The study, published in the journal Geographica Helvetica by geographers Frank I. Müller, Frank Meyer, and Judith Miggelbrink, is among the first to move beyond the textual analysis of alternative-protein hype and examine how promises about cultured meat are organised audio-visually. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s concept of translation from actor–network theory, the authors argue that promotional videos do not simply transmit information about a technology. Instead, they align heterogeneous elements, including cells, laboratories, animals, kitchens, investors, and crisis imagery, into coherent stories that reshape how each of those elements is understood. In Latourian terms, translation is not mere communication but a transformation: to translate is to link agents in ways that change them, and the videos, the researchers contend, turn laboratories into scalable futures, cells into commodities, and viewers into potential supporters or investors.

The corpus was assembled from the company database of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that promotes animal-protein alternatives. The researchers selected short-form, English-, German-, Spanish-, or Portuguese-language videos intended to advertise companies to consumers or investors, excluding interviews and slide presentations in favour of genuine narrative storytelling. Each video was analysed as a single audio-visual unit through a two-stage coding process. The first stage coded material against four analytical entry points derived from the literature on promissory narratives: strategic positioning, material referents, temporal projection, and broader promissory framings linking crisis, ethics, and transformation. The second stage compared the coded material across the corpus to identify recurring narrative configurations. The result was six cross-cutting patterns, which the authors interpret as six translational operations.

The first pattern, which the researchers call narrating CellAg, relies on infographics, comic-style graphics, and interviews with chefs, employees, and chief executives to make complex science digestible. Young scientists in white suits work diligently in gleaming laboratories while founders offer personal testimony, vouching for the technology and its promise of a better world. Statistics and charts sit alongside images of suffering animals, blending economic motivation with ethical storytelling. The authors describe this as a translational act of guided explanation: it renders technical opacity trustworthy through controlled visual explanation and embodied spokespersons, while quietly narrowing the field of interpretation by foregrounding expertise, safety, and optimism and backgrounding uncertainty, conflict, and the difficulties of industrial scale-up.

The second pattern performs what the researchers call scalar translation, entangling the planetary, the microbial, and the domestic in rapid montage. Aerial tracking shots sweep over deforested land and monotonous agriculture before cutting to laboratory scenes; close-ups of petri dishes, test tubes, and microscopes give way to family barbecues and dinner tables; computer-generated cell biopsies are followed by sizzling pans. The laboratory becomes the hinge connecting the micro-scale of the cell to the scale of the planet, framing cell cultivation as a natural response to global crisis. Crucially, the authors note, the montage almost always skips the contested middle step: the upscaled fabrication plant, with its energy demands, infrastructure, and regulatory complexity. What the videos omit, they argue, is as persuasive as what they show.

A third pattern bundles crises together. Climate change, land scarcity, food security, animal welfare, water pollution, and even urban futures are condensed into a single narrative problem space to which cellular agriculture appears as a proportionate answer. One video in the corpus declares that by 2050 the world’s population will exceed ten billion and that cellular agriculture is here to tackle the resulting challenge. The researchers describe this as crisis–solution translation: diffuse collective anxieties are converted into a market-compatible horizon of action, positioning private firms as legitimate responders to anticipated catastrophe and framing investment and entrepreneurship as socially responsible rather than merely profit-seeking.

Perhaps the most striking pattern is temporal. Several videos invoke a nostalgic, pre-industrial past in which people grew their own food, knew the animals they ate, and lived in balance with nature, before contrasting that idyll with the devastation of industrial meat production. One company’s video, styled as a fairy-tale book turned by an invisible hand, moves from cows grazing in alpine meadows to the eroded landscapes of the Amazon, before asking whether technology could restore what has been lost. The researchers call this temporal translation: a promise to bridge an apparent contradiction by using technological progress to recover the virtues of an imagined past. The affective vocabulary of tradition is preserved, they argue, while the material basis of that tradition is replaced, allowing cultured meat to appear both radically novel and culturally continuous.

