One of the most intriguing notions developed by Bruno Latour as a part of his ‘controversy mapping’ approach is the idea of second-degree objectivity. ‘Second-degree objectivity’ is an objectivity obtained by the multiplication of different viewpoints; an objectivity that comes from diversity rather than from uniformity; an impartiality that comes from exploring a multitude of partial bias, rather than abstracting from them.
I have been invited to give this conference at the Visualizing Knowledge Controversies Symposium at the University of Oxford (21/01/12) and at the Social Sciences and Web2 workshop at La Cantine (Paris, 04/04/12).