The Shape of Public Engagement - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 128

Issues involve the public when institutions fail to
appropriate them. Dewey goes further with this idea by
claiming that the particularity of public engagement is that
it is involved in the topic of the debate without being
completely part of it. So controversies arise when people are
affected by a given situation they have not created
themselves; they must then gather into an audience and
examine the problem. It is therefore the distance from the
causes of the problem that characterizes the public and
enables it to form [MAR 05b, p.213].
The mobilization of individuals to find data sources on
radiation levels follows the same pattern of public emergence
from a controversy. The post-March 11, 2011 situation has
indeed previously been described as shared uncertainty,
where official and civil society members failed to find
information on the status of radioactivity. It was indeed a
result of the failure of experts and leaders to provide
information on the situation that the public gathered, using
its distance from the problem in question to obtain
alternative data sources. This involvement is also related to
the more important role citizens play in debates on nuclear
energy in society.
8.1.2. Public engagement on nuclear issues
The engagement to produce radiation maps after
Fukushima follows a participatory logic seen on nuclear
issues involving amateur members of the public alongside
experts. Radiation-mapping practices are part of the
opposition drawn by Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe between
“secluded science” [CAL 01, p.61] and “open science”
[CAL 01, p.105] in socio-technical controversies. In the first
instance, scientific practices are carried out in the laboratory
where elements extracted from the field are analyzed, and
then “brought back out to the world” to present and
potentially apply the scientific results. In “open science”, on