A fifth pattern moralises cleanliness. Sterile laboratories, spotless microscopes, and controlled interiors are repeatedly juxtaposed with barns, smoke, mud, and smoking chimneys, so that hygiene becomes shorthand for sustainability, safety, and ethical superiority. The researchers describe this hygienic translation as reframing food production as a problem of controlled environments and optimised processes, shifting attention away from questions of energy use, material throughput, and industrial dependency toward an ideal of transparent technical management. The messy materiality of animal agriculture is translated into a seemingly frictionless, governable environment, with the laboratory positioned as the clean successor to the farm.

The final pattern works through emotion. Videos individualise animals, giving them names and close-ups, and stage scenes of family barbecues rendered in nostalgic, 1970s-style footage. One company famously named a chicken Ian; another asks viewers whether cramming animals into barns is even natural. The researchers argue that this emotional translation redistributes responsibility: guilt is displaced onto existing production systems rather than consumption itself, so the viewer is not asked to give up meat but to accept it in a morally repaired form. Regret and compassion are converted into acceptance of technological substitution, legitimising a new production regime that promises ethical continuity without dietary rupture.

Taken together, the six patterns form what the authors call a repertoire rather than a typology, and they reveal a sector that, despite its fragmentation, presents a remarkably coherent audio-visual narrative about its own promise. The researchers are careful about what their findings do and do not show: the analysis does not demonstrate that cellular agriculture companies are already agents of a protein transition, only that their promotional media frame them as such in an effort to stabilise that position with consumers, investors, and regulators. By centring audio-visual material, the study extends scholarship on promissory narratives beyond text-based sources and raises pointed questions about how these translations travel, whether the meanings crafted in industry videos are reproduced, contested, or transformed in policy documents, news coverage, and audience reception. As cultured meat edges toward supermarket shelves, the study is a reminder that the battle for the future of protein is being fought not only in bioreactors, but in storyboards, scripts, and carefully edited frames.

Subject of Research: Promissory narratives and audio-visual storytelling in cellular agriculture promotional videos

Article Title: From lab to table: promissory narratives and the future of protein production in response to global crises

Article References: Müller, F. I., Meyer, F., & Miggelbrink, J. (2026). From lab to table: promissory narratives and the future of protein production in response to global crises. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 463-479. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-463-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-463-2026

Keywords: cellular agriculture, cultured meat, promissory narratives, actor-network theory, socio-technical imaginaries, food systems, sustainability, multimodal analysis, alternative proteins, science communication, food media, Latour

Social life cycle assessment has matured considerably over the past two decades. Guided by the ISO 14075 standard and the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2020 guidelines, it evaluates social impacts such as human rights, working conditions, cultural heritage and governance across a product’s entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use and end of life. Stakeholders examined typically include workers, local communities, value chain actors, society at large and children. Yet the method’s DNA comes from environmental life cycle assessment, which was built to trace physical flows and processes. When applied to social questions, this heritage means S-LCA tends to anchor its analysis to the stages where materials physically move, leaving the social drama that surrounds a project, the permit battles, the community anxieties, the historical grievances, largely invisible.

The Finnish team, led by Anni Orola with colleagues Laura Kainiemi, Jarkko Levänen and Ville Uusitalo, turned to controversy mapping to fill that gap. The method is grounded in actor-network theory, a sociological framework developed by Bruno Latour and others that treats both human and non-human entities, from mining companies to protected frog species, as actors capable of shaping socio-technical systems. Controversy mapping, which began as a teaching tool in sociology and has grown into a serious research method, examines and visualizes public disputes by tracing who says what, who aligns with whom, and how arguments evolve over time. The approach proceeds through five stages: moving from statements to debates, from debates to actors, from actors to networks, from networks to broader worldviews, and finally to the politics of how controversies develop across time.

