Socioscientific Controversies: A Theoretical and Methodological Framework

This paper describes a theoretical and methodological framework from critical discourse analysis for the study of the rhetoric of socioscientific controversies. The approach, based on the work of Norman Fairclough (1992), describes the construction of such controversies in terms of chains of communicative events and particularly attends to intertextuality and interdiscursivity within and across orders of discourse. This framework is situated within extant work in the rhetoric of science and is illustrated through a case study of a controversy surrounding an evolutionary psychology study on gender and spatial cognition.