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Based on in-depth interviews with members of two academic climate activist movements in Sweden, this paper explores how competing notions of expertise shape the credibility and legitimacy of scientists’ political engagement amid contested authority of expert knowledge.

Paper long abstract

How do scientists negotiate the credibility and legitimacy of expertise when engaging in political activism in a context where the authority of expert knowledge is increasingly contested? Drawing on in-depth interviews with scholars involved in the Swedish climate activist movements Researchers Desk and Scientist Rebellion, this paper examines how academic climate activists mobilize and reinterpret expertise when legitimizing political action. Adopting a frame analytic approach, we analyze how activists make sense of the relationship between scientific knowledge, ethical responsibility, and public trust.

Across both movements, climate change is framed as an unprecedented societal crisis and scientists are understood to carry a particular ethical responsibility to act. However, activists articulate this responsibility through two contrasting notions of expertise. While some locate their authority in field-specific scientific expertise, others ground it in a broader scientific vocation and the civic responsibilities associated with belonging to the scientific community. These differing understandings produce distinct boundaries around which epistemic claims are considered legitimate and shape competing visions of how scientists should intervene in public debate.

By examining how academic climate activists negotiate the credibility of expertise and the legitimacy of political engagement, the paper contributes to STS discussions on shifting relations between knowledge, authority, and democracy. It highlights how struggles over expertise within scientific communities themselves reflect broader transformations in public trust in expert knowledge and the role of science in contemporary societies.

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Paper short abstract

Debates about technocracy and populism as competing forms of truth in liberal democracies constrains productive understanding and debates. A virtue epistemology can help us frame these competing political-epistemic regimes as vice-laden modes of knowledge production from which to learn from.

Paper long abstract

Scientific expertise – treated as representative epistemic authority of technocratic elites – exists in contrast to populism in political epistemology. Technocracy and populism compete as the two wellsprings of political truth in modern democracies. These contrasting political-epistemic regimes maintain their authority self-referentially, each justifying its legitimacy through opposition to the other. The result is a persistent tension within liberal pluralistic democratic societies, where we require a modus vivendi–a minimal degree of consensual agreement on basic truths necessary for collective decision-making. The challenge becomes how to mediate and coordinate a middle ground between these oppositional forces. In their opposition to each other's perceived threat of hegemony, this pair of conflicting positions establish a conceptual hegemony over political epistemology, constraining the ways which knowledge in democratic politics can be understood solely in reference to one of these political-epistemic regimes.

This contribution argues that accommodating both technocratic and populist perspectives, while neither privileging nor legitimising either, requires a political epistemology in which expert knowledge gains precedence only through democratic mediation. I suggest a virtue epistemological framework provides such grounding and dissolves populist-technocratic dichotomous oppositionalism. This framework understands these competing political-epistemic regimes as distinct practices of knowledge production laden with different virtues and vices–their virtues are features from which they derive their legitimation, and their vices are justified as preferable to the competing regime’s vices. Rather than positions to be mediated between, they are modes of practice from which we can identify which epistemic and social virtues should be cultivated and which vices avoided.

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The paper discusses “scientific populism” in the Covid-19 pandemic and argues that if we are to see a legitimate democratisation of science, two obstacles must be overcome: the conspiracy theory charge and the international technocratic offensive.

Paper long abstract

In Western democracies, a significant proportion of the population no longer takes at face value politicians’ justifications of public policies, nor the pronouncements of scientific experts. This social evolution is dubbed populist, far-right, or fascist by mainstream media, academics, and political personnel alike. But whether we like it or not, it is here to stay and can even give rise to institutionalised forms such as MAHA in the US. A better way to make sense of this orientation towards science is to draw upon the findings accumulated in STS for the past forty years. Thus, “scientific populism” signals the blatant failure of the PUS strategy despite sustained efforts since the Bodmer report. True, following the wrong risk assessment of BSE, PUS was questioned and much was made of the House of Lords “Science in Society” report. Yet PUS was replaced by the Public Engagement in Science approach that rested on the same deficit model.

The proposed paper has three aims. First, I will show that we have known since the 1960s that laypeople can grasp and mobilise scientific knowledge in an independent and fruitful manner. Second, looking at the (mis)management of the Covid-19 pandemic, I will discuss the extent to which “scientific populism” is a figure of the lay appropriation of science. Third, I will argue that if we are to see a legitimate democratisation of science, two major obstacles must be overcome: the conspiracy theory charge on the one hand, the international technocratic offensive on the other.

