Send message to Authors

Short abstract:

What does it mean for a system of knowledge production or dissemination to be called corrupt? In accounts of corruption, how does a system become degraded or debased, and by what kinds of actors and processes? Here we present a preliminary taxonomy, along with some model cases.

Long abstract:

The Roman physician Galen begins his On My Own Books with an anecdote: “One day, I was in the Street of the Sandal-Makers (where most of the Roman booksellers are) when I saw some people arguing about whether a book that was for sale was one of mine or by someone else.” He goes on to express concern about the poor quality – even the “mutilation” – of his work in the copies being circulated.

In the early 2010s, the pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt was involved in more than 876 contracts – with medical education and communication companies, key opinion leaders, publishers, and others – to shape medical views on opioids. According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency the company was at that point the “kingpin within the drug cartel.”

In our terms, both of these cases can be described in terms of epistemic corruption, but as a result of different kinds of forces, situated in different moral economies of knowledge, and resulting in different practical concerns. What does it mean for a system of knowledge production or dissemination to be called corrupt? In accounts of corruption, how does a system become degraded or debased, and by what kinds of actors and processes? In this presentation we will outline a preliminary taxonomy of kinds of epistemic corruption, along with some model cases.

Send message to Author

Short abstract:

Drawing on qualitative data, this paper examines the epistemic crisis that the US Census Bureau faces while trying to enroll stakeholders in conducting the census. These efforts are unexpectedly triggering an epistemic corruption of democracy's data infrastructure and the federal statistics project.

Long abstract:

Since 1790, the US has conducted a decennial census to reapportion political representatives. While this data has never been perfect--and while there have always been actors invested in manipulating the data-- mechanisms are innovated each decade to improve the data quality.

The Census Bureau created a "trusted messengers" program to improve data quality by involving community stakeholders. This effort simultaneously widened the range of actors that were invested in how the census works, triggering epistemic tensions. The bureau leverages statistical techniques to get the best count possible; community-based stakeholders expect the bureau to directly count everyone.

This tension came to a head during the 2020 census as partisan politics, scientific developments, and attempts to be resilient during a global pandemic collided. While the statistical quality of the 2020 census data was on par with earlier decades, the perceived quality was abysmal and the legitimacy of the operation was contested. Many stakeholders who served as "trusted messengers" for the census during the 2000 and 2010 cycles played a key role in delegitimizing the census in 2020. Moreover, they continue to do so. Disconnects between the Census Bureau and its stakeholders continue to magnify a "crisis in expertise" (Eyal).

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this paper examines the epistemic crisis that the Census Bureau faces while trying to enroll stakeholders in creating democracy's data infrastructure. While "trust in numbers" (Porter) has always been illusory, this paper interrogates the consequences of epistemic corruption of the federal statistics project.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Over 400 research articles about COVID-19 have either been retracted from publication or withdrawn from preprint servers due to serious research or publishing errors. By violating research norms, many of these articles were able to fabricate novel or controversial findings that received more academic citations and media attention than non-retracted COVID-19 research. Retracted COVID-19 research has jeopardized public health efforts by supporting untested treatments, casting doubt on the effectiveness of face masks, and claiming that 5G radio towers transmit COVID-19.

The retractions of these papers were designed to correct the scientific record. However, in the context of politicized science, retractions may instead be interpreted as evidence of censorship or simply ignored. We performed a content analysis of tweets about the two most widely shared retracted COVID-19 articles, Mehra20 and Rose21, before and after their retractions. When Mehra20 was seen as a politicized attack on Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine, its retraction was broadly shared as proof that the article had been published for political reasons. However, when Rose21 was seen as evidence of vaccine harm by vaccine opponents, its retraction was either ignored or else framed as a conspiracy to censor the truth.

Our results demonstrate how scientific counterpublics can selectively use conspiracy to explain away both the publication of disfavored scientific findings and the retraction of favored scientific findings. We end with a discussion of the standards that scientific publishers should adopt to address these concerns.

Send message to Authors

Short abstract:

We argue that the current context of science does not encourage self-regulation. Through the analysis of a particular case of epistemic corruption in biomedical research, we discuss how to protect science from its own threats

Long abstract:

The system of governance and quality control of science through the peer-review process has turned into a resource of predetermined scarcity for which scholars have to compete, threatening the epistemic integrity of science and leading to the much discussed confidence crisis in science. Inappropriate uses of statistical methodologies and a reward system that has turned journal rankings into criteria of sound science constitute an important part of a problem that is promoting transformations in the disciplinary communities affected.

