Cartografia de controvérsias

Abstract

Aiming to contribute to the debate on education for citizenship in Science Education, we investigated the connections between citizen participation and scientific knowledge in the dispute about the installation of the Apolo Project in Sierra Gandarela. In recent years, researchs in Science Education and official documents governing the teaching of science in Brazil strongly related acquiring scientific knowledge as a prerequisite for technical-scientific citizenship and for making informed decisions in this field. Despite the recurrence of the view that the acquisition of scientific knowledge is essential for democratic participation, and of the many studies that use science education for citizenship to measure the importance of teaching and learning science, there is no empirical evidence that "scientific literacy" effectively enable students to act in technical-scientific controversies of public interest. In order to produce an empirical work that, in fact, investigates the connections between scientific knowledge and democratic participation, we mapped the Apolo Project. This controversial technical-scientific enterprise would be set in Sierra Gandarela, a place that is rich in natural, paleontological, physiographic, cultural and historic attributes in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte. Such controversy mobilized various actors, such as lay citizens, researchers, politicians, businessmen, animals endangered, endemic plants, natural resources, popular groups, NGO's, businesses, public institutions etc. Due to the heterogeneity of the participants in the dispute, it was necessary to bring together theoretical and analytical tools that share the perspective of political ecology, as presented by Latour. The toolkit designed for this research was therefore strongly substantiated by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), whose author with more expressive work is Latour, and has as one of its fundamental principles a generalized symmetry, which includes human, things etc. in sociological analysis. The ANT was combined with the notion of ontological politics (LAW, MOL), with great assistance from the set of tools provided by the Controversy Mapping (LATOUR, VENTURINI), and contributions of the concepts of cosmos and of cosmopolitics proposed by Stengers. An application of data mining on the Web 2.0 (Netwizz) and a software to visualize and analyse networks (Gephi) was also used. With this group of tools we expected to politicize issues related to scientific knowledge and design the investigated practices to include the performance of various types of participants. The results enable us to propose a participatory democracy where lay citizens have increasing power to question the technical reasoning governments whenever they have devices and procedures to get informed, deconstruct the idea that behind all controversies lies an objective reality, independent of what actors think, say or do, and that everyone whose practices might be, in many ways, involved with technical-scientific controversies, must actively participate. We also intend to suggest that there is no universal logic nor entirely comprehensive institutions that can encompass all the different worlds, and that if the realities are made locally, contingently and with hesitation, then the common world should be built through a local, hesitant and very slow manner.