In 2014, we started the FORCCAST summer school with a provocative question: “What is a good controversy?”. We began by lining up case studies selected by participants which were then discussed by  participants in small groups. We would like to continue this exercise by inviting scholars working on controversies to present their case study and situate the notion of “controversies” in relation to more established and used social sciences concepts. It is not unfair to detect a somewhat casual use of “controversies” as an analytical resource. Against this trend, we encourage scholars to present research that falls within this area, and also to refine the coarse nature of the very term “controversy”. Over the years, we will build a repository of case studies that should help all of us to analyze the diversity behind the use of the term “controversies”, to identify some patterns, and hopefully to build a common typology.

Presentation and argument

From August 26th to August 28th 2015, the FORCCAST consortium will host its second summer school on controversy studies in Paris (at ENSCI - les Ateliers). This series started in 2014 and will continue for the next 5 years. Tailored for early career university teachers and researchers, it is designed to qualify and promote the diffusion of methods and tools for controversy mapping.

Participants will take part in a collaborative effort to not only dig deeper into the question of what controversies are, why they are interesting, and how they might be mapped, but also produce a series of examples and conceptual illustrations to help us crystallize our thinking and teaching in this respect. As we are launching a journal on controversy studies, representing today’s state of the art both in the fields of research and pedagogic innovation, your contributions to the summer school will be peer-reviewed in order to be published in the first volume of this collection.

In 2015, the summer school will be organized around several activities: research, pedagogic innovation and tutorials, and a tool development sprint.

Research reports and collective conceptualization

In 2014, we started the FORCCAST summer school with a provocative question: “What is a good controversy?”. We began by lining up case studies selected by participants which were then discussed by  participants in small groups. We would like to continue this exercise by inviting scholars working on controversies to present their case study and situate the notion of “controversies” in relation to more established and used social sciences concepts. It is not unfair to detect a somewhat casual use of “controversies” as an analytical resource. Against this trend, we encourage scholars to present research that falls within this area, and also to refine the coarse nature of the very term “controversy”. Over the years, we will build a repository of case studies that should help all of us to analyze the diversity behind the use of the term “controversies”, to identify some patterns, and hopefully to build a common typology.

Pedagogic innovation reports and tutorial session

Using controversies in the classroom is both promising and challenging. The promise comes from the open-ended nature of ongoing controversies for which no easy solution comes to settle the conflicted positions. Controversies offer real opportunities for students to sharpen their skills as social scientists and practical diplomats; unlike business cases for which a unique solution is hinted at by the professor, teaching controversies rules out this substantive formula and replaces this solution by training students to invent procedures to tease out the possible common ground for parties initially unable to recognize each other.

The prospect of exposing students to real uncertainty comes with a price though: a teaching philosophy needs to be invented from scratch and despite more than a decade of teaching experiments in that area, we all feel that we are forced to invent without much accumulated insights from previous attempts. This section of the summer school remedies the scarcity of course blueprints by inviting scholars and professors to present and share their own teaching experiments and their experience of using controversies in the classroom.

A whole afternoon will be dedicated to a tutorial session on “how to teach a controversies mapping class”. It will provide you with the up-to-date techniques and tools from the FORCCAST team, for your new or ongoing mapping controversies courses.

The tools to study controversies

FORCCAST has started developing a battery of tools designed to equip our community of scholars and teachers working on controversies. The highly specific nature of each controversy case study creates a series of constraints for us as we collect fieldwork data. The attention on the temporal and spatial deployment of entities moving up and down scales can challenge the modes of data collection privileged by approaches focused more on entities treading only one sphere. Whether one wishes to track the circulation of claims from scientific circles to specialized industrial presses, or to track the series of affiliations and collaborations of experts straddling different fields, new tools are clearly needed as the existing battery of techniques to study the social are poorly equipped to deal with controversies.

The summer school will launch a competition to draft the specification of such a tool. The definition of a tool is by design left open (not necessarily yet another scientometrics tool!). It is indeed a choice that the summer school participants will make collectively: at the beginning of the school, participants, who will have sent a 1 to 2 page description of their dream tool, will have 5 minutes to pitch their idea to the audience. After discussion and questions, a vote will decide which project(s) will be developed during the summer school. A team of developers will help with the elaboration of a prototype. The format of collaboration will be that of a sprint/hackathon. FORCCAST will cover the travel and expenses of the developers involved.

Submission guidelines

You can find all the details in the attached programme.

Deadline: the 15th of June

Each applicant should provide the following information (through this form): http://goo.gl/r7VlAJ

1. Name, position, institution, area of active research, teaching experience on mapping controversies
2. One or two paragraphs describing your motivations for taking part in this summer school
3. If you want to present a research or a pedagogic report, or share the specifications of a tool: write (for each activity) a maximum 5.000 characters proposition describing your contribution

Scientific committee

• Pr. Andrew Barry, geography, University College London
• Dr. Peter Bearman, sociology, Columbia University
• Pr. Mario Biagioli, STS, University of California Davis
• Dr. Martin Giraudeau, accounting, London School of Economics
• Pr. David Kaiser, STS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Pr. Trevor Pinch, STS, Cornell University