About This Website - The project: "Hydraulic Fracturing- A Controversy in the Making"
Ok, so this webpage is part of an academic desire to investigate and explain the controversial field of hydraulic fracturing, both as a contested drilling practice involving the public, activists, drilling companies and scientists, but also as an emerging conflict in which actors position themselves, make alliances, evolve special language to back up their claims, and as a conflict that reaches beyond a simple dualistic divide between humans and objects, since what is “controversial” is tied up in things, practices, equipment and semiotic structures.
As such, it invites to an investigation, a mapping if one whish, whose research agenda and questions we will present underneath, but before discussing hydraulic fracturing in terms of theoretical models within the social sciences, we would like to reassure the already confused cyberspace surfer that this page is intended before everything to be user friendly!!
In practice that means that you can navigate the page without being familiar with social science research and the corpus of concepts used within this rather specific type of epistemic culture. We hope that you will take the time to just dive into the mess, just as we have done, getting frustrated, getting curious. And to ease your enterprise, whatever it may be, we have connected all sites within this page in a way that allows you to start wherever and to end where you whish. That means that every site within this page has links to other parts of the page, aspects of the controversy if you like, and that, when reaching the information on the sites, some of it is made interactive, so you can yourself investigate it.
If you are reading this, you didn’t “Frack it!”, for instance. We believe this is the best way for anyone to navigate the particulars of a controversy, since, if you are here we believe you are an actor or a becoming actor in this controversy, or at least something about hydraulic fracturing has caught your interest.
We might not be able to provide you with all relevant information about technicalities and actors, but we hope to at least aid you in your own investigation, spurring your curiosity, and in a very much down to earth language introduce you to what social science in the twenty first century might look like and be relevant for.
It should be noted that we’ve focused on this controversy in a Danish context, so some information is mostly relevant to Danish speakers, but in such cases we will offer translations and explanations of words.
BELOW WE PRESENT THE RESEARCH STRATEGY, CATEGORIZATIONS, QUESTIONS AND SOME THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS USED IN THIS PROJECT, BUT FEEL FREE TO “FRACK IT” AND MOVE TO “CONTROVERSY”
As such, it invites to an investigation, a mapping if one whish, whose research agenda and questions we will present underneath, but before discussing hydraulic fracturing in terms of theoretical models within the social sciences, we would like to reassure the already confused cyberspace surfer that this page is intended before everything to be user friendly!!
In practice that means that you can navigate the page without being familiar with social science research and the corpus of concepts used within this rather specific type of epistemic culture. We hope that you will take the time to just dive into the mess, just as we have done, getting frustrated, getting curious. And to ease your enterprise, whatever it may be, we have connected all sites within this page in a way that allows you to start wherever and to end where you whish. That means that every site within this page has links to other parts of the page, aspects of the controversy if you like, and that, when reaching the information on the sites, some of it is made interactive, so you can yourself investigate it.
If you are reading this, you didn’t “Frack it!”, for instance. We believe this is the best way for anyone to navigate the particulars of a controversy, since, if you are here we believe you are an actor or a becoming actor in this controversy, or at least something about hydraulic fracturing has caught your interest.
We might not be able to provide you with all relevant information about technicalities and actors, but we hope to at least aid you in your own investigation, spurring your curiosity, and in a very much down to earth language introduce you to what social science in the twenty first century might look like and be relevant for.
It should be noted that we’ve focused on this controversy in a Danish context, so some information is mostly relevant to Danish speakers, but in such cases we will offer translations and explanations of words.
BELOW WE PRESENT THE RESEARCH STRATEGY, CATEGORIZATIONS, QUESTIONS AND SOME THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS USED IN THIS PROJECT, BUT FEEL FREE TO “FRACK IT” AND MOVE TO “CONTROVERSY”
Below we present our initial research project as it looked like before we started to map the controversy. Here you will be able to learn how we have thought the project, but, that is important!, not how we ended up doing it.
We have worked with digital methods to explore different aspects of the controversy, but we have ourselves created categories and groups whom we wished to investigate. We publish the research strategy here so that you might learn how the controversy have been shaped in our heads and also, maybe, to identify our preliminary position before typing our way into the field.
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Hydraulic Fracturing in Denmark - A Controversy in the Making (The project)
Preliminary Categorizations: We have distinguished between three categories of Public Actors, as opposed to scientific, namely: 1) Private Drilling Companies, 2) Government Institutions and 3) private Activists and NGO´s (who are either for or against HF), who all partake in an ongoing public debate about the pros and cons of hydraulic fracturing of natural gas in the Danish soil layers in Northern Jutland and Sealand. The scientific actors are kept apart as a special category from these actors, so as to identify the interlinking of the public actors to scientific persons, positions and communities. We acknowledge that scientific persons and positions might overlap with those of public actors so that these first visualize within the before mentioned group of public actors, but we keep them conceptually apart so as to identify how public actors validate their positions with reference to “science”.
To identify the controversy of HF within a Danish context we distinguish between to domains that are co-constitutive of the controversy but separate with regard to the activities of the public actors: 1) Public debate within the massmedia, and 2) the scientific debate within scientific communities. These domains are kept separate only to establish two conflictive spaces for the controversy to unfold, and to identify how the actors might navigate between them.
We hope that the reason for these categorizations will stand out more clearly from our research questions, strategy and method as outlined below.
Main Research Question: How does the Hydraulic Fracturing Controversy interrelate both public and scientific actors, and how do their interrelatedness manifest a conflictive techno-scientific network space on the Internet? How does it manifest in a Danish context?
Research Questions:
Who are the main Public Actors in the HF debate and what are their positions on the specific issue?
How do they back up, validate and compare their positions with reference to scientific communities, persons and positions? Can a community of scientist interested as well in the HF controversy be derived from the linkups made by Public Actors?
If so, can we distinguish between groups and positions within such a community, thereby mapping what we have called the scientific domain around this controversy?
What discursive formations are used to force through the positions of Public Actors within a public debate (i.e. the mass media)?
Within the domain of the public debate, are the claims made by Public Actors when referred to in the mass media validated with reference to “scientific facts” or with reference to other discursive formations (good/right, bad/wrong environment, economy, future, water, pollution)?
Is it possible to show specific intermingling of the Scientific Domain and the Public Domain overlapping (blogs, persons, groups)?
Whereas it is clear that a controversy is in the making in the Public Domain, is it also the case in the Scientific Domain?
The Public Actors group 2 is in part defined by having its own scientific institutions (which of course show how our categorizations are not stable, since this Public Actor is part of both Domains) and also being a regulative force, but to what degree do the other two group of Actors (1 & 3) legitimize their claims with reference to group 2 scientific institutions?
If the HF controversy is situated in geographical terms as Danish, is it possible to identify an American or European public debate influencing itself on a Danish context?