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This paper shows how emotional/affective judgments shape knowledge integration in pandemic science advice. We argue that trust is an affective, anticipatory practice, and that acknowledging this emotional dimension is key to building more socially robust, legitimate and inclusive crisis expertise.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how emotional dynamics shape the credibility of evidence and expertise in pandemic science advice. While trust in science is often framed as rational and evidence-based, the act of trusting always involves uncertainty and thus emotions of hope, doubt or fear. Sociological work on emotion has long challenged the binary between cognition and feeling, showing that emotions are not irrational impulses but socially and culturally constituted ways of knowing. Drawing on this insight, the paper argues that trust in expert advice during crises is co‑constituted through such emotional practices. For example, what feels resonant tends to appear more trustworthy, and affective ties, charisma, and perceived goodwill influence which experts are judged credible. These dynamics are central to how advisory systems integrate different knowledges under urgency and uncertainty.

Using interviews and observations from UNITY—a Dutch consortium studying integrated science advice during pandemics—we examine how emotional judgments shape knowledge integration within advisory bodies. Experts rely on affective cues when assessing evidence under time pressure, while publics evaluate advisory outputs through culturally grounded interpretations of what counts as “real science.” As advisory systems attempt to include e.g. biomedical, social, ethical, and experiential knowledges, affective dynamics and “economies of credibility” play a decisive role in negotiating legitimacy, authority, and whose knowledge is taken up.

We argue that crisis preparedness frameworks must recognize trust as an affective, anticipatory practice. Making knowledge integration more participatory and just requires attending to the emotional infrastructures through which expertise is granted, contested, and enacted during crises.

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Focusing on knowledge infrastructures that support expert assessment of climate technologies, I develop an account of practical wisdom as an infrastructurally mediated capacity and show how uneven research capacity can constrain participatory parity and impede the cultivation of prudent judgment.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ethical implications of expert assessment in the governance of solar radiation modification (SRM), arguing that ethical analysis should attend not only to the justice implications of potential deployment but also to the infrastructural conditions under which assessments are conducted. In the absence of large-scale empirical experience with SRM and amid ongoing controversy surrounding field experimentation, in silico modeling has become central to exploring potential impacts and informing policy-relevant evaluations. As a result, expert judgment about SRM is profoundly mediated by knowledge infrastructures, including high-performance computing resources and data storage, high-resolution datasets, and climate models and downscaling tools. Focusing on these sociotechnical arrangements, the paper conceptualizes practical wisdom as an infrastructurally mediated capacity. It argues that unevenly distributed research capacity affects experts’ abilities to participate as peers in shaping judgments about what questions matter, what knowledge counts as relevant for decision-making, how uncertainties should be interpreted, and which knowledge gaps warrant priority. Such asymmetries can constrain participatory parity in epistemic inquiry and impede the cultivation of prudent judgment within expert communities. By analyzing the role of research capacity in SRM research and assessment, the paper shows that capacity building is not merely a technical or instrumental matter but an ethical concern tied to the arrangements that enable inclusive and context-sensitive deliberation. Building research capacity thus emerges as an integral ethical task for fostering more reflexive, equitable, and practically wise assessments of emerging climate intervention technologies.

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This paper examines how the moralization of COVID-19 vaccination as a "public good" created an epistemic gap for Post-Vac Syndrome. This paper analyses how the alignment of scientific advice with moral legitimacy complicates medical care for vaccine injuries.

Paper long abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific knowledge was mobilized as a primary order of justification for biopolitical interventions. Following the concept of "Regimes of Living" (Collier & Lakoff), this paper explores how technical facts were folded into moral imperatives, specifically the principle of solidarity, to stabilize immunization as the core strategy of pandemic preparedness.

While effective for public health governance, this strategic alignment produced a significant epistemic and clinical blind spot: Post-Vac Syndrome (PVS). Drawing on qualitative interviews with PVS patients and a discourse analysis of scientific-political advice in Germany, I demonstrate how the moralization of vaccination created a regime in which medical care for those with vaccine-related injuries is structurally hindered. Because experiential knowledge of PVS contradicts the dominant narrative of safe vaccination and solidarity, it is often excluded from advisory infrastructures as a politically sensitive disruption.

