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Discussion and Conclusions1336nanotechnology-in-food online controversy, miniature pellets or particles, scientists and scientific activity are often seen. For both processed food and nanotechnology in food, visuals of food and people interacting with it were used. Again, sometimes they communicated the risks or benefits of food technologies. People interacting with food and food abundance were frequently depicted to convey a risk-meaning in the sense of the many temptations; similar visuals conveyed a benefit-meaning when the emphasis was on the variety offered when making food choices.6.1.2 Narrative (sub-question 2)In the Introduction chapter, I defined policy controversies as social conflicts in which networks of actors express competing framings of a policy issue. Online, these actor networks compose online publics. In this dissertation, I have studied two types of online publics: online discourse coalitions and online sentiment coalitions. A discourse coalition is ‘a loose network of actors who develop a shared way of interpreting a policy issue’ (Metze & Dodge, 2016, p. 366). A sentiment coalition is a group of (online) actors that predominantly express positive, negative or balanced sentiments about an issue. In their framing process, online discourse and sentiment coalitions use frames and storylines (referred to together, in this dissertation, as narratives), which are reflected in their text and visualisations. Hence, discourse and sentiment coalitions use, in their framing, word and visualbased narratives. In this section, I discuss the three ways they do so. Hence, I answer the question:How do coalitions in a policy controversy use visual and textual narratives?In the controversies I have studied, the narratives most observed are those of risks and benefits of technologies. Risk narratives were often more prevalent than benefit narratives. In all cases, actors use visualisations to make textual narratives more concrete and literally more visible by (1) relating the technology to ‘casual’, everyday objects or events and (2) isolating objects and magnifying them.By using visualisations, actors give concrete visual examples of the risks and benefits mentioned in the text. This way of visualising narratives makes abstract risks or benefits concrete. By showing flames coming out of a well or even a kitchen faucet, an abstract risk narrative, expressed through text, becomes tangible. By Efrat.indd 133 19-09-2023 09:47