Compare methods

	Sociotechnical Imaginaries Analysis	Controversy Mapping
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2009	2010
Originator	Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim	Bruno Latour (Sciences Po médialab); codified by Tommaso Venturini
Type	Qualitative interpretive and comparative method	Qualitative descriptive method and pedagogy
Seminal source	Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119-146.	Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258-273.
Aliases	Sociotechnical imaginary analysis, Imaginaries of science and technology, Visions of desirable futures analysis	Cartography of controversies, Mapping scientific controversies, Controversy analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Sociotechnical imaginaries analysis studies the collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures that societies attach to science and technology. Introduced by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim in their 2009 comparison of nuclear power in the United States and South Korea, the concept treats imaginaries as more than rhetoric: they are co-produced with the material and political order, shaping how technologies are designed, governed, and lived. The method reconstructs these visions from public discourse, traces how they become embedded in institutions and policy, and compares how the same technology animates different imaginaries across nations or eras.	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.