To test the approach, the researchers applied it to Finland’s battery material sector, covering mining, the production of precursor cathode active material, cathode active material and battery cathode production, along with transportation. Finland was a deliberate choice: the country holds reserves of multiple critical battery minerals and is investing heavily in its battery sector, yet despite its comparatively high level of social sustainability, battery material projects there have generated persistent contestation. The team collected data from Finnish-language online news media between November 2023 and July 2024, using Google Alerts with search terms for mining, battery metals and battery chemicals. After excluding unavailable and irrelevant items, they assembled a corpus of 93 articles spanning national and local newspapers, magazines and specialist publications, including interviews, opinion pieces and editorials.

The coding process, carried out iteratively with NVivo software and then organized in Excel, identified 95 actors engaged in the disputes. These ranged from mining and battery manufacturing companies and environmental non-governmental organizations to municipal governments, authorities such as the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency, residents, landowners, business development companies, researchers and journalists. Notably, the analysis also included non-human actors, among them the Eurasian otter and the moor frog, both strictly protected under the European Union’s Habitats Directive, whose presence shapes the fate of mining projects. Strikingly, none of the 95 actors identified in the Finnish-language media represented the Sami, the indigenous people of northern Finland where several controversial projects are located, a gap the authors attribute to their data sources and a recognized digital bias in the method.

The mapped disputes revealed a rich landscape of arguments. Supporters of the battery industry, mostly companies, emphasized new jobs, economic benefits, risk management plans and the global imperative of the green transition, with some arguing that mining in Finland is more sustainable than in Africa. Opponents, largely NGOs and individual residents writing opinion pieces, pointed to Finland’s history of environmental damage from mining, potential biodiversity loss, sulfate emissions into the Baltic Sea, water contamination, impacts on reindeer herding, fishing, trekking and berry foraging, and what they called green sacrifice zones, where indigenous lands and protected areas are put to industrial use in the name of sustainability. Even battery material trade with Russia became entangled in the debates, with some actors questioning whether such commerce might support aggression against Ukraine, while a company representative defended it as sanction-compliant and even patriotic.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns timing. In conventional S-LCA, social impacts are usually assessed starting with raw material extraction. But the study shows that the socially decisive processes happen years or even decades earlier: area reservations that companies announce to claim prospecting rights, prospecting permits, environmental and water management permits, all of which can provoke community reactions, uncertainty and mental strain long before any mine is built. In the case of the AA Sakatti mining project near the Viiankiaapa wetland, public attention moved from the prospecting permit to on-site activism and finally to a visit by Finland’s environmental minister. Because these pre-production social processes can determine whether a project ever gains social acceptance, the authors argue that excluding them from S-LCA omits some of the most significant social impacts of all.

The case studies also demonstrated why stakeholder categories in S-LCA guidelines should be treated as illustrative rather than exhaustive. In the town of Hamina, home to a planned battery material plant by CNGR Finland, the municipality supported the project while residents, NGOs and a local fishing co-operative opposed it. Around the Suhanko Arctic Platinum project, neighboring municipalities split, with Ranua supporting the mine while Tervola and Simo raised concerns, partly because a wastewater pipe would cross Tervola’s territory without economic compensation and Simo was not invited into the environmental permit process. These procedural fairness issues, the researchers contend, are central to social acceptance, which research links to five drivers: the planning process, impacts on nature and residents, social norms, economic impacts and attitudes toward the energy transition.

On this basis, the study proposes that social acceptance should become a distinct impact subcategory within S-LCA, particularly for assessments involving high land use, such as mining, or emission potential, such as battery chemical manufacturing. The subcategory would focus on measuring the procedural justice experienced by local communities, and could be assessed through media coverage capturing both positive and negative viewpoints, an approach already used by sustainability rating platforms like EcoVadis. The authors note an important limitation: such a subcategory only works in countries with freedom of speech and a free press, though Finland ranks among the top five nations in the world press freedom index. Because the subcategory centers on procedural justice rather than overlapping outcomes, the researchers argue it would not result in double counting with existing S-LCA indicators.

