Methoden vergleichen

	Laboratory Ethnography	Controversy Mapping
Fachgebiet	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Entstehungsjahr	1979	2010
Urheber	Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar; Karin Knorr-Cetina	Bruno Latour (Sciences Po médialab); codified by Tommaso Venturini
Typ	Ethnographic field method	Qualitative descriptive method and pedagogy
Wegweisende Quelle	Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691028323	Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258-273.
Aliasnamen	Laboratory studies, Ethnography of the laboratory, Anthropology of science	Cartography of controversies, Mapping scientific controversies, Controversy analysis
Verwandt	4	4
Zusammenfassung	Laboratory ethnography is the anthropological study of scientists at work, observing how scientific facts are constructed through the mundane practices of the laboratory rather than discovered ready-made in nature. Pioneered by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life and Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it brought the gaze of the field anthropologist into the lab as if studying an exotic tribe. The method follows benchwork, inscription devices, and the conversational and material labour through which claims are stripped of their qualifications until they harden into facts. It treats knowledge as manufactured, local, and contingent, and renders that manufacture visible through immersive observation and thick description.	Controversy mapping is a descriptive method for exploring and representing socio-technical disputes while they are still open and unsettled, before they harden into accepted facts or stable technologies. Developed as a teaching practice by Bruno Latour and codified by Tommaso Venturini at the Sciences Po médialab, it asks the analyst to dive into the heat of a debate, follow the actors and their arguments without prematurely taking sides, and render the resulting complexity legible through maps and visualisations. It treats controversy not as a pathology to be resolved but as the privileged moment in which the social and the technical are visibly being assembled.