Issue 1: Pandemic

Issue 1 – Table of Contents

Introduction – Pandemic from the Perspective of Science and Technology Studies

COVID and Comparative STS – An Interview with Dr. Shobita Parthasarathy
Matthew Sample

What Expertise, between Life and Death? COVID-19 in the UK
Noah Walker-Crawford

Locating the State in the Restaurant
Anna Nguyen

STS in an Un-Silent Spring: Or How to Listen in a Time of Crisis
Hilton Simmet

Re-Imagining Democracy with STS
Shiv Visvanathan

Expertise and Locality – A Conversation with Professor Sundar Sarukkai on STS and COVID Science in India
Nithyanand Rao

Performing Expertise in Times of Pandemic: Strengthening the Expert-Lay Divide
Elise Tancoigne and Marianne Noël

About This Issue

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Introduction: Pandemic from the Perspective of Science and Technology Studies

MATTHEW SAMPLE

For each of us, crisis evokes experiences and meanings that may or may not be shared with our fellow humans, whether colleagues, family members and friends, or public figures. In this moment, there is not one crisis but rather many crises: of the climate, of public health, of racism and inequality, and of governance, to name a few. One thread that runs through each of these is the need to act, an implicit compulsion to do something, even if any particular action on its own is unlikely to accomplish anything. This online media project STS&Crisis is in a sense born out of that compulsion, tied to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the uncertain present and possible futures that it represents. As crisis pushes individuals and institutions to seek out authoritative epistemic and moral guidance, it also poses a challenge for academic research and scholarship to respond in kind.  

We see this moment of crisis as one that calls upon the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in two ways. First, STS is distinguished by its careful attention to the co-production of knowledge and social orders, the making of pasts and futures, and the entanglements of bodies and modes of governance. During the pandemic, these theoretical insights into the moral commitments of societies, into carceral logics, and the meaning of health and illness become crucial. They represent a core set of intellectual contributions that STS scholars can make with special force. To do so means leveraging existing empirical and theoretical literature in a responsive mode, situating or clarifying the crisis we are currently living through. Other academics from a range of disciplines are already seizing this opportunity. The historian Lorraine Daston, for instance, has claimed that we have been catapulted back to the 17th century and “ground zero empiricism.” In philosophy, Giorgio Agamben has asserted controversially that the crisis is merely a pretense for the consolidation of state power. Bioethicists as a group have commanded perhaps the widest uptake as experts, publishing ever more op-eds and guidelines (lawful or not) to delineate the lives worth saving in the context of constrained healthcare resources.    

But are these quasi-academic texts and takes — promoted widely in short form via newspapers, social media, and commentary — really an appropriate mode of expression for STS or (as Warwick Anderson has suggested) should we stay silent because we don’t yet have something to say? How can STS scholars better shape their writings and public engagements to meet a crisis in real time? And to serve whose interests? 

This brings us to the second important sense in which STS is called upon to face this crisis. Practitioners in our field must, as they have many times before, reflect on and re-configure their role as critical scholars within present-day society. Unlike bioethics and other related fields, STS already has the methodological tools to conduct such a self-examination in a rigorous way: a trained community, a set of critical approaches, and decades of work that unpacks the production, performance and attribution of expertise, cultural standards of public reason, and democratic implications of knowledge practices. Each of these analytic thrusts contains an implicit normativity that, if made more explicit, could enrich our collective discussions of the values, means, and goals of STS in a time of crisis.

Over the next few months, this inaugural issue of the STS&Crisis project will publish short pieces, reflections, and interviews that address fundamental methodological questions and use STS to better understand current crises around the globe. The format will remain somewhat traditional — text or discourse written for interested online readers — but this choice is not inconsequential; it means that many other publics, including those most adversely affected by the crises of 2020, are left out from these discussions. For this reason, this project will prioritize contributions that seek to forge new connections to affected publics or communities beyond STS. Our self-understandings as researchers and scholars should not begin or end with texts, but should be sharpened through interactions with the world, whether in dialogue with local policy makers and activists or in speaking with a colleague or neighbor. In this spirit, we hope to collect reflections and engagements that sharpen the field’s sense of purpose, beneficence, and collective action, both now and for future crises. 

Matthew Sample, PhD (Managing Editor, STS&Crisis Issue 1) is a philosopher of science and technology. His research maps the interactions between ethical ideals, emerging technologies, and democratic governance.

COVID and Comparative STS: An Interview with Dr. Shobita Parthasarathy

MATTHEW SAMPLE

Whether between times, contexts, or spaces, comparison is a core methodological technique in STS, and is exhibited by several pieces in this issue. In June 2020, Matthew interviewed Dr. Parthasarathy (School of Public Policy, University of Michigan) about her own use of comparison in a recent project on COVID-19 and policy responses.

What Expertise, between Life and Death? COVID-19 in the UK.

NOAH WALKER-CRAWFORD

The global coronavirus crisis is bringing to the fore how science and expertise come to bear on political decision-making. While scientists might strive towards an idealized form of neutrality, their insights are inevitably entangled with other normative values. How we know the world is inherently connected to how we choose to live in it – a dynamic that the STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff has described as “co-production.”¹ The UK’s coronavirus response offers an example.

In an unusually sunny British spring, thousands of people have ignored government advice and gone outside. As a pandemic began to engulf the world, beaches and tourist hotspots overflowed with visitors enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. Many worried that this helped spread the “novel coronavirus” that has wreaked havoc on the British health care system.

The UK government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson was slow in taking action to impede the spread of COVID-19. While most European countries had followed advice from public health scientists and imposed strict lockdowns, the UK’s initial strategy was to let the disease spread and achieve “herd immunity” – if a large enough portion of the population contracted the virus, it would stop spreading. Why take such a different approach? According to newspaper reports, the UK government planned for a controlled circulation of the virus based on mathematical models, privileging advice from behavioral scientists and rejecting calls from public health experts for tighter restrictions and widespread testing.