In this proposal we argue that these processes are also turning into a myth a significant attribute of academic science: its capacity for self-correction. We present a case study about a widely cited article in a top biomedical journal that should not have been published because of its statistical flaws. We also present the reflections generated by the fact that it has not been retracted despite the journal, the authors and their institution were informed of its weaknesses. What is striking in this case is that scientism functioned here as a kind of collective bias that prevented all the actors in charge of safeguarding the epistemic quality of the article from recognizing their mistakes, combined with the desire to obtain attention and social impact.

Although the literature on science and society has oscillated between discussing how to defend science from society and how to defend society from science, probably the time has come to start thinking of developing external regulatory mechanisms to help protect science from its own threats.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Analogies to viruses have become commonplace explanations in accounts of online (mis-)information diffusion: “it went viral”, we say, to describe content that circulates widely among many users. In particular, from “viral vaccine conspiracies” to “woke vaccine mind-viruses,” in the aftermath of the pandemic they have become omnipresent in discussions of vaccine politics. This research turns to these analogies as an object of investigation, recovering an under-analyzed connection between people that do not trust vaccine-based immunology, and people that “stand for” it: the use of analogies to viruses and viral diffusion as explanations of vaccine controversies. By situating this thought-practice ethnographically through both vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers, it surfaces as a style of explanation that designates disagreement within controversies as the result of programmed, captured actors whose collective capacity to reason has been trapped and taken over by an external force — foreclosing analyses that see it as emergent from choices or decisions that are politically and epistemically meaningful in their own terms. In this light, vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers appear linked by a partially shared concept of disagreement, which here I call “capto-political”: explanations of disagreement that hinge on appeals to heteronomous interests, whose presence subsumes its political purchase as uncoupled from those that populate it. Tracing this partially shared capto-politics through vaccine debates, vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers surface as not only opposed, but also, following Heidi Larson (2020), as “stuck together” — or, like I suggest in this article, “co-captured.”

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Historically, human variation studies have been a site of attraction for researchers of many disciplinary hues and significant contestations. In contemporary times, the science of population genetics has fully embraced DNA and genomics as a mode of knowledge production. The tools and techniques of physical anthropology, including anthropometry, typology, craniology, and biochemical indexes, are now replaced by epistemic objects like ‘frequencies of alleles’ and ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’. The erstwhile methods employed by social sciences to study human variation have now ceased to provide trusted knowledge. The paradigmatic shift from old race science to population genetics is thus seemingly complete. However, scholars have argued that the concepts and practices of population genetic studies of human variation overlap and exhibit continuities. In this paper, I draw on my ongoing fieldwork of the GenomeIndia project (GIP), which aims to create a catalogue of genetic variations in Indians through whole genome sequencing of 10,000 representative individuals. Nevertheless, apart from the whole genome sequencing and genomic analyses, the study individuals had to undergo several blood and anthropometric tests. If the methods of anthropometry lack integrity and hence are brimmed with epistemic corruption, and genomics alone has the power to arbitrate truth, it is perplexing why an ambitious national project is engaging with multiple epistemic devices. In the paper, I bring to attention the tensions, conflicts and contradictions that the use of anthropometry in GIP engenders and ask in what ways we can understand continuities within knowledge systems that discount epistemic corruption while claiming integrity simultaneously.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

As noted by STS and environmental justice scholars, science is strategically used by big corporations that profit from causing harm to people and the environment. From ‘big tobacco’ to oil multinationals, private firms suspected of causing socioenvironmental harm resort to the authority of science to produce the evidence they need to counter or delay public regulation. Accordingly, is not difficult to relate epistemic corruption to the image of scientists willing to accommodate their studies and findings to corporate interests. Nevertheless, epistemic corruption can also take less obvious forms. Based on the Arica Victims v. Boliden Mineral case, in which 796 low-income Chileans sued a Swedish mining corporation for the mismanagement of 20,000 tonnes of toxic waste in northern Chile, this proposal explores two ways of epistemic corruption. The first one involves two scientists working for a major consultancy firm in charge of producing the evidence required to deny a causal link between the toxic waste and the health damages alleged by the plaintiffs. The second one involves a reputed Chilean lawyer who, despite his profile as a left-wing public intellectual, was willing to testify in the trial for the corporation’s defense. The proposal contributes to a more complex understanding of epistemic corruption, showing that it emerges not only when scientists sacrifice their independence to serve corporate interests, but also when experts try to keep an extreme emphasis on objectivity and impartiality.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