The broader message extends beyond batteries. Industrial ecology has long excelled at quantifying environmental impacts, but the social dimension demands methods that can capture context, history and the plurality of actors, including those, like a protected frog or an unconsulted municipality, that fall outside standard stakeholder lists. Controversy mapping, the authors suggest, could serve as a preliminary data collection step before site-specific assessments, or as a complement to existing S-LCA databases, and could even help identify relevant actors before interviews begin. Future work might integrate additional social science perspectives, from institutional analysis to power relations between stakeholders, and test the approach in countries with different levels of institutional trust and press freedom. As the clean energy transition accelerates the global demand for battery materials, the Finnish study offers a timely reminder that the social license to operate is earned not in the factory, but in the long, contested years before ground is ever broken.

Subject of Research: Complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping to assess social acceptance in the battery material industry

Article Title: Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping

Article References: Orola, A., Kainiemi, L., Levänen, J., & Uusitalo, V. (2026). Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Keywords: social life cycle assessment, controversy mapping, actor-network theory, battery materials, social acceptance, mining, Finland, industrial ecology, life cycle thinking, procedural justice, stakeholder analysis, green transition

The study, published in the journal Ambio, was led by Etienne Quillet of the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale together with Rhoda Fofack-Garcia, Laureline Poisson, and Frida Ben Rais Lasram. Their goal was not simply to describe the seafood industry but to capture its structural complexity, the dense web of interactions linking fish stocks, fishing vessels, processing plants, regulators, markets, technologies, and social norms. To do this, they combined two analytical frameworks that are rarely brought together: the social-ecological network approach, which translates social and ecological elements into nodes and links, and Actor-Network Theory, a sociological perspective that insists non-human entities such as fishing gear, processing technologies, climate change, and even abstract concepts like the market can act as full participants in shaping a system.

The theoretical foundation matters because conventional approaches to social-ecological systems often treat the non-human world passively, as a backdrop against which human actors make decisions. Actor-Network Theory, developed by sociologists Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, flips that assumption. In this view, components are defined by their relationships to other components rather than by their intrinsic characteristics, and material and immaterial objects alike can stabilize or destabilize the network. For a sector as technically saturated as seafood processing, where social and ecological components interact through fishing gear, filleting lines, cold-storage facilities, and regulatory institutions, this perspective offered the researchers a way to include everything stakeholders considered relevant, without imposing rigid predefined boundaries on the system.

Building the network required extensive fieldwork. Between May and July 2024, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and participatory workshops with a deliberately diverse set of participants drawn from the membership of the regional competitiveness cluster supporting sustainable seafood development: fishing companies and shipowners, primary and secondary processing firms, storage and packaging businesses, traders, maritime colleges, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, certification bodies, unions, and researchers specializing in biology, marine ecosystems, engineering, and logistics. This methodological triangulation, combining multiple data sources, was designed to mitigate the biases inherent in any single method. Interviews capture individual narratives shaped by personal experience; observations and collective workshops add the researchers’ interpretations and the nuances that emerge when participants compare perspectives. The findings were later presented back to stakeholders in a restitution workshop in November 2025 to discuss how the results could inform governance.

The data were analyzed qualitatively using thematic coding in NVivo14, guided by a deceptively simple question: who is responsible for what in relation to seafood products in Boulogne-sur-Mer? The ‘who’ became the nodes of the network, and the ‘what’ became directed links between them. Through iterative, open coding rooted in grounded theory, the team identified a staggering 227 nodes and 595 directed links spanning 49 distinct types of relationship, grouped into nine broad categories: contain, development, influence, integration, production, repercussion, supervision, support, and use. Each category forms a distinct layer of interaction built on the same shared set of nodes, producing what network scientists call a multi-layer network, a structure far richer than the simple social-versus-ecological dichotomy used in most previous studies.