We can imagine government officials and advisors poring over spreadsheets. In one scenario, 250,000 people might die. In another, half a million. Better keep those numbers down, some officials might have said. Whatever advice he collected, Boris Johnson subsequently told the nation: “Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” While other European countries implemented draconian restrictions on public life to stop the virus from spreading, pubs, restaurants and schools initially remained open throughout the UK. Public officials merely urged citizens to avoid crowded places. According to one news report, Johnson’s Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings said crudely: “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

What kind of logic leads political leaders to knowingly accept hundreds of thousands of untimely deaths? Our contemporary conception of public health emerged in 18^th and 19^th century England, when government officials sought to map and control the spread of disease among the population. This required statistical representations that rendered the population as a biological entity that could be disciplined for its own good. In Michel Foucault’s terms, this gave rise to a form of “biopolitics,” a new governmental focus on the population’s health and fitness. Britain exported its understanding of public health to colonies around the world, ultimately contributing to the global discourses and expertise embodied in the World Health Organization.

When COVID-19 began to spread through Europe, Boris Johnson faced tough choices. He had built his political career, in part, on the symbolism of “Little Britain” – a determined island nation going its own path in the world, stronger outside of Europe. If Europe was in lockdown on the basis of international public health advisory bodies, the opposite strategy was surely best for Britain. In combination with the discourses of “herd immunity,” I noticed that government declarations and media pundits seemed to purvey a sense of British exceptionalism.

But Britain’s initially light-handed approach to COVID-19 would fail spectacularly, leading to a government-mandated public lockdown within weeks, bringing an end to beach tourism and reliance on public judgment. Scientific advisors at Imperial College London presented revised models warning that the strategy of herd immunity would lead to many more deaths than social distancing. With fears that the country’s National Health Service might collapse, the government changed its strategy and followed the advice of public health experts calling for stricter measures. While other experts placed more emphasis on the economic impact of lockdown, the government ultimately chose to re-align its priorities with those of public health science – by seeking to save lives.

Looking back at these policy missteps and hesitations, the problem is not, as some have claimed, just a failure to “follow the science.” Drawing on the framework of co-production, we should also pay attention to the way that understandings of expertise are co-produced with shared imaginaries of what it means to be British. When experts produce knowledge, they inadvertently incorporate their disciplinary values – economists focus on the economy while medical scientists are more concerned with healing sickness. These varying forms of expertise, with their own histories, enable different possibilities for political argumentation in a given cultural context—a social phenomenon that Jasanoff (2011) has studied as Britain’s “civic epistemology.”² Accordingly, when Boris Johnson faced uncertainty over an emerging pandemic and economic crisis, he had to weigh both competing values and multiple types of knowledge, and he allowed his view of common sense to override scientific expertise.

Looking back, the UK government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic appears tragically chaotic. As infection began to spread, Boris Johnson boasted of shaking patients’ hands. After the government advised people to stay away from older people, he said he would visit his 77-year-old mother on Mother’s Day. By early April, Johnson was in intensive care with COVID-19. Health Secretary Matt Hancock also tested positive, while Johnson’s Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings and England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty were in self-isolation after displaying coronavirus symptoms. With confirmed deaths from COVID-19 at over 40,000 in the UK, it becomes all the more urgent to ask: why did the UK go its own way in initially favoring economic worries over public health concerns? Are there more balanced approaches for integrating expertise into political decision-making?

Noah Walker-Crawford is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. His work traces the production of knowledge in social claims about climate change and responsibility. Using an ethnographic approach, he is following a precedent-setting lawsuit for climate justice brought by a Peruvian farmer against a German energy company.

References and Further Reading:

¹Jasanoff, S. (Ed.). (2004). States of Knowledge: the Co-production of Science and the Social Order. Routledge.

²Jasanoff, S. (2011). Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press.

Irwin, A., & Wynne, B. (Eds.). (1996). Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology. Cambridge University Press. 

Locating the State in the Restaurant 

ANNA NGUYEN

In April and June of 2020, Anna Nguyen conducted an interview with Mali Too, a local community member and service employee in Watertown, MA. What started out as a small exercise in tracing the language of the state in the restaurant led Anna to reflect on the need for broader institutional reforms.

Driving to Pho O-Sha, a Vietnamese-Thai restaurant, takes less than five minutes from our apartment, yet we didn’t start ordering takeout until the pandemic. Each time we’ve stepped inside, the seating area looks different, a sign of the gradual regulatory changes imposed on the restaurant industry. Since Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency on March 10 and a statewide shutdown of all eating establishments on March 16, restaurants like Pho O-Sha have tried to navigate the consequences of closing their dining rooms. 

Taped to the front doors of Pho O-Sha, two bright orange pages detail a notice released and signed by Baker, prohibiting gatherings of more than 25 people and on-premises consumption of food or drink. The brief provides a short outline of effective dates ranging from March 10-17 announced by the governor himself, the definition of the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, and guidance from the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to protect the citizens of the Commonwealth. The notice ends with a reference to sections 7, 8, and 8A of Chapter 639 of the Acts of 1950: Civil Defense Act, left unexplained and ominous for the reader. 

In his provocatively titled Seeing Like a State, James Scott writes that along with a governing system of beliefs, high modernism, and globalization, states design and impose census data, standardized metrics, and static language to make societies visible.¹ However, these tools for governance, legal codes, and language may not actually benefit citizens or take account of lived experiences. And, yet, the troubling “encratic language”² of the state has traveled into our everyday lives and into other institutions’ language practices. We can trace how language, ideas, and people flow across local and global boundaries to understand the shift in our social worlds, or what Arjun Appadurai has detailed in his five “-scapes” of globalization (mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, and financescapes).³ Since the pandemic, and likely long before, restaurants are a site to locate where and how the state is reinscribed. 

During the few times I’ve been inside Pho O-Sha, the dining tables are pushed to the corner, chairs atop, to discourage customers from sitting or other unnecessary contact. At that time, I could still see the kitchen, where two cooks were filling orders. When I came by at the end of April to interview Mali Too, two of the dining tables were pushed together to bar the customer from walking any further than the pick-up table. A printed photo of two people at two meters apart was taped in front of the table. I no longer saw the kitchen but heard a chef nearby. At the very left of the dining room, four tables with designated handwritten signs on neon colored paper for DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and ChowNow indicated orders from third-party options. But the tables are empty.

