Progress in Human Geography

http://phg.sagepub.com Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise
Sarah J. Whatmore Prog Hum Geogr 2009; 33; 587 originally published online Jul 28, 2009; DOI: 10.1177/0309132509339841 The online version of this article can be found at: http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/5/587

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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: Reecting 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 rst 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 scientic knowledge claims. The second is also a cartographic exercise designed to teach students how to account for the political force of technoscientic controversies by mapping the intense entanglements of scientic 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: sarah.whatmore@ouce.ox.ac.uk 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 dened 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 scientic 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 ooding 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 scientic 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 scientic 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 rst is a reconguration of scientific divisions of labour to address more inter- or transdisciplinary objects of analysis. The second involves a rekindling of public condence in science-based policy through increased public engagement activities. The ethos of this shift is distilled nicely in the inuential 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 scientic 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 beneciaries. 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 scientic 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 afliations. II Mapping knowledge controversies 1: partisan science The Bush administrations imperviousness to the weight of scientic 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 scientic 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 gure as the White House situational science advisor Dr Nathan Null. Situational science, Null explains, is about respecting both sides of a scientic 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 rst 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 exemplied 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 afnities to the situational science of the Doonesbury White House. In the face of scientic 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 afliations 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 scientic 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 rst 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 rst 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 nd 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, technoscientic 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 nal 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 scientic 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 dened here not as the pitting of differently situated scientic 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 scientic 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 ooding moves those affected by it to interrogate and, sometimes, to contest the expert knowledge claims and practices associated with the science and management of ood 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 ood-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 eld 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, eld measurements and notes) and a group blog. At the heart of knowledge controversies associated with flooding is a dissonance between the rst-hand experience of ood 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 ooding in shared concerns about the inadequacy of ood-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. Scientic 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 ood event of a specied magnitude. Provisional because, as modellers would be the rst 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 ood-risk policy. This occurs through the standardization of model equations and data sets and the modelling software used by engineering consultants to inform the ood-warning systems and ood-defence investments made by the government agencies responsible for oodrisk 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, scientic 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 ood-risk knowledge that redistribute expertise across the scientic/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, ooding 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: rst, 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 ooding. 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 specicities 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 scientic 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 congurations 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 ood research groups in Yorkshire and Sussex for shared insights into the nature of environmental knowledge controversies and the analytical challenges they present. Notes
Rumsfelds remark, made at a US Defense Department Brieng 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 nanced 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 1.

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

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 rst 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 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 ofce 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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