercise is not only to produce
a mapping that helps those producing it
to inform their own understanding of the
controversy at issue but one that travels, so
enabling others for whom the issue is a matter
of concern to learn from, and build on, their
efforts. Controversies are defined here not
as the pitting of differently situated scientific actors, facts or language commitments
against each other, but rather as the upshot
of the uncertain and provisional nature of the
production of scientific knowledge claims.
Close attention to the process of knowledge
production contextualizes this scientific
work in terms of its social, legal, political and
media networks. Equally close attention is
paid to the knowledge production process
involved in mapping controversies and to
the difficulties associated with inventing
new tools to represent an increasingly complex environment that combine multiple

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594 Progress in Human Geography 33(5)

ways of knowing: textual interpretation,
media analysis, virtual ethnography, intensive searching of heterogeneous data-bases
and web-design.
For all their differences, the two examples
of mapping controversies that I have considered so far nonetheless share the common
feature of being third-party cartographies
of environmental knowledge controversies
in which those doing the mapping are at one
remove from the controversy being mapped.
In other words, their own knowledge practices and claims are not at risk in the controversy they are mapping, nor do those for
whom the controversy does matter and
whose knowledge claims are at stake have
any means to call them to account or modify
the map. The third and final version of
controversy mapping that I want to outline
here is an attempt to take the redistribution
of expertise made possible in the event of
environmental knowledge controversies in
this direction, in response to Stengers call
for researchers to invent more apparatuses
such that the citizens of whom scientific
experts speak can be effectively present
[and] participate in the invention (Stengers,
2005b: 160).
V Mapping controversies 3:
competency groups
Notwithstanding the diversity of exciting
experiments in making things public exhibited and subsequently published under
that title by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
(2005), geographers have a stronger track
record of inventiveness when it comes to
methodological apparatuses designed to
redistribute environmental expertise by engaging concerned publics more effectively.13
The apparatus I want to outline here sets out
to equip a mapping of scientific uncertainty
into public knowledge, and is currently being
trialled as part of a RELU funded research
project interrogating the knowledge controversies associated with flood risk in the
UK. 14 This experimental methodological
apparatus is the competency group a

conscious exercise in translating Stengers

understanding of knowledge controversies as
generative events into research practice.15
The event of flooding moves those affected
by it to interrogate and, sometimes, to contest
the expert knowledge claims and practices
associated with the science and management of flood risk. Through the Competency
Group work, the natural and social scientists
in the project team collaborate with residents
affected by flooding in localities in which
flood-risk management is already a matter of
concern and public contestation. The project
involves two such collaborations, each of
some 12 months duration, one in Yorkshire
and one in Sussex. In each case, Group membership has comprised some 56 project
team members and 58 local members, plus
a dedicated camcorder operator. Group
activities centre on bi-monthly meetings,
supplemented by a variety of other activities
that emerge in the course of the Groups
work, such as field visits, data collection and
video recording. Each Group is supported
by a password-restricted website hosting a
resource depository for materials collected
by group members (eg, maps, transcripts,
photos/videos, newspaper cuttings, policy
documents, field measurements and notes)
and a group blog.
At the heart of knowledge controversies
associated with flooding is a dissonance
between the first-hand experience of flood
events and the vernacular knowledge accumulated in affected localities, and the
hydrological and hydraulic science that
underpins flood-risk estimation and management. This finds popular expression
among those publics sparked into life in the
event of flooding in shared concerns about
the inadequacy of flood-management policies
and the knowledge claims on which they rely,
not least because of their perceived failure
to learn from the locality or consult those
who live there. Scientific knowledge claims
about flooding are the product primarily
of mathematical modelling and, as such,
are necessarily uncertain and provisional.

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Sarah J. Whatmore: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise 595

Uncertain in that modelling is an exercise
in predicting future (unknown) events from
projections of observed (known) events and,
in the case of flooding, in estimating the
return period of a flood event of a specified
magnitude. Provisional because, as modellers
would be the first to acknowledge, models
are only as good as the data available to make
them run, which are always imperfect but
improvable as new data generation instruments provide better and/or cheaper data
sets. These modelling practices and the
claims to which they give rise become hardwired into the technical arrangements and
institutional procedures of flood-risk policy.
This occurs through the standardization
of model equations and data sets and the
modelling software used by engineering consultants to inform the flood-warning systems
and flood-defence investments made by the
government agencies responsible for floodrisk management.
In the event of flooding, the public face
of this complex network of knowledge
claims-making to those affected by it on the
ground is the Environment Agency (EA). It
is in the EAs policy documents, consultancy
protocols and investment decisions that
all the uncertainties and provisos properly
attached in the process of scientific knowledge production become erased and, in
the terminology of Demoscience, scientific
and technical knowledge is presented in its
final form in which its certitude has been
achieved. In this context, our Competency
Groups represent a civic apparatus for (1)
mapping into knowledge the intermediate
stages [which] best highlight the connections between scientific work and other
types of activities, and (2) developing new
collective competences in handling the
double uncertainty of flood-risk knowledge
that redistribute expertise across the scientific/vernacular divide.
The working practice of Competency
Groups centres on slowing down reasoning,
each others as well as that of the local EA, in
order to collectively interrogate explanations