Pho O-Sha opened in January of 2018 on Arsenal Street. A year later, Boston Globe published an enthusiastic and promising review. Mali is friends with co-owner Prasert Pathammovong, and has worked at Pho O-Sha six months after the restaurant opened.

“In the beginning, when I first started working here, it was very busy during lunch time. All tables here were full of people,” said Mali, gesturing to the sparse dining room. We were both wearing our face masks, but took them off and stood at the recommended distance when we couldn’t hear each other. “The main customers, they work around here in the offices. Some customers used to come two or three times a week. I recognized them and knew their names.”

Now, some months into this exceptional year, the employees at Pho O-Sha are dealing with the ongoing economic challenges of COVID-19. 

“We decided to close for two weeks when things were getting bad in Boston, when things were announced,” said Mali, referring to the now universal recommendation of self-quarantine by public health officials. “We closed for the personal safety of ourselves and the customers. We work with food, you know.”  

During this two-week self-evaluation, Mali said they had reduced the number of staff. There used to be between four and five employees in the kitchen, and now in their limited capacity they have three employees in the entire restaurant. Since the stay-at-home orders and businesses operating within restrictions, Mali estimates that they have lost about 70 percent of business. 

When Mali speaks about Pho O-Sha, she often refers to the local and global news and media and her own observations, and weaves in these references throughout our 20-minute conversation. They receive weekly updates by fax and telephone calls from the city, regarding the number of COVID cases and plans to reopen businesses and schools. They applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Small Business Administration (SBA) loans under the federal CARES Act at the start of April, when it was first announced on the Internet and in the media.

When I asked if the delivery apps helped their business at all, she paused. Uber Eats takes a 35 percent commission, Grub Hub takes 20 percent, and ChowNow sent an email waiving commission fees for participating restaurants. Though they take a service fee, Mali says it is very little. Pho O-Sha has offered these services before the pandemic, but she noted that it didn’t enhance their overall business. 

She repeatedly brought up the possibility of government loans. 

“We don’t know when we are going to get those loans. The big businesses will get it first,” she said matter-of-factly. “The voices that are kind of louder at the bank…”

The phone rings, and Mali interrupts our conversation to answer the phone. After a few minutes, she hands the phone to Pathammovong.

“Some customers have expressed their support,” Mali said. “Some have tried to order once a week.” She points to Pathammovong, who was speaking animatedly into the phone. “Like that customer. She didn’t order anything, but she called to check on us.”

Although Mali often smiled and was forthcoming throughout our conversation, she is aware of the long-term impacts of this wave of uncertainty. She notes that restaurants will need more than a year to resume normalcy once and if things settle. These very sentiments are rife in popular food media. Headlines ask if ordering from restaurants is an ethical dilemma during this contentious time and what the oddly-phrased “new normal” means for indoor dining services.

In mid-June, Mali shared that Pho O-Sha received approval for the PPP loan. They were financed for 2.5 months of payroll. A week later, she reported her friend was approved for an SBA loan. 

As Baker continues with his 4-phase plan to reopen the economy, restaurants will proceed to open slowly. Yet, the fate of the restaurant is under scrutiny during the pandemic and ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. As many of us have seen, read, and known, all institutions have been reevaluated and are in need of a reckoning. This includes the restaurant, both the local and the big chains. Idealized representations of democratic society, as we might find in invocations of state law and in the pronouncement of allegedly universal public health facts, actually function to further exclude non-dominant groups and experiences. To write and observe cultural institutions like the restaurant as sites of oppression or where the invisible boundaries of “the racial contract” are enacted, as Charles W. Mills observed,⁴ means we need to reexamine the parts of the imagined world we desire. Though Mills’ target is the academy, his observations apply to other prominent institutions. 

The government guidance posted on the restaurant’s front doors, faxes from the city, the sign to emphasize social distancing, and the tables set aside for digital delivery services all seem inadequate to respond to the crisis and make better worlds possible. Discourses invoking oppression, capitalism, and social injustice have become part of our daily repertoires, as indicated by the current wave of protests and calls for reform, but the state persists. Despite our learned terms, our institutions and states have continued to use census data, statistics, and legal language to control citizens, govern businesses, and to minimize their own accountability. If multiple worlds are produced through deployments of labor, capital practices, and material and visual representations, as Sheila Jasanoff writes in Dreamscapes of Modernity, then our own languages and practices should reflect those desired social worlds.⁵ For now, they still embrace particular institutional standards of state surveillance and expert knowledge. 

Anna Nguyen, MLA is currently a doctoral student at L’institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, Canada and a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Program on Science, Technology and Society. She examines literary and technoscientific representations of food in society. Her academic and personal essays reflect a core interest in how we communicate our values for science and technology using food as an everyday metaphor

References and Further Reading:

¹Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.

²Roland Barthes’ term for language that is constructed and authorized by powerful institutions. C.f. Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. Macmillan.

³Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2-3), 295-310.

⁴Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.

⁵Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.

STS in an Un-Silent Spring: Or How to Listen in a Time of Crisis

HILTON SIMMET

Mar 2 2020. @BrunoLatourAIME writes: “Remember when it was hard to accept that non-humans, like microbes, could be full fledged actors -actants rather- able to build up associations in addition to those more classically ‘social’? Now it’s common sense: here is Chinese pollution with or without virus.”¹

The Twitter post contains two pictures, both with gossamer threads (perhaps a spider’s?) over white backgrounds and the letters C H I N A appearing in dark blue. The “pollution,” absent on the right and present in the left-hand image, seems to refer to a fuzzy little splotch of yellows, oranges and reds painted atop the blue.

