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- Convenors:
-
Charlotte Waltz
(Pandemic Disaster Preparedness Center)
Bert de Graaff (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Roland Bal (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Anticipating uncertainty: organizing scientific advice for crisis and disaster preparedness and response
Description
Wicked crises such as pandemics, climate emergencies, and technological disruptions expose the fragmented and fragile enactments of knowledge-infrastructures, for instance in the uneven distribution of legitimacy across epistemic cultures. Scientific advice is often mobilized not only to manage a pandemic or disruption, but to prepare for and imagine particular futures. Practices of preparedness, optimization, and speculation structure how different epistemic cultures are included or excluded, and on what terms. The height of the COVID-19 pandemic rekindled an emphasis on the integration of such epistemic cultures, questioning in particular the dominance of biomedical approaches. What does it mean to integrate scientific, experiential, local, embodied, formal, and informal knowledges when histories, institutions, politics, and anticipatory imperatives shape both the possibilities and the limits of collaboration?
We invite contributions that explore scientific advice in crisis preparedness and response as sites of anticipatory practices. We are particularly interested in exploring how knowledge integration is organized in practice, and how different approaches to knowledge integration might shape more participatory futures of scientific advice. How are advisory bodies designed to bring together multiple knowledges under conditions of urgency and uncertainty? How do such designs reproduce or unsettle entrenched hierarchies of legitimacy? How are socio-technical imaginaries enacted when timeliness, anticipation, and inclusion come into tension? In what ways do epistemic practices of knowledge integration risk reinforcing and reproducing perceptions of “Science”, and in what ways might they open space for more participatory, accountable, and just futures?
We welcome empirical, comparative, and conceptual contributions that examine these questions across domains such as public health, environmental governance, technological regulation, and other fields where the mobilization of scientific advice is deemed critical. Contributions might engage with debates in STS around co-production, civic epistemologies, anticipatory regimes, knowledge infrastructures, or constitutional dimensions of expertise, among other approaches to studying scientific advice.