for, and solutions to, flooding in the locality

that members (university and local) bring to
the table. One of the primary means by which
this slowing down is achieved is by working
with various things that serve to objectify
the knowledge claims and practices of different members of the group from photos
and video footage brought and/or produced
by local members to computer models and
policy documents brought and/or produced
by university members. This objectification of knowledge claims and practices also
serves two other purposes: first, as a means
of putting at risk, in Stengers terms (see
Whatmore, 2003), the knowledge practices
of university as well as local members of the
Competency Groups, perhaps most notably
those of the hydrological modellers in the
project team/Groups; second, as a means
of making the collective knowledge claims
and practices of the Groups travel effectively
beyond the time and place of group activity,
particularly in visualization devices such as
maps and computer models of local flooding.
In the case of the Yorkshire experiment, for
example, the Group determined early on to
make an intervention in the very heated local
knowledge controversy by means of a public
event.16
VI Conclusions
Much of the emphasis in the rich body of work
between geography and STS that focuses attention on the specificities of environmental
knowledge controversies has been on the
uncertainties associated with scientific
knowledge claims that become hardwired
into regulatory protocols, uncertainties that
are a necessary part and desirable indicator
of robust scientific practice. The entry of these
same uncertainties into the public arena
finds politicians and media commentators
(and sometimes scientists) handling them
like hot coals. In this climate, social scientists (as many human geographers will be
all too aware) have found their expertise
subordinated either to the service of science
(eg, mapping socio-economic data into

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596 Progress in Human Geography 33(5)

comprehensive environmental models) and/
or representing what the public thinks (eg,
through conducting surveys or focus groups)
or in the service of science-based policymaking by acting as multilingual interpreters
or facilitators and holding the ring between
scientists, publics and policy-makers. However, as I have sought to argue here, publics
quite as much as knowledges are produced
in the event of environmental knowledge
controversies. In this, the well-established
intercourse between geography and STS
would benefit from a closer engagement
with political theory in ways that are consequential for the role of social scientists.
In this context, the answer to the question
of what makes public science a more effective
public good resides not in its subservience to
governmental or commercial agendas but
rather, as Callon has suggested, in recognizing
its extraordinary capacity for invention as a
source of variety, according to the strategic
configurations into which it enters (Callon,
1994). This places the onus on diversifying
the publics with whom scientists collaborate
on matters that concern them, and on the
terms on which they do so. It should also,
I have suggested here, involve redistributions
of environmental expertise in which the inventiveness of social scientists comes to the
fore in the design and conduct of research practices that stage more and different opportunities for new knowledge polities to emerge.
The overlapping interests in geography
and STS in environmental knowledge controversies share at least three features in
common: (1) a commitment to an ontological
or more-than-human conception of knowledge practices and knowledge polities;
(2) an interest in knowledge controversies as
generative events in the socialization of scientific knowledge claims and technologies;
and (3) a demonstrable investment in research
practices that redistribute expertise, including
that of social scientists. The Geography,
Science, Politics Research Network initiative (http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/
projects/gsprn/Home/tabid/3033/Default.

aspx, last accessed 15 June 2009)17 will make

a significant contribution if it succeeds in
providing an effective forum for mobilizing
these commitments and resources. However, if that initiative, or any other, is to make
geography matter more it cannot be by addressing our efforts exclusively to institutionalized power states, corporations, interest
groups and stakeholders but only by
addressing them also to those whose power
comes from being moved to challenge expert
knowledge claims on matters that concern
them. Among other things, this means using
research funds, skills and energies to generate
opportunities and invent apparatuses in
which those whose experience makes them
sensible and knowledgeable collaborate
in interrogating environmental expertise,
slowing down reasoning and making a
difference to the framing of environmental
problems.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank staff and students at
Oxford participating in the Demoscience
experiment, my collaborators on the RELU
knowledge controversies project and members of the projects two local flood research
groups in Yorkshire and Sussex for shared
insights into the nature of environmental
knowledge controversies and the analytical
challenges they present.
Notes
1.