To me, a junior STS scholar, it wasn’t clear what was so “common sense” about talking about actants, a specialized term in STS, nor what had been so “classically ‘social’,” and hence inadequate, in the associations behind the Chinese pollution that this post was referring to. It did remind my unfocused millennial mind of being in backyards—the yellow blob looked like a 2D image of a spider’s nest I once found stuck to two pieces of wood—in company with nesting and darting birds in a world enclosed and away from the noises of the multitude. But triggering such runaway thoughts was not the tweet’s primary function, and I tried to understand why, as a response to crisis, it felt so insufficient.

Before there was Twitter, birds taught us to listen—to songs that make this contemporary tweeter seem like he is missing the point. His academic abstractions potentially prevent us from taking responsibility for the actants we ourselves have put in circulation, and thus may keep us from registering our own roles in making worlds where birds and other life do or do not feel at home.² We forget that, before there were actants, or Latour’s “common sense” explanations of the social, we had already learned to link birdsong to pollution.

Flash back to 1958. The 50-year-old Rachel Carson set out to write a book because, in a crisis of her day, the birds were falling silent. In Silent Spring she wrote:

Mysterious maladies swept the flocks . . . There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. It was a spring without voices.”

The spraying of pesticides and herbicides had led to “mysterious maladies” destroying wildlife and vegetation, and endangering human life in the process. Carson’s investigation, surely a classic of environmentalism, portrays nature as a human construct threatened by pollution as much as her own society’s failures of responsibility in it. She was dismayed at the loss of birdsong in a human-made world and she wrote a book because she felt she had to make our role visible – as she put it, “There would be no peace for me if I kept silent.”³

Carson, whose moral seriousness made her a doyenne of the nascent environmental movement, often asked a very STSish question: “Who speaks, and why?”⁴ When I read Latour on Twitter, I wondered who was speaking and why. Did he too speak because, like Carson, he had to? I was struck by an STS author making a point about the importance of the “non-human,” while turning a global crisis into an occasion for talking about the power of his own analytic tools. Maybe for him, Carson and her work linking consumer democracy to a silenced environment does not count as “classically ‘social.’”

I tried to listen more attentively.

This doyen of actor-network theory seems to be making two points, one about his own work and the other about the world.

His first chirp hits a prideful note. Tweet: “Remember when it was hard to accept” (for whom?) that “non-humans” (which ones?) could be “full fledged actors” (entities with agency in their own right?). Translation: See now how right I was to bring on the actants?

His response is a demonstration. Tweet: “Now it’s common sense: here is Chinese pollution with or without virus [sic].” Translation: Doesn’t THAT explain the social: how a “non-human” virus on its own can stop all Chinese pollution? QED.

If I follow this logic correctly, how am I supposed to interpret how we STSers should listen to signals of crisis from our world? Am I supposed to think of this STS birdsong as explaining all our present troubles? Why should it dominate other accountings of the stricken social world, in which we encounter pollution as well as sickness and death from the coronavirus? Should I think that, if I too started singing about non-humans, then a formerly social evil like “Chinese pollution” might become a thing of the past? Is this only common sense, after all?

For all its pride in theorizing our world right, this bird is not telling me the whole story of the crisis, either of the virus or of pollution. The tweet says nothing about the uncounted sufferings of millions around the world from a deadly and contagious disease that eats away at human lungs and hearts and brains. Nor does it tell us if it matters whether the “non-human” is a deadly microbe or a wet market in China or the meat it brings to global tables. It does not say what is necessary to create a pollution-free world. Carson identified a clear culprit: a chemical compound that was produced by humans and became harmful to birds. Calling coronavirus an actant attributes power and agency to it, but this is an esoteric re-description of non-humans that ignores the (social) work of the humans who made for the spread of both virus and pollutants.

Language, as Adam knew, makes us the masters of nature.⁵ Yet we see in this STS Tweeter’s performance words stripped of intention, context and meaning.⁶ All the complexity of humanity’s morality play is reduced to a conjuring up of the “non-human,” through its disciplinary alter ego, the “actant.” For all the magic of such words, we can’t narrate with them a story of collective responsibility of the sort that Carson saw when she wrote that, “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”⁷

Seduced by the surface appeal of actor-networks, we are in danger of forgetting that the point of thinking of non-humans as Carson did was to master our hubris as makers of harmful actants. We can blame this forgetfulness on our technologies of dis-humility.⁸ We broadcast momentary thoughts from insulated interiors, positing binaries and black-boxes that quarantine off our material visions from nature in its infinite variety, its depth and its mystery, its murkiness and terrible power.⁹ What would happen if we, as scholars and (I suppose) as “humans,” listened more—if we only spoke because we too could not remain silent?¹⁰

In the garden, I thought of the birds again, whose sweet songs many have heard in the silencing of our machines in this year of Covid-19.¹¹ The birds don’t seem aware of a virus or a crisis that temporarily suspended our incursions into their world.¹² Where Latour uses his tweets to prove his theories right, surely these birds make a more universal point. Rachel Carson might have interpreted their song as nature’s pushback, telling us humans that we are the unwelcome ones.¹³ A friend called this the un-Silent Spring.

Hilton Simmet is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy and a Research Associate in the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines how analytic tools in economics, political science, and other quantitative social science fields construct narratives of social progress that guide public policies aiming to “solve” problems of development and inequality. Drawing on the politics of knowledge in STS, his work confronts conventional accounts of democracy in political theory to unlock alternatives for human flourishing in an expert-ruled 21^st century.

References and Further Reading

¹See BrunoLatour. (BrunoLatourAIME). “Remember when it was hard to accept that non-humans, like microbes, could be full fledged actors -actants rather- able to build up associations in addition to those more classically “social”? Now it’s common sense: here is Chinese pollution with or without virus. (Huffingtonpost).” March 2, 2020. https://twitter.com/BrunoLatourAIME/status/1234491625965019136?s=20.

²Weston, P. (2020) “Birds ‘falling out of the sky’ in mass die-off in south-western US,” The Guardian, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/16/birds-falling-out-of-the-sky-in-mass-die-off-in-south-western-us-aoe.

³Carson, R. (1994). Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Company.

⁴“Silent Spring.” Accessed September 27, 2020 from http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx.