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Paper short abstract

Public unease with science has evolved rapidly into the political mainstream. In this paper I develop an analytical framework for understanding the sources of public unease through working at the interface of critical public engagement studies, knowledge politics and cultural sociology.

Paper long abstract

Public unease with science has evolved from a preoccupation of academics, science policy actors and fringe groups into the political mainstream with populist parties increasingly resisting science-based policymaking. Working with two cases where science-based policymaking is experiencing backlash – climate-change measures and vaccination policy – an analytical framework for studying the sources of public unease to controversial science is developed. Three innovations are proposed. (1) A critical and politically reflexive mode of ‘doing’ public engagement is proposed. By engaging publics in critical policy analysis, publics use lay experiential knowledge to challenge and reconfigure a dominant public policy representation of an issue, and where the role of the facilitator is to make issues explicit and political. (2) The concept of the ‘deep story’ – inspired by Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land – is developed for understanding the narrative mechanisms through which disillusionment and disaffection with mainstream politics is enacted. From the perspective of the populist right, for example, climate-change policy is viewed as a Trojan horse, from which emerges the quintessential overreach of global government, imposing restrictions on personal freedoms in how people travel, heat their homes, purchase goods and so on, taking away residues of political control, agency and honour from publics. (3) The institutional dynamics underpinning the epistemic role of science as an actor in fostering polarisation and resistance is highlighted, to help explain the (often stubborn) resistance of policymakers to engage seriously with lay experiential knowledge.

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Paper short abstract

A decade of right-wing populism has eroded climate ambition, yet progressive responses beyond the deficit model have yet to materialise at scale. With an empirical case from German energy policy, this paper explores how STS approaches might retheorise dissent for a more reconciliatory democracy.

Paper long abstract

A decade since Euro-American politics lurched towards a new populist paradigm, the political consensus around climate action has continued to fracture in the global north, from acute challenges like ULEZ and Gilets Jaunes protests to the more general materialisation of a shared anti-Net zero platform between emerging far-right movements. Beyond rehearsing a commitment to facts, or else enlisting in the very same fractious culture wars, compelling progressive response to this moment have been few.

At the same time, the social and moral implicatedness of climate action has never had greater institutional recognition than it does now, with terms like environmental justice, sustainable development, and just transition littering political discourse from university departments to multilateral treaties. Why then do policies seem no closer to understanding sociological rifts of populism, much less reconciling them. Can STS help move us towards a more productive account of dissent in existential times?

This paper will present early results from a comparative study on Just Transition discourse in Germany. The national 'Energiewende' policy pursues a normative vision centred on 'energy democracy' and citizen participation in its plan for energy transition, yet opposition to the plan appears strongest in many parts of Germany most in need of industrial transformation. The paper explores dissent as the product of mismatched visions of 'justice' and progress between state and citizen in a time of transition. This symmetrical model aims for alternative ways of theorising public dissent beyond narratives of deficit, as one possible step towards a more reconciliatory democratic politics.

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This study draws on discourse theory to analyse how politicised social groups articulate their political identities and antagonisms in relation to the climate in the Netherlands.

Paper long abstract

The rise of populist politics in 21st-century Europe is profoundly entangled with the emergence of climate change as a contested political problem. Though populist movements are commonly portrayed as obstacles to climate action, they have been at the forefront of the (re-)politicisation of climate change and of the formation of various polities that contest the meaning and importance of climate change. Simultaneously, they also contribute to an increasingly polarised public sphere with intensifying antagonisms erupting among opposing political groups. The Dutch context is particularly revealing: the nitrogen crisis saw the emergence of farmer protests that contested governmental policy and its purported scientific basis, while concurrent climate movements are demanding more science-driven climate policies.

Despite STS’s insistence on the co-production of climate science and its politics, there are few empirical accounts of how civil political identities take shape around climate science. Yet, the shape of these political identities and how they relate to one another have profound implications for the possibilities of a democratic governance of climate policy and the role climate science is afforded therein. This study draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory to analyse how various social groups in the Netherlands articulate their political identities in relation to the climate and where they locate antagonisms with other identities.

In order to capture the spectrum of polarisation that exists around climate discourse in the Netherlands, the participants were recruited based on their self-identification as climate activists, organic farmers, biodiversity experts, industrial farmers and climate sceptics.