This talk explores the conceptual and empirical tensions between “epistemic corruption” and “epistemic inequality” in the private production of public knowledge. I draw evidence from the nearly 3,000 environmental site investigation reports commissioned by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) since 1980. The reports represent the state’s cumulative knowledge of soil contamination across the state. Each report summarizes a particular site’s land use history, describes the current conditions of the lot, presents results from chemical analysis of soil and groundwater samples, outlines site remediation plans and lists restrictions on future site reuse. Although most site investigations are managed by RIDEM, they represent the collective work of dozens of private entities who are key players in New England’s burgeoning environmental services industry. Because they are tied to real estate transactions, state-sponsored knowledge about soil contamination tends to concentrate in neighborhoods where real estate markets are dynamic, but accumulates more slowly in areas that are economically depressed or in neighborhoods blighted by poverty, industrial decline, and institutional neglect. In this way, entrenched social and environmental inequalities are accompanied – and likely reinforced – by a type of state-sanctioned epistemic inequality, in which some neighborhoods consistently generate more regulatory attention and knowledge than others in ways that map onto the ebb and flow of property values in commercial real estate markets. I argue that epistemic corruption is characteristic of knowledge systems whose legitimacy is dependent on economically powerful actors that, in this case, value some soils (and some people) more than others.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

In the hands of industries making products that harm human health or the environment, the strategic corruption of knowledge is a powerful vehicle for product (and industry) defense. Bodies of knowledge created for this purpose are known as "product-defense sciences," and they have distinctive attributes stemming from that raison d’etre. This being a new object of STS study, our approach is necessarily inductive, involving gathering data and looking for patterns and generalities to use as building blocks in conceptual models. This paper examines this class of sciences as a problem of epistemic corruption. The focus is the case of soda-defense science (“soda science”), a body of knowledge created by Coca-Cola and its academic partners to protect sugary soda from the threat to profits brought by public health critiques of soda as a prime culprit in the obesity epidemic. Focusing on two key decades (1995-2015), it uncovers the epistemic practices of the two leading “soda scientists” to understand (1) how they quietly corrupted (mainstream) obesity science to serve industry ends, and (2) how they stabilized and advanced that knowledge by mobilizing ethics practices that concealed the corruption. As skilled quasi-corporate scientists, these researchers succeeded in creating a corrupted knowledge system that was remarkably long-lived. As a huge sector of our knowledge economy, product-defense sciences deserve greater attention. This inquiry is part of a larger project of building a conceptual model of product-defense science that will illuminate the nature, dynamics, and significance of epistemic corruption for industry benefit.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders and public health institutions alike invoked ‘science’ and ‘evidence’ in their responses, and while knowledge translation is a vibrant field of scholarship, little research has been done to actually describe and analyze how specific products of knowledge (i.e. publications) find their way to policy and public discourse. Drawing inspiration from STS insights on the coproduction of knowledge and expertise, this paper addresses this gap by identifying three specific papers from The Lancet that were invoked by various political and public health actors in the Philippines to justify - or criticize - government responses to the pandemic. Taken together, the case studies reveal that the use of the scientific literature has been selective, and whenever they are actually invoked for policy, their meanings and implications were mediated by and coproduced by local health experts, academics, journalists, government officials, as well as the multiple efficacies and outcomes of the policies themselves.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Through my presentation I will delve into the discursive, epistemic and material labour mobilised to introduce AI in India’s healthcare ecosystem, even as existing warrants for foundational healthcare reforms are systematically ignored. I will argue that ‘epistemic corruption’ can be read into such moves at least across two registers.

First, policy-makers, technologists and other proponents of the technology create a space, through knowledge brokerage of a certain kind, to float narratives of transformative technofutures. This involves presenting the current state of the healthcare system in a way that it appears ripe for ‘disruption’. And further, deflecting uncomfortable knowledge about social, legal, ethical and even technical preparedness, all in favour of prospective future gains. Part of creating that space is to invest in the discourse of ‘lacunae’ - diagnosing that AI is what is missing to solve our problems and thereby prescribing that AI will indeed solve them. Second, endorsing this technology requires a certain downplaying of its own fragility and ‘lacunae’, and the extent to which it can genuinely make healthcare more accessible and affordable - the motifs through which promises of transformative technofutures are floated. It also obfuscates the possibility that propagation of emerging digital technologies and data analytics in healthcare can potentially advantage certain interests and cohorts over others. In a way, the initial discourse of fragility in one system serves to obfuscate the prospects of fragility in another system.

On both scales, the integrity of the promise about transformative healthcare is compromised, through epistemic corruption.