The paper argues that scientific advice, when tightly coupled with the moral economy of a political campaign, creates a infrastructure in which access to medical care is more difficult. Patients respond by mobilizing their own knowledge-infrastructures to challenge and expand the established regime. By examining the struggle of PVS patients for credibility, this contribution reflects on the constitution of expertise in times of crisis: How do moral narratives underline medical consultation? Through which orders of justification are these regimes maintained, and how can they be deconstructed?

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The paper analyses the challenges of dealing with non-knowledge in crises and advocates a pluralistic approach to scientific policy advice. It proposes an integrative model that can be applied in practices that synchronise the past, present and future in order to manage future crises.

Paper long abstract

The paper argues that in future crises, scientific policy advice should ensure a pluralism with regard to the scientific and political strategies for dealing with non-knowledge that are involved. This is further increased by the fact that the future is becoming a more central reference point in current crises. However, the future (whether as a framework for solutions or a disaster scenario) is open, which is why uncertainty and dealing with it in the present takes on a systemic status.

In a first step, the paper demonstrates the influence that the processing of ignorance have on the political and social handling. During the COVID-19 crisis in Germany a certain epistemic community with specific strategies for dealing with non-knowledge dominated the advisory process. Scientific advisors and political decision-makers formed a non-knowledge regime that succeeded in portraying other non-knowledge approaches from the scientific community as illegitimate. This excluded alternative approaches to policy advice from the crisis response. In a second step, an integrative model of knowledge-based policy advice is developed from the experiences with the non-knowledge regime in the COVID-19 crisis. The model implements epistemic pluralism in the advisory process, recognising all scientific and non-scientific non-knowledge strategies as equal. In a third step, the resilience of this model in solving future crises is discussed by addressing the increased production of uncertainty. This requires the successful application of pluralistic non-knowledge strategies in the crisis-related practices of synchronising the past, present and future.

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Scenario-based pandemic exercises stage how different epistemic cultures are integrated in science advice. Drawing on ethnographic research of such an exercise, this paper shows how knowledge is brokered across multiple boundaries, reproducing but sometimes unsettling hierarchies of expertise.

Paper long abstract

Calls for interdisciplinary science advice intensified after COVID-19, with policymakers urging closer collaboration between biomedical sciences and the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Yet integrating diverse epistemic cultures in crisis governance remains difficult. This paper examines how practices of preparedness organise the inclusion and integration of different forms of knowledge within advisory infrastructures in the Netherlands.

Drawing on boundary practices and epistemic justice, we analyse a multi-session pandemic scenario-based exercise conducted in the Netherlands in 2025. The exercise brought together biomedical, behavioural, and SSH researchers to collaboratively produce advice for a fictional Ebola-like outbreak. Treating the simulation not as a rehearsal for a future crisis but as an anticipatory infrastructure, we examine how it stages the work of integrating different types of expertise. The analysis draws on participant observation and fieldnotes from discussions across three phases of the simulated outbreak.

We show that the exercises function as a site of epistemic brokerage, where different forms of knowledge are translated, prioritised, and made ‘actionable’ for policymakers. Integration occurs across multiple boundaries: between disciplines, between parallel advisory bodies, and between experts and imagined policymakers. These brokerage practices enable collaboration but also reproduce hierarchies of legitimacy, with biomedical framings often setting boundaries for problem definitions while social and experiential concerns enter as contextual or secondary considerations. At the same time, moments of reflexive discussion around values create openings for more diverse forms of knowledge to shape advice.

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This study examines how expertise, personal authority, and leadership shape the framing and formulation of pandemic policy advice for wicked problems, drawing on STS perspectives on co-production and ethnographic research within the UNITY advisory framework project.

Paper long abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic placed the resilience and preparedness of healthcare systems firmly on national policy agendas. Yet responses varied across countries, highlighting differences in crisis governance that cannot be explained by epidemiological evidence alone. Policymakers relied heavily on scientific advisory bodies to formulate policy advice for a rapidly evolving and inherently wicked problem. From a STS perspective, scientific knowledge and social order are co-produced. As Jasanoff argues, what counts as valid expertise both shapes and is shaped by institutional arrangements. In the Netherlands, virological and biomedical expertise became particularly influential in pandemic advisory structures, while behavioral and social sciences remained comparatively marginal. Although such asymmetries are often attributed to disciplinary hierarchies, less attention has been paid to the role of the individuals representing these fields. Personal characteristics such as leadership, credibility, and authority may influence how expertise is interpreted, how knowledge is prioritized, and how the crisis itself is framed in the formulation of policy advice.