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Paper short abstract

A comparative analysis of parliamentary debates in five countries examines how scientific authority is negotiated in politics, showing how research is strategically invoked and contested. The paper examines the politics of expertise in democratic institutions amid contemporary populist challenges.

Paper long abstract

Recent debates in Science and Technology Studies examine how the authority of expertise is negotiated in contemporary politics, particularly amid populist challenges to expert knowledge. While much attention has focused on explicit contestation of science, less is known about how research is routinely mobilized within democratic political institutions. This contribution examines how research and science are invoked and framed in parliamentary debates.

The analysis draws on a qualitative analysis of 325 parliamentary documents from 2023 across five countries: Australia, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and South Africa. Using a keyword search for research or science, the study identifies 6,091 coded segments. An inductively developed coding scheme captures different ways in which research appears in parliamentary discourse: as evidence supporting political arguments, as expressions of value attributed to science, and as instances where research agendas are problematized.

The findings show that parliamentary actors rarely reject science outright. Instead, critique more often targets the credibility of specific research outcomes or research activities. Conversely, when invoking scientific evidence, speakers frequently appeal to the authority of particular research institutions. These patterns are consistent across the five cases countries, while differences in framing seems primarily along the political spectrum.

By tracing how research is mobilized in parliamentary debates, the paper contributes to STS discussions on the politics of expertise and epistemic authority in democratic societies. The analysis highlights how scientific knowledge is strategically invoked, contested, and reframed within parliamentary politics at a time when the authority of science is simultaneously relied upon and challenged.

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Paper short abstract

There have been massive disruptions in the US research system (and elsewhere) with world-wide consequences. How are European-based researchers making sense of these changes? And what are the consequences for global research? We report on a qualitative study of researchers and research leaders.

Paper long abstract

The US research system finds itself under political attack, both in terms of funding cuts but also a broader climate of hostility and threat. In this situation, many scientists experience a massive direct impact on their research (for example within infectious diseases and climate change) but also substantial indirect effects – including a sense of personal insecurity and fear. We report upon a series of interviews with researchers and research leaders across Europe. How are they making sense of the disruptions to the international research system? And what does this mean for their own research activities?

In terms of the European research system, it is possible to imagine a ‘wait and see’ response – based on the idea that this may be only a temporary phase. One can also anticipate an ‘accommodation’ approach; perhaps changing European policies (for example on diversity) in order to fit with US demands. A third and more radical approach could be labelled ‘adaptation’ as new initiatives emerge which seek to counter-act or re-balance current disruptions. These responses are linked to an assessment of the robustness of the global research system: can it withstand such shocks or will the consequence be irreparable damage to research consortia and infrastructures?

Interviews suggest that the responses of European researchres relate to their assessment of whether this is primarily a US problem or whether similar threats exist within Europe. How do they view the emergence of related populist movements closer to home? And what does this mean for their activities?

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the issues of trust in, and governance of Science-for-Policy ecosystems. What to trust and the issue of persisting scientific dissent and uncertainty? and who to trust amidst misleading populistic science communication and interest-based strategic use of scientific knowledge?

Paper long abstract

Key words: Science-for-Policy, Scientific Expertise, Trust, Anticipatory Governance.

Scientific advice is more entangled than ever with value‑laden policy decisions, yet the conditions that sustain trust have grown fragile. Policymakers depend on science to render complex problems actionable (e.g., climate risk, pandemics), but institutional pressures—reproducibility concerns, metrics‑driven knowledge production, strategic use of expertise, and the populistic spread of disinformation—undermine public confidence. This paper tackles the following guiding question: How can trust in science‑for‑policy ecosystems be understood and institutionally strengthened under conditions of uncertainty, scientific dissent, and public contestation?

We make three contributions. First, we advance a clarified conceptualisation of trust for the science‑policy interface that integrates cognitive, relational, and procedural dimensions. Second, we link these dimensions to governance principles and to distinct ‘objects of trust’ across the ecosystem. Third, we offer a collaborative science-policy-society agenda that couples quality assurance and anticipatory governance with inclusive knowledge brokerage.

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Paper short abstract

The Lysenko affair, long a cautionary tale of political interference in science, is reframed as a Kuhnian "antiexemplar": a normative failure shaping scientific boundaries politically, ethically, and disciplinarily. This invites complex STS readings beyond caricatures to resilient epistemic futures.