⁵Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Catherine Porter (tr.), Harvard University Press. See also a review by Val Dusek, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/an-inquiry-into-modes-of-existence-an-anthropology-of-the-moderns/.

⁶Not unlike the scientific method itself, which reduces natural phenomena like birdsong to chemistry and other human social and anti-social practices ranging from jazz to opioid addiction. See “Why do birds sing? Because they’re all on drugs,” The Guardian, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/26/why-do-birds-sing-because-theyre-all-on-drugs.

⁷Carson, Silent Spring.

⁸Jasanoff, S. (2007). Technologies of Humility, Nature 450, 33.

⁹For a meditation on birds and their infinite variety, see Franzen, J. (2018) “The radical otherness of birds: Jonathan Franzen on why they matter,” The Guardian, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/23/the-radical-otherness-of-birds-jonathan-franzen-on-why-they-matter.

¹⁰Or, as the postcolonial historian of medicine Warwick Anderson has recently quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” See Anderson, W. (2020) Epidemic Philosophy, Somatosphere, accessed September 27, 2020 from http://somatosphere.net/2020/epidemic-philosophy.html/.

¹¹Fears, D. (2020) “Amid the pandemic, people are paying more attention to tweets. And not the Twitter kind,” Washington Post, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/05/22/amid-pandemic-people-are-paying-more-attention-tweets-not-twitter-kind/.

¹²Though we do seem to think that we can save them with their song. See Gyllenhaal, A. (2020) “With bioacoustics, conservationists try to save birds through their songs,” Washington Post, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/with-bioacoustics-conservationists-try-to-save-birds-through-their-songs/2020/01/10/8b800048-0c9a-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html.

¹³Or, perhaps, it’s also the non-humans that are unwelcome. See Guardian staff (2020). “Bald eagle attacks government drone and sends it to bottom of Lake Michigan,” The Guardian, accessed September 27, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/14/eagle-drone-attack-lake-michigan.

Re-Imagining Democracy with STS

SHIV VISVANATHAN

I must begin with a confession. It takes courage for a scholar to claim that he works on STS in India. On the subcontinent, STS is embedded in a frozen idea of governmentality, where the power of science becomes the pomposity of policy. Think of Covid; how do you talk of science when the government never admits a mistake? Science, as the Indian case illustrates, has become a way of validating authoritarian and corrupt regimes in parts of the global South. It is presented as an immaculate conception, a Tussaud of table manners, rather than as an epistemology of living methods.

The science I work on is more a part of dissenting imaginations, of social movements seeking to sustain an alternative world. In fact, STS in India is a split-level world, between the pronouncements of official science, and the challenges of the dissenting academies. These latter groups do not have power, but they sustain a community of conversation. They create a web of gossip outside science policy, which dreams of a different world. They provide a sense of irony, of play, which official science in the Covid era lacks.

The conversation began when one of my friends cited his guru C V Seshadri, who used to teach at IIT Kanpur, then left to create a laboratory near a slum in Chennai. Seshadri once explained how STS has to be read differently. This parallel world, as his student described to me, refracted science across three spectacles. Science was read as a paradigm, which is almost a textbook science, as a discourse where dialogue and interdisciplinarity prevail, and as an act of storytelling. Science in India desperately needs a storyteller. Because the story and the storyteller often disappear from the discussion before the event is over, STS becomes an obsession with postmortems. Voice becomes important, not just as testimony in participation, but as citizens attempt to articulate a different world. Voice desperately needs to add to the plurality of STS challenging the official monologue.

Now let us look at the world of Covid, which governments almost everywhere greeted with lockdowns. There was a sense of machismo and control as States presented the idea of timetables to convey an aura of control. The virus, like anything else in the industrial system, had to follow timetables. Nature and democracy were the first casualties of Covid, and thanks to the sustained authoritarianisms around the world. The scientists acted as government functionaries, projecting certainty where there was none, creating a veil of policy where they could have admitted to ignorance. What they created was an epidemic of mathematical models without articulating their assumptions. Each was presented as a weekly prophecy without the cautionary caveats of normal science. One word that became popular in India at that time was “exponential”. The scientists became more adept than the astrologer in erasing last week’s prediction. Here, the Covid crisis eventually became a composite of old apocalyptic events – gas leaks invoking Bhopal, locust invasions, cyclones, and the epidemic itself. Science had little to offer in terms of fresh insights across the spectrum of capacity.

Watching Covid advance in India, one sensed a society which had no respect for life nor what science said about it. Science as a process, as a tentative experiment, was not respected. All we seemed to want was certainty. There was no sense of knowledge as a process, of roots that can be life giving. We moved in crowds, walked without masks in religious festivals, looked indifferent as people died around us. We insulted doctors and nurses, we distrusted them. In this way, we practiced social distancing with doctors and nurses. Our trust in science was negligible. One sensed we needed to think of science differently, less instrumentally, more creatively. One had to think of science not as a commodity, but as a value. But something happened which went beyond science and the State, reaching deep into the value frames behind it. The State saw the Covid as an Olympiad of death, and science became a cost-benefit of casualties. It was a breakdown of a civilization and a cosmos, not just of science and democracy. Life, whether it was an elephant dying in a park, or a migrant dying at railway station did not matter. Our indifference to life was compounded by inanity about death. The sadness of Covid lies in the fact that the new normal that everyone talks about is a model of necrophily. One needs a science which somehow re-enchants nature and life.