The nodes themselves span four major categories: economic, environmental, productive, and social. They range from aquatic species such as pollock, mackerel, herring, scallop, and the recently abundant squids landed by the local fleet, to the social norms governing seafood consumption, from processing technologies to the regulatory frameworks that govern productive activities. When the researchers visualized the full network, the result was an intricate web almost too dense to interpret directly. But by adjusting the visualization to highlight concentrations of nodes and links, four functional clusters emerged. Cluster 1 represents fishery and aquaculture resources within their ecosystem, connected almost exclusively through ‘contain’ relationships. Cluster 2 corresponds to the operational production of seafood products, bound together by production and use links. Clusters 3 and 4 serve regulatory and organizational functions: the former acts primarily as an influencing force over other components, while the latter channels support toward operational production.

The most consequential finding is structural: operational production entities constitute the core of the network, shaping how environmental resources, economic support, and social regulations are organized around them. Environmental nodes are understood primarily as exploited resources, with their broader systemic dimension, ecosystems, habitats, and unmarketed ecosystem services, remaining marginal. Economic components focus mainly on industrial development support and product promotion, while social components are embedded within the regulatory and normative frameworks governing production. In other words, the entire system reads as production-centric. The researchers argue this reflects a capacity of a limited set of highly connected actors to impose specific interpretive frameworks of sustainability, prioritizing efficiency gains, monitoring tools, and production optimization while marginalizing alternative framings centered on social equity, food sovereignty, and the well-being of coastal communities.

This production-centric structure also raises questions about power dynamics and who gets left out. The network was built from stakeholders recruited through the competitiveness cluster, which facilitated participation but biased it toward well-organized, formal actors, potentially under-representing precarious workers, small-scale fishers outside the cluster, and critical NGOs. Consumers, laborers, and local communities appear weakly connected, suggesting their knowledge, interests, and values are poorly integrated into current governance. The authors propose concrete remedies: creating new nodes, such as organizations representing labor or consumer interests, strengthening their connectivity, reinforcing collaboration between scientific institutions and resource users, and developing participatory interfaces between regulators and local stakeholders. They also recommend expanding the environmental dimension of the network to include habitats, ecosystem services, and biodiversity dynamics, which would support ecosystem-based management in the face of climate change and mounting anthropogenic pressures.

The study is candid about its limits. Generic boundary-interface nodes such as ‘market’ or ‘import’ inevitably conceal a diversity of underlying mechanisms, actors, and geographic contexts, simplifying the complexity of global seafood systems that connect Boulogne-sur-Mer to Norwegian salmon farms, Malagasy shrimp fisheries, Brexit, and resurgent US protectionism. The network is also a snapshot of 2024, though it incorporates drivers of change that give it a dynamic dimension. Future work, the authors suggest, could apply quantitative social network analysis, including centrality metrics and community detection algorithms, information-spreading analyses to trace how disturbances propagate, loop analysis of stabilizing and destabilizing feedbacks, and temporal comparisons to reveal how the network evolves. For now, the map stands as a diagnostic tool: by making visible the underlying structure of interactions and power relations in Europe’s seafood capital, it gives decision-makers an evidence-based foundation for sustainability strategies grounded in the sector’s systemic reality, and identifies the levers, connecting the marginalized, reconfiguring key relationships, and broadening how the environment itself is represented, through which genuine transformation might begin.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological network analysis of the seafood processing sector in Boulogne-sur-Mer using actor-network theory

Article Title: Highlighting the structural complexity of Europe’s leading seafood processing hub: Building a social-ecological network with actor-network theory

Article References: Quillet, E., Fofack-Garcia, R., Poisson, L., & Ben Rais Lasram, F. (2026). Highlighting the structural complexity of Europe’s leading seafood processing hub: Building a social-ecological network with actor-network theory. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02485-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02485-w

Keywords: seafood sector, social-ecological network, actor-network theory, Boulogne-sur-Mer, fisheries, aquaculture, governance, sustainability, supply chain, complex networks, stakeholder participation, marine ecosystems