Paper long abstract

The Lysenko affair stands as a canonical narrative in history, philosophy, and sociology of science—a recurring "morality tale" (Mouzo, 2025) warning against political interference, from Stalinist endorsement of Trofim Lysenko's failed genetic theories to Soviet agricultural collapse. Popular textbooks and high-impact journals (Nature Genetics) perpetuate it as fraud cautioning against state meddling in science.

This paper replaces that reductive framing with the analytic category of "anti-exemplar," inspired by Kuhn's exemplars—shared past achievements guiding normal science (Kuhn, 1962). We define anti-exemplars as "exemplary failures" blocking discarded research paths as normative obstacles.

Methodologically, we conduct a bibliographic review of classic historiographies (Medvedev 1969; Joravsky 1970; Lecourt 1978) plus recent works (Krementsov 1996; Graham 2016; Wolfe 2010), alongside textbook mentions and Scientific journal rhetoric.

Lysenko functions as an "anti-exemplar"on three axes: politically, assaulting scientific autonomy amid Cold War tensions between democratic (scientist-led) and totalitarian (state-controlled) models; ethically, as "infamous" violator of Merton's CUDOS norms (Merton 1942), contrasted with Vavilov's martyrdom; disciplinarily, reinforcing modern genetics' identity against "Lamarckian" inheritance of acquired characters, consolidating it as a discipline

This anti-exemplar reveals its emergence amid post-WWII state-science planning, expert role shifts, and ethical norm-building. Contemporary epigenetics reopens Lysenko affair-blocked paths, while STS (Haraway 2004; Latour 2008) moves beyond positivist/Popperian/Mertonian legacies that Lysenko readings helped entrench.

Far from rehabilitating Lysenko, this invites complex, non-naïve interpretations of historical episodes as disciplinary tools—fostering resilient epistemic futures attuned to science's co-production with politics and society

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Paper short abstract

Populist contestation of science is not ignorance but a political symptom. Using the SVC framework and Latour's five political modes, this paper reframes climate skepticism as a political response to the production of expert knowledge.

Paper long abstract

The rise of populism is frequently narrated as a story of science denial — publics rejecting expert consensus in favor of misinformation or tribal identity. This paper argues that this framing misses something more structurally significant: the contestation of scientific authority is not a failure of public reason but a legible political response to the conditions under which expert knowledge has been produced, circulated, and trusted.

To make this argument, the paper develops a dialogue between the stakes–visibility–contestability (SVC) framework and Bruno Latour's (2007) five successive meanings of "political," using climate change science as its central case. The SVC framework holds that a science's political status can be understood through three interacting dimensions: the stakes involved in scientific knowledge; the degree of public and political visibility of scientific findings; and the extent to which scientific authority is perceived as contestable. Crucially, contestability does not require genuine scientific uncertainty — it can be manufactured and institutionalized, and it is precisely this manufactured contestability that populist movements often inherit, rather than originate.

Latour's typology gives this argument its processual depth. The current populist moment is best understood as a Political-2 eruption: publics rendered problematic by decades of unresolved science-policy entanglements that deliberative institutions have failed to adequately represent. Populist skepticism of climate science is thus not ignorance; it is a symptom of the failure of expert institutions to adequately represent the publics whose knowledge they affect. This paper explains how the conditions of science politicization create the trust deficits that populism exploits.

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Paper short abstract

Inquiring into critiques and appropriate responses in the Dutch nitrogen controversy, I explore how these interactions can be telling of how science and democracy coproduce. For this, I study how publics' epistemic demands and scientists' epistemic conventions stand in relation with one another.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation, I explore key critiques directed at science and its representatives that became articulated in the agricultural-environmental controversy on nitrogen in the Netherlands by relying on an analysis of (online) newspaper articles between 2019 and 2025. Furthermore, I contextualise these critiques with appropriate responses relevant technoscientific actors or institutions. This latter part relies on ongoing field work in a scientific unit that is implicated in these critiques. In doing so, I explore how the articulation of epistemic demands by concerned publics and the epistemic conventions of scientists stand in relation with one another. Understanding the interaction of articulation-response as moments in which the ontological and the normative co-stabilise, I explore how such interactions can be telling of how science and democracy become coproduced.

