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1Introduction23food. The idea behind selecting multiple cases when taking an interpretive approach is to enable one to study a phenomenon in different contexts. This helps the research to be ‘sufficiently contextualised’ (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012, p. 46) and to explore multiple interpretations of actors of the studied phenomenon (Boswell et al., 2019, Ch 2 and 4).In this thesis, I chose to study the phenomenon of online visualisations in controversies. I am interested in illuminating as many faces as possible of this understudied phenomenon. Hence, I selected controversies that are diverse in their stage of development, from an emerging controversy to a developed one, and I ensured that these controversies are about technologies in different stages of development, from newly emerging (see Krabbenborg, 2019) to an alreadyembedded technology. The broad and diverse social contexts of the cases I selected lead to a holistic understanding of how actors give meaning to contested issues through visualisations. See Table 1.1 for an overview of the cases and their variety.Table 1.1. Varieties enabled by the selection of the casesHydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction (‘fracking’)Food processing Nanotechnology in food and food packagingDomain in which technology can facilitate a transition toward sustainable developmentEnergy Food FoodControversy stage of development Developed controversy Emerging controversy Emerging controversyTechnology stage of development Emerging technology Already-embedded technologyNewly-emerging technologyThere is one case selected from the energy domain (the controversy about fracking) and two cases from the food domain (food processing and nanotechnology in food and food packaging). Fracking is a ‘technique that injects water and chemicals under high pressure to “frack” deep shale layers, enabling extraction of previously inaccessible gas resources’ (Metze, 2017, p. 49). Several publications have indicated that the policy and societal debates about this technique are complex and sit within a discursive tension of, on one hand, considering fracking as necessary for a transition fuel towards a more sustainable energy future and, Efrat.indd 23 19-09-2023 09:47