Rumsfelds remark, made at a US Defense Department Briefing on 12 February 2002, won the Plain
English Campaigns foot in mouth trophy for 2003.
A video link can be found at http://www.dailymotion.
com/video/x2xipi_2002-donald-rumsfeld-unknownunknow_politics (last accessed 15 June 2009).
2. For a wide-ranging exploration of these conversations, see the collection of essays edited by Braun
and Whatmore (2010).
3. It is notable, for example, that GM foods have
been a common reference point for Latour, Callon
and Stengers in developing their approaches to
knowledge controversies.
4. The work was financed for more than three years
by the Swedish Council for Research and Planning
and was initially led by Roger Svensson (Gibbons
et al., 1994: preface). I am grateful to Catharina

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Sarah J. Whatmore: Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise 597

5.

6.
7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Landstrm for bringing the provenance of mode 2

science to my attention.
A leading example of the translation of STS work
on this topic into policy practice can be found in the
Report of the expert group on science and governance
(Wynne et al., 2006) to the Science, Economy and
Society Directorate of the European Commission.
I am grateful to my nephew Tom Whatmore for
explaining these various terms to me.
Heclos critique was published under the imprint
of a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which seems oddly exempt from his
concerns about the broadening of organizational
participation in US policy-making.
This work will shortly be brought together in a new
book entitled Vibrant materialism to be published by
Duke University Press in 2010.
The initiative and website (www.demoscience.
org/mappingControversies2008.pdf, now replaced
by www.demoscience.org) were first drawn to my
attention by Valerie November, who works at the
Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL)
and is a member of the advisory panel for the RELU
project on knowledge controversies discussed
later in the paper.
Vincent Lepinay at the MIT, Bruno Latour at
Science Po and Dominque Linhardt at the Ecole des
Mines in Paris. Students taking the Masters degree
in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy
in the School of Geography and Environment at
the University of Oxford joined this pedagogic
network/exercise for the first time in 2009. This
brief outline draws only on web-based material
(accessed July 2008) as Oxfords involvement in the
exercise had not commenced at the time of writing.
The work of Marres and of Rogers is implicated in
that of Latour through various forms of intellectual
collaboration and influence. These include: his
acknowledgement of Marres in the introduction of
the exhibition/book Making things public (Latour
and Weibel, 2005: 14); their roles in the Govcom.
org Foundation responsible for the design of Issue
Crawler (Rogers is Director and Marres is listed
as principal affiliate see http://www.govcom.
org/about_us.html); and its uptake as a key device
in Demoscience and other controversy mapping
collaborations instigated by Latour.
The effectiveness of these different mobilizations
of controversy mapping arises from their practitioners, rather than from analytical differences
between Lippmann and Dewey whose sustained
intercourse in the early twentieth century is instructively examined in Marres (2005).
I am thinking, for example, of Jacquie Burgesss
pioneering work on the research applications of
group-analytic psychotherapeutic focus groups in
the late 1980s (Burgess et al., 1988) and that of Gail

14.

15.

16.

17.

Davies and colleagues on deliberative mapping

(Davies, 2006). See Hayden (2007) for a critique
of such public engagement methodologies.
The Understanding knowledge controversies
project is funded under the RELU Programme by
the Economic and Social Research Council, the
Natural Environment Research Council and the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (details available at http://knowledgecontroversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk, last accessed 15 June
2009). Other members of the project team include
Catharina Landstrm, Anders Munk and Gillian
Willis at the University of Oxford, Stuart Lane,
Nick Odoni and Geoff Whitman at Durham
University, Neil Ward at the University of East
Anglia, and Sue Bradley and Andrew Donaldson at
Newcastle University.
To our knowledge, the methodological term
competency group was coined in a small office in
the centre of Brussels in 2001 by Pierre Stassart and
Sarah Whatmore in the process of trying to derive
a research practice for a collaborative project
on novel foods from the notion of competent
publics in a web-essay by Stengers on sustainable
development.
Several papers are being written about more
detailed aspects of the competency group methodology in theory and practice. Updates can be
found on the project website.
This network was officially launched in January
2009 and is coordinated by Rob Doubleday
(Cambridge) and Matt Kearnes (Durham). It
has already consulted on a submission to the
current review of sciencesociety relations being
undertaken by Government.

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