This study examines how expertise, knowledge, and the individuals who represent them interact in the formulation of pandemic advice. Following the UNITY research consortium, we use qualitative methods including interviews, observations, and document analysis to study the development and testing of an integrated advisory framework in simulation exercises.

The study contributes to understanding how expertise, authority, and framing shape decision making in the governance of wicked problems.

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This paper explores how AI can bridge epistemic hierarchies between research stations and tropical island communities to strengthen community resilience. Drawing on fieldwork in Panama and Curaçao, it examines barriers to knowledge integration and how AI might mediate more reciprocal collaboration.

Paper long abstract

Tropical island communities face environmental crises that demand the integration of multiple knowledge systems for effective preparedness and community resilience. They actively call for technologies to address these challenges, drawing on their own ecological knowledge and lived experience of vulnerability. Yet the knowledge infrastructures through which scientific advice is produced and mobilized (e.g., international research stations) remain structured by deep epistemic hierarchies. Operated predominantly by Global North institutions, these stations deploy cutting-edge AI for ecological modeling and conservation while neighboring island communities are largely excluded from research agendas and advisory processes.

When AI tools are designed around local needs and knowledge systems, they can strengthen community resilience and open space for more participatory configurations of science advice. However, they also risk reinforcing existing power asymmetries if implemented without genuine community agency.

Drawing on fieldwork in Panama and Curaçao, I identify which barriers hinder communication and collaboration between science and local island communities. I then explore how AI applications might bridge these gaps by mediating more reciprocal forms of knowledge integration between international researchers and local communities.

This research contributes to debates on knowledge integration by reframing resilience as a collective, situated practice and asking how epistemic practices at the intersection of crisis, technology, and locality might shape more just and accountable futures.

Keywords: knowledge integration, collaboration, artificial intelligence, marine research stations, Caribbean, crisis preparedness, community resilience

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The paper explores Bagnoli’s redevelopment through "anticipatory regimes" and "socio-technical imaginaries." It examines how the 2027 America’s Cup and seismic risk reconfigure expertise, contesting the legitimacy of local knowledge in the governance of resilient urban futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the redevelopment of Bagnoli, a former steelmaking district in western Naples (Italy), as a case study of how different forms of scientific expertise are mobilised and contested in urban governance under conditions of environmental risk and uncertainty. In recent decades, the area has been the focus of significant public investments for environmental remediation and urban regeneration, while also facing the ongoing bradyseismic crisis affecting the Phlegraean Fields.

Recent policy changes have reshaped previous remediation plans to restore the original coastal morphology and remove the industrial landfill created during the twentieth century, in order to accelerate infrastructural works linked to hosting the America’s Cup sailing competition in 2027, prioritising the construction of a new tourist marina.

Adopting an STS perspective, the paper analyses the controversy surrounding the America’s Cup as an arena where multiple epistemic cultures intersect. Government agencies, scientific institutions, urban planners, private developers, citizen committees, and local residents mobilise heterogeneous forms of knowledge—scientific, technical, experiential, and local—to frame competing visions of environmental remediation, ecological risk, and urban futures.

Drawing on concepts such as co-production, civic epistemologies, and anticipatory regimes, the study explores how different knowledge infrastructures are assembled in the governance of large urban projects. It investigates how anticipatory narratives of economic revitalization, ecological safety, and territorial resilience shape the legitimacy of expertise and the inclusion—or marginalization—of local knowledge. The Bagnoli case highlights how urgency and future-oriented imaginaries reconfigure the organization of scientific advice, while simultaneously generating sites of contestation over participatory and just urban futures.

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This paper examines how temporal pressures shape scientific advisory systems during pandemics. Fast indicators easily dominate, pushing slower societal effects to the background. We argue that anticipating crises requires advisory systems that accommodate such temporal dynamics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how temporal pressures shape scientific advisory systems during pandemics. Drawing on interviews and observations from UNITY’s work on integrated science advice in the Netherlands, we show that time is not merely a logistical constraint but a constitutive element that structures which knowledges are included, how legitimacy is negotiated, and what futures are imagined as actionable.