How does one respond to this? The groups in which I work are not just a discourse, but a collection of thought experiments, an attempt to invent alternative forms which link science and democracy in critical ways. A recent idea that was proposed was the idea of the knowledge Panchayat, a follow up on the Right to Information movement, which redefined information as an entitlement. Information, the network explained, is raw and incomplete. It needs a sense of knowledge and epistemology. It suggested debates and dialogues around any new legislative policy proposed, from disaster management to biotechnology. One simulates a knowledge village, where all the stakeholders in a community play some role, where storyteller is crucial as an ordinary life as critique emerges in the form of parables. The knowledge Panchayat as a dialogic group, examines the fate of the project refracting it to the marginal groups and minoritarian imaginations. It highlights dissenting imaginations. Knowledge is no longer a restricted domain or a specialized activity. One thinks of pluralization and democratization of knowledge across what is playfully called, the five Cs, acronyms mimicking policy’s penchant for such exercises. The five Cs are: civilization, constitution, citizenship, community, and childhood. In a civilizational sense, the Covid revealed a crisis around time and timetables. One expected the virus like everything else in an industrial society, to conform to time. The varieties of time one confronted, from accelerated time, empty time, the time of waiting and anxiety, are needed to be explored pedagogically. The group also satirized the efforts to scienticize anxiety to handbooks, where everything was reduced to technique. It suggested that the folklore around science needed scrutiny as much as the formal policy itself.

Constitutionally, the network argued, nature had to be re-read. One needed to represent nature in the constitution allowing a sense of enchantment. A re-enchantment of nature, as Isabelle Stengers or C V Seshadri called it, was required. The current policy was not the Judeo-Christian use of nature as a resource. It was more ruthless. As a moral secular development model, it sought to subjugate nature. The liberalization of economic rules which unleashed corporations on the forests and the coastline, in the post Covid world, needs to be challenged. The new sense of the Constitution must combine the numeracy in the constitutional imagination. Thirdly, one has to look at citizenship and the devaluation of the idea in the Covid world. One senses a weakness of citizenship in the way we handled the refugee and the migrant. Science needs to cater to the informal and marginal economies. STS, thus, should not be oriented towards Big Science and the consolidation of innovation chains. It needs a new sense of epistemology, where a theory is validated not merely in a laboratory context but in terms of the faith of an idea as it traverses life, life-worlds, livelihood, lifestyle, lifecycle, and life chances.

Underlying the critique of Covid is a search for an epistemic plurality. It is a recognition that the enlightenment model of liberty, equality, and fraternity is now incomplete. Here the epistemic and the cosmological must join the political through a second triangle of diversity, plurality, and dialogue. The era of the monologic paradigm is over, Thomas Kuhn joins the likes of Alfred Wallace and Vavilov to anchor a plurality of knowledges and species. The citizen as a consumer and constructor of knowledge becomes central. Democracy can no longer be a knowledge society, where we delegate decisions to experts. Disasters become a test of this new democracy, seeking to tackle vulnerability and violence in contemporary society.

The fourth C is still being debated, in a sense that science must challenge the economic categories of the current world. Science must challenge triage present in the current models of technology. Tribal and craft groups argued that one needs to secede from the current intellectual property regimes of science and knowledge, and become part of a new commons. Finally, the group suggested, that one needs a playfulness. Science as Big Science is becoming a dismal science. One needs a science of alternatives, plurality, and play. One suggestion made to challenge Covid time was to let children model the future, invent new alternatives. At the beginning, each school would now be responsible for saving one dying language, one dying species, one near extinct craft. The future as an idea is a dream of multiplicity, which State and corporations cannot tolerate. The new normal that Covid speaks about is nothing like what Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz unravel in their idea of “post-normal science.”¹ Science must provide new metaphors for democracy, to rethink its way out of the Covid crisis. Out of this will emerge the new social contract reinventing different imaginaries for science and democracy.

Prof. (Dr.) Shiv Visvanathan is currently Professor at Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat and Director, Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems, O.P Jindal Global University. He is an Indian public intellectual and social scientist best known for his contributions to Science and Technology Studies and for his concept of cognitive justice. He is author of Organizing for Science (1985), A Carnival for Science (1997), and Theatres of Democracy (2016).

References and Further Reading

1. Funtowicz, S. O., & Ravetz, J. R. (1993). Science for the post-normal age. Futures, 25(7), 739-755.

Visvanathan, S. (1997) A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology, and Development. Oxford University Press.

Expertise and Locality – A Conversation with Professor Sundar Sarukkai on STS and COVID Science in India

NITHYANAND RAO

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in India demonstrates that the question of what counts as a good response informed by science is complicated. Independent scientists have raised concerns about the Indian government’s disregard for science but the scientists’ statements and interventions raise broader questions about the nature, diversity and social locations of their expertise. The philosopher of science Sundar Sarukkai, through his work, has long argued for knowledge production that is more grounded in local experiences and theory – not just in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences and STS – and the need for theory to take ethics seriously. STS in particular, he proposes, must be institutionalized in a way that accounts for its particular context of practice and intellectual tradition, despite the field’s global scope and reach. Taken together, these jointly epistemic and political challenges of academia and public health are certainly not unique to India, but we can attend to their local instantiations as they play out in real-time, as the pandemic spreads in this particular “state of knowledge”.¹

This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted on 18 July 2020 online in Bangalore, India, with Sarukkai, who runs Barefoot Philosophers, an attempt to foster public engagement with philosophy. He was previously at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, and the Founding-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities.

Q1: On 24 March, the Government of India imposed a stringent, nationwide lockdown that lasted more than two months. It caused immense and inhuman suffering but did not help in curbing the spread of the virus. In fact, members of the government’s own COVID-19 taskforce had warned that a lockdown of this nature would protect only the privileged. Practitioners of the applied sciences – physicians, public health experts and epidemiologists – saw the lockdown as an idea imported from Europe. Meanwhile, some scientists, largely from India’s elite research institutions, welcomed the lockdown, while others were more skeptical and worried about its devastating effects.

So there was, at least initially, a convergence of opinion between the government and a section of scientists in elite institutions about the necessity and effectiveness of the lockdown, which they said, is what science recommends. What does this tell us about the social locations of these different groups of scientists and the science-state relationship? Many of these scientists are by no means supporters of this government and have now expressed concerns about how the government doesn’t release data and doesn’t listen to expert advice.

