The public Debates on Energy Transition in Germany and France. Understanding ecological transformations by crossing two sociological approaches to discourse

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Reiner Keller
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389691224

• Final Report Year: 2022

Final Report Abstract

EnergiCorpus is a French-German joint project whose aim was to combine two sociological approaches to discourse in order to investigate the public debates surrounding the French and the German energy transitions from the 1970s to the 2020s. To this end, the project relied on the Sociology of Knowledge Applied to Discourse (SKAD) developed by Reiner Keller in Germany and on the sociology of controversies developed by Francis Chateauraynaud with his software Prospéro in France. More precisely, the research design consisted in building text corpuses with relevant data (expert reports, media articles, etc.) on energy debates in order to develop a shared heuristic approach integrating the software Prospéro into the research program of the SKAD. Throughout the project, we thus developed a preliminary German version of the software Prospéro with limited capacities, which we then tested on a range of corpuses in order to map energy controversies. In so doing, we were able to compare French and German textual data on thematically analogous debates on energy supply, and soon noticed that similar material stakes such as these inherent in the location of wind farms could give way to different discursive constructions, depending on place-specific cultural, political, and ecological representations. In order to visualize these specificities, we consequently adapted the mapping features of the software Prospéro to the SKAD, and used it to promote a digital analysis to interpretive patterns (Deutungsmuster). As a result, the project enabled the conceptualization of a more processual approach to controversy analysis, based on texts corpuses focused on energy issues. Several follow-up questions hence arose from the project. Firstly, the project highlighted a gap between big data analysis and qualitative content analysis in social sciences, paving the way to a further integration of Prospéro into the SKAD in order to promote more reflexivity in digital discourse analysis. Secondly, the multilingual aspect of this comparative study of French and German discourses emphasized the need to go beyond linguistic categories in order to develop other semantic concepts which would be better suited to the sociological analysis of discourses beyond linguistic barriers. Thirdly, our discursive approach allowed us to identify a “situational ballistic stake” inherent in the analysis of energy transition pathways. Comparing two countries and following their trajectory over time, we indeed noticed that, depending on the laws ruling energy policies and energy markets, practices and discourses varied and followed context-specific elaborations.

Publications

• Discourse analysis of environmental policy revisited: traditions, trends, perspectives, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 2019, 21:5, 445-463
  S. Leipold, P. H. Feindt, G. Winkel, R. Keller, R.
  
• Narrative, discourse, and sociology of knowledge: Applying the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) for analyzing (counter-)narratives. In: Klarissa Lueg & Marianne Wolff Lundholt (eds.): Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives. London: Routledge, 2021, S. 98-109
  Keller, R.
  
• Neuer Materialismus? Ein Blick aus der Wissenssoziologie. In: Diskurs und Materialität. Schwerpunktheft der Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, hrsg. von Simon Egbert und Patrick Bettinger, Nr. 2/2021, S. 181-200
  Keller, R.
  
• Du champ à l’archipel des études énergétiques : quelles frontières pour les recherches francophones et anglophones ?, VertigO, 2022
  Fond B.