Pandemic governance unfolds through shifting tempos: early phases of uncertainty and urgency are followed by slower moving social, economic, and emotional effects. Yet advisory infrastructures often remain anchored in initial framings—such as infection control or hospital capacity—even as new societal concerns emerge. These path dependencies shape knowledge integration, narrowing what counts as relevant expertise and reinforcing imaginaries of “science” as fast, quantified, and biomedical.

Urgent decision making privileges fast, easily measurable indicators, while slower and harder to quantify issues—like mental health, educational disruption, or declining societal trust—are easily overlooked. This creates tensions between “fast” and “slow” science, between short and long term effects, and between narrow technical expertise and broader societal knowledge. Drawing on UNITY’s work, we examine how these temporal issues are addressed in integrated science advice.

We argue that these temporal dilemmas are fundamentally anticipatory: decisions about timelines define whose futures matter, which risks become visible, and what forms of knowledge are recognized as legitimate. Designing participatory and just crisis advisory systems requires frameworks that accommodate temporal plurality.

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This paper examines how predictive technologies and preparedness exercises can inadvertently close down rather than enhance anticipatory capacity in disaster governance. Using Japan’s nuclear preparedness as a case, it distinguishes prediction from anticipation and highlights institutional mindsets.

Paper long abstract

Anticipatory governance is often associated with predictive technologies, simulations, and preparedness exercises designed to foresee and manage future crises. However, anticipation is not equivalent to prediction. While prediction estimates future events, anticipation translates uncertain futures into strategies, adaptive responses, and learning under uncertainty.

This paper examines how predictive technologies can paradoxically undermine anticipatory capacities, using the case of nuclear emergency preparedness in Japan before and after the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Building on previous research by the author on predictive technologies in nuclear disaster governance, the paper revisits the role of the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI). Before 2011, Japan’s preparedness regime relied heavily on SPEEDI, a dispersion modelling tool for evacuation decisions. In practice, SPEEDI became embedded in scripted disaster drills aimed at demonstrating that responses could be executed under predefined plans. Prediction thus functioned less as a resource for exploring uncertainty than as a device stabilizing imaginaries of controllable disasters.

Following Fukushima, policy shifted in the opposite direction: predictive modelling was abandoned in favour of preset evacuation zones and criteria-based decision rules. While intended to ensure robustness under uncertainty, this approach limited incorporation of emerging knowledge during unfolding crises.

Drawing on literature on anticipatory governance and institutional mindsets, the paper argues that the anticipatory value of predictive technologies depends less on the technologies themselves than on the institutional contexts shaping their use. When embedded in closed preparedness regimes, prediction may stabilize imaginaries of controllable disasters rather than support anticipatory learning under uncertainty.

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How can technology assessment as an established policy advisory field best contribute to crisis resilience and disaster preparedness? We present findings from a dedicated conference, addressing issues of timing, integration and geopolitical scope.

Paper long abstract

Whether it's the “climate crisis,” “crisis of confidence,” “COVID crisis,” or “energy crisis,” debates surrounding so-called crises are not only an integral part of subjective experience, everyday politics, and journalistic reporting, but have also increasingly found their way into scientific discourse and scientific policy advice in recent years. In times of “poly-crises” and technological leaps, the demand for and efforts to obtain transparent and independent knowledge are equally great, but also present all stakeholders with new challenges. For this reason, the 11th conference of the German Network for Technology Assessment (NTA11) focused on crisis-specific needs in scientific policy advice. In this paper, we aim at summarizing our learnings from this three-day event, that are now published within an edited volume.

Firstly, the combination of urgency, uncertainty, complexity, and global interdependencies seems to force upon us a momentous decision: Should TA respond quickly and locally, with simple messages for rapid decisions, or should it proceed thoroughly, and anticipatively, embracing slowness for the sake of increasing social resilience in the long term? Secondly, different types of crises challenge democratic processes: ‘chronic crises’ lead to social fragmentation and a decline in shared values; ‘creeping crises’ undermine the legitimacy of public institutions, including TA expertise and its political addressees. Transformative TA research can foster integration and trust-building. Thirdly, the geopolitical level at which TA should be institutionalized become more salient. TA is currently well represented only at the national level in some countries, whereas the local/regional, the global level lack comparable institutions.