A. There are interesting strands in this question. In some ways, it’s a uniquely Indian problem.

Unlike in many other countries, our major science institutions do not have medical schools. (Our science institutions don’t even have departments for humanities and social sciences – some of the teaching institutes have one department called “Humanities and Social Sciences”, which is often shaped according to the perceptions and interests of the scientists.) And medical science in India (with the exception of a handful of government hospitals) has largely been associated with institutions which are actually in the business of medical education, not research. Within these institutions, there is a strong hierarchy; in many cases, the department of public health will be lowest in the hierarchy. A major reason for this is that public health is perceived to be caught between the disciplinary tensions of (medical) science and social science. There are public health groups outside the university system, but within academia they have been marginalized.

This means that people in our science institutions do not engage with people in public health. If there were medical schools within our science institutions, we would have had disciplines interacting with each other. We have not built an integrated science community in India and now we are paying the price for it.

On what basis do some scientists from some elite institutions make public policy recommendations? If these are scientists who have worked with the community, society or the government, one can understand it. Are some of them making their recommendations based on their opinions about society or their knowledge of social processes? It would have been good if we had scientists from different disciplines coming together to suggest specific recommendations and guide policy. Instead, science institutions were in a race with each other to get access to a sudden inflow of funds in the name of Covid research. Within this, there was a disconnect between doctors and medical researchers, and the scientists from the elite science institutions. Increasingly, there are more private players contributing to the science of the virus who are not necessarily in conversation or in sync with the government-funded science organizations. It is not that these scientists should not be making recommendations but in a national culture where the (natural) scientists have always looked down on the value of social science, how can policy recommendations, especially in public health, be meaningful?

Q2. Many scientists, worried about the public’s lack of “scientific temper”, are engaged in countering rumors and pseudoscience about the pandemic with facts, essentially saying that “We’re scientists; trust us.” Meanwhile, STS research on situated performances of expertise, such as Hilgartner’s Science on Stage, shows that there is more at play here than just fact vs error. Do you think this pedagogical nature of Indian scientists’ relationship with the public, creating a “theater of scientific authority”,² could be related to their disinclination to publicly confront the political origin and nature³ of the misinformation that they’re trying to combat, even as they continue to insist⁴ that science is the antidote to right-wing authoritarianism?

A. Well, when you use the term “scientists”, we have to recognize the problem of a few individuals claiming to speak not just on behalf of all others in their community but also on behalf of something called ‘science’. The Indian science community is not a homogenous one at all. We have thousands of scientists in government organizations ranging from space research, atomic research and defense research to huge CSIR [Council of Scientific and Industrial Research] labs. And we have a few hundreds from the elite institutes. And within these elite institutes we have a handful of scientists who are even remotely political in the sense that they take public positions for or against the government. Ironically, the largest majority of Indian scientists do not take any such position and in private, we know that many of them are supporters of the present government. Moreover, as is well known, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the majority of Indian scientists continue to indulge in various cultural and religious practices, which are often claimed to be against ‘scientific temper’. I would be very interested to know the percentage of scientists who are actually against ‘right-wing’ politics. As far as we have seen over the years, scientists will criticize a government if that government does not give the funds the scientists demand. And they will support a government if they are given enough funds and a free rein to do what they want. Perhaps this is all the politics we can expect from the science community as a group?

Now, how does science produce trust in a society like India? To understand why there is so much trust in science as far as public policies are concerned (note the influence of science on issues of agriculture, development, medical science and so on, all of which directly impact the society), we need to note at least three major causes for the establishment of trust. I believe that the most important reason is the way global science is privileged and presented. The attraction of the foreign, an attraction that drives immigration and ‘brain drain’ of the highly skilled science students, is a major factor in science acquiring social value. Famous scientists from abroad are names which students know well. I have seen science departments even in rural colleges which have photos of scientists on their wall and this will almost all be foreign scientists. To add to this, there is the pressure on children by families to choose science for their studies as opposed to other disciplines. This makes families an important catalyst for the public acceptance of science. The third major influence is the educational system in India starting from school, where the emphasis on science and science education is often at the expense of other disciplines. ‘Trust’ in science is thus built on these lines but very often functions as a blind belief in science and not as trust that arises through a critical understanding of what is being trusted.

Ironically, this notion of trust in scientists, driven by these factors, has very similar characteristics to trust in religion. The source of the trust in science is also the source which produces trust in religion. This is why when scientists use naive ideas of ‘scientific temper’, they betray their ignorance not just of social rationalities but also the complex nature of scientific practice and epistemology. Thus, they tend to use this term more as an accusation and as a way to defend themselves from any question of accountability. It is impossible in India today to raise questions about scientific mismanagement, scientific fraud, arbitrary allocation of funds, the impact of major scientific installations on the local community, religious practices within the science community (and within scientific institutions!) and the nature of scientific knowledge without being charged with ‘lack of scientific temper’ and being labelled as ‘right-wing’. Thus, we have to respond to many of these claims about scientific temper in the same register that it is being raised in – namely, [through] rhetoric and politics.

Q3. Within India, STS arose along with social movements that critiqued developmentalism but this did not result in STS being institutionalized within academia and, as we have seen this during this pandemic too, neither social scientists nor natural scientists seem particularly concerned about the absence of their mutual engagement. How would an institutionalized STS actually help science and scientists in India, and also enhance the public discourse?

A. The necessity of having institutionalized science studies programs is a no-brainer. Even countries which have a much smaller number of scientists have STS programs or at least, HPS programs which are run by professionals in these fields. We have failed miserably in India to set up such programs. One of the major causes is because scientists have resisted it, both directly and indirectly. One way they have indirectly destroyed the possibility of professional STS and HPS programs is by appropriating themes like ‘Science and Society’ within their own structures, such as the program under the Indian National Science Academy. (Even mandated courses in humanities and ethics for medical students and other science streams are often taught by doctors and scientists instead of hiring qualified teachers in these fields!) These have been largely run by scientists at the end of their careers or who are retired. The indifference of the social science community in India has added to this problem. They have never come together to demand such programs given that the impact of science on the country is a problem that demands their attention.