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Paper short abstract

Post‑truth politics and corporate doubt expose the limits of STS symmetry. Drawing on Söderberg’s Asymmetry Principle, the paper examines how socio‑technical infrastructures enact dominant realities and weaponise ignorance. I propose ontological hegemony as a way to reassembly critique within STS.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that post-truth politics, corporate doubt-production, and the organised manufacturing of ignorance expose the limits of the symmetry principle in Science and Technology Studies. Building on Söderberg’s Asymmetry Principle, the analysis shows how contemporary knowledge conflicts are shaped by actors who intentionally cultivate uncertainty, doubt and ignorance, making symmetrical treatment of all claims analytically untenable. To address this, the paper reworks the Gramscian notion of hegemony into an ontological STS vocabulary by conceptualising it as an ontological regime: a distributed configuration of devices, platforms, practices, and institutional routines that enact particular realities while disarticulating or foreclosing others. In this formulation, hegemony operates not primarily through ideology but through socio-technical assemblages that stabilise certain ontologies while rendering alternative enactments fragile or impossible. Agnotology and research on “undone science” provide tools for tracing how ignorance becomes a strategic resource embedded in these ontological infrastructures. Drawing on Marxist and Hegelian traditions of critique, the paper outlines how STS can renew critical engagement without reverting to foundationalist truth regimes or naïve scientism. This approach foregrounds the political and moral necessity of distinguishing real from fake claims, interrogates the limits of the idiom of co-production and the generalised symmetry principle, and offers conceptual resources for analysing how technoscientific and corporate infrastructures reproduce ontological dominance in the post-truth era.

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What is science’s ‘rightful’ place? We propose a conceptual lens viewing both its renegotiation and politicisation as an active actor-driven process raising questions about science's performative nature and effects: what science is or ought to be, who gets to reimagine science and to what ends.

Paper long abstract

What is the 'rightful place of science'? This is continuously renegotiated, currently amidst backlashes against sustainability efforts, rising post-democratic politics and far-right populist movements, renewed geopolitical and military tensions. Actors, from “radical” researchers, governmental bodies, the military, to (authoritarian) policymakers, are destabilising existing scientific practices, funding streams, and institutions. Science, in this context, is both object and instrument of political struggle: deeply politicised yet often framed as apolitical by those who enact its politicisation. While a rich literature engages with science politicisation, how politicisation has performative effects remains blurred. This presentation advances a conceptual lens of science politicisation as performative, based on a critical engagement with STS and political science. Crucially, science and its institutions are inherently political and may at times become politicised, when their political character becomes visible, contested or strategically enacted – challenging, polarising or reshaping established forms of science. This politicisation relies on the enactment of performances, that we understand as producing social realities through contextualised interactions. Politicisation is then no longer a by-product of conflict or the exploitation of scientific uncertainty. Instead, it is an active actor-driven process that raises questions about what science is or ought to be, how politicisation is staged, by whom, and to what ends. We illustrate our theoretical argument through analytical vignettes drawn from sustainability science and security-related research. The politicisation of science then inevitably serves to reimagine the ‘rightful place of science’, yet the question remains who gets to reimagine science and for what purpose.

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Paper short abstract

Why are conspiracy theories unprecedentedly more appealing in today’s world? How did they become ever more mainstreamed and legitimised? Drawing on research with high income and high status professionals in Western Europe, this presentation explores how conspiracism fuels populist imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Conspiracism is ever more influential in sociopolitical debates across the world. Crucially, once secluded to the ‘fringes’, they have steadily moved to the ‘centre’, becoming unprecedentedly legitimised and credible. Striving to go beyond conventional articulations in political science and social psychology, which reduce conspiracism to individual/socioeconomic pathologies, this presentation takes conspiracy theories as alternative political imaginaries through which radical political critique is levelled against politics and society. It refrains from treating conspiracy theories simply through their epistemological qualities (that they are always already wrong) but focuses on the sociopolitical effects generated through their circulation. Through focusing on the findings from an ongoing study with educated elites (physicians, lawyers, and managers) in Germany, UK, and Sweden, this presentation explores how conspiracism engages with the political arguments of populist and radical right political movements, mainstreams them in the face of decline an inertia by ‘establishments’, and through conspiratorial forms, come up with radical political critiques against increasing socioeconomic inequality and political polarisation. This exploration reveals how the terrain upon which scientific ‘truth’ reigned supreme is radically reconfigured with competing political claims challenge the way society and politics are organised.