However, the question is not so much how an institutionalized STS would help, but what the nature of such an institutionalized STS should be, one which can help us address the kinds of issues specific to Indian society. For example, I do not believe that a model of STS which does not take HPS seriously is a good idea in India. In the US and other countries which have well-established programs in STS and HPS, it might make some sense to have different approaches. However, the absence of philosophy of science, for example, in so much of STS does not allow us to respond to naive assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge, a problem that has deep social implications in India. A program in STS which does not take into account Indian intellectual traditions will not have the resources to understand the relation between science and society, as well as the types of relation between science and the state. So a naive appropriation of global STS cannot be the answer.

Q4. How, specifically in the Indian context, would you say we can make our science align more with social justice and help address the larger issues the pandemic has exposed? Mathematical models of the pandemic spread, for example, leave out the social and economic costs of lockdowns, and the underlying inequalities and processes that leave some more vulnerable than others.

A. There is an intrinsic question here of the relationship between science and the local. Is our science geared to deal with local issues? Absolutely not. Some of the most basic technologies needed for the functioning of our society are not being produced in India. We don’t have the capacity for that. We have built a science infrastructure which is not really engaged with the local, particularly in the elite institutes.

Of course, scientists resist this link fiercely and insist that science is not about the local. I understand that; I’m not saying they should all work on roads and sewage, but they have to build a community where science engages with the idea of the local. Indian science cannot work on questions of social justice because it doesn’t know how to engage with the local even within its own domains. They can’t simply go and stand in protest and say we’re fighting for Dalits if they don’t also think of technologies to help alleviate the conditions in which people live every day. The larger science community in India has been the most prominent group in protesting against reservation and social justice. They have created an ecology of ‘merit’ which is not based on any sense of inclusion, but it is one which has led to the excessive presence of dominant castes in science. Top science institutes do not allow for reservation in their academic hiring and if they are mandated by the government, they restrict it only to their administration. The problem of gender representation, both in numbers and in leadership positions, continues to plague science in India.

We need to find more nuanced ways of looking at this question. It’s not just about aligning science with social justice in the context of the pandemic but about getting the country to face the next pandemic. For this, there has to be a far more active openness from scientists to learn from other communities. We have to have the self-confidence to legitimize good science which has an impact on the local. That is the relationship we have to think about.

STS will help us in thinking through this issue because it shows the complexity of the processes of science.⁵ I don’t think we can depend on the global STS community because the global STS community is like the global science community – they are interested in their questions and their perspectives. We have to build STS communities here which will convince people – and not just become political rhetoric – to look at the complexities of these issues in order to facilitate a more effective involvement of science with the larger society.

Nithyanand Rao is a graduate student in the Department of Communication / Science Studies Program at UC San Diego. He is interested in studying the practice of science in contemporary India and how it influences, and is influenced by, hierarchies of various kinds.

References and Further Reading

¹This “co-production” of epistemic and political orders around the world is the primary focus of States of Knowledge (ed. Sheila Jasanoff), which illustrates how the general phenomenon is locally instantiated in different nation states.

²Hilgartner, Stephen. (2000). Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

³Subramaniam B, Bhattacharyya D. (2020). “A Viral Education: Scientific Lessons from India’s WhatsApp University.” Somatosphere. Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2020/a-viral-education-scientific-lessons-from-indias-whatsapp-university.html/. Accessed July 27, 2020.

⁴Sarukkai, Sundar. (1999). “Science, Knowledge and Society.” Economic & Political Weekly. 34(13), 27 Mar. Available at: https://www.epw.in/journal/1999/13/discussion/science-knowledge-and-society.html

⁵In case the reader might be wondering: what is the origin of this complexity? STS suggests that science is complex not only in virtue of its technical practices and processes but also because it is situated in society, hence the need for expertise beyond that of scientific practitioners.

Performing Expertise in Times of Pandemic: Strengthening the Expert-Lay Divide

ELISE TANCOIGNE AND MARIANNE NOËL

Hilgartner’s Science on Stage (2000) uses a dramaturgical metaphor to argue that scientific expertise is both performed by particular actors and received (or not) by particularly situated audiences. In their comparative analysis of Jordan and Sweden, Elise Tancoigne and Marianne Noël present two recent examples of expert performances; they show that disparate states draw on expertise for similar purposes, pushing us to ask: when and why are such performances still credible to audiences in each country, and under what historical and cultural conditions?

Introduction
Measures put in place by the various States to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic show great and intriguing variations. Some, such as Middle-Eastern Jordan, have imposed very strict containment even though there were less than 100 cases in the country. Conversely, other States such as European Sweden still refuse to take such measures. Public records reveal that, as of June 2, Jordan reported 746 cases and 9 deaths from COVID-19, while Sweden totaled 38,589 cases and 4,468 deaths for roughly the same population (10 million). However, what makes such a comparison interesting is not mainly the political, economic or even coercive differences between the two countries. It is, instead, their similarity in calling on State expertise to guide and justify their decisions. Since the very beginning, both countries brought their National Epidemiological Committee (Jordan) and Public Health Agency (Sweden) to the frontstage. However, the reception of expertise in both countries had different trajectories: while Jordan now celebrates the choices of its Health Minister, the Swedish Public Health Agency faces contestation by counter-experts.

It is, we propose, the role of STS to question the making of expertise and its relation to the State. Cross-national comparison allows us not only to spot differences, but also to underline regularities within the various faces of expertise, thus calling for a broad reflection on its role in society. In this case, we argue that despite their different outcomes, performances of expertise,¹ in Jordan and Sweden contributed to reinforce an “expert-lay divide.”²

The two expert bodies: Jordan, Sweden
The expert bodies in each country are made of a small group of specialists, gathering regularly to provide recommendations to their governments.³ There is a personification of expertise in both countries: their recommendations are channeled through highly mediatized spokespersons.

The main epidemiological body of expertise in Jordan is the National Epidemiological Committee, located within the Ministry of Health and the National Center for Security and Crisis Management (NCSCM), in charge of the response to the COVID-19 pandemics. Its 25 members include experts from the medical faculties of Jordanian universities and military hospitals, as well as the Ministry of Health, the WHO, the Civil Aviation Authority, and the private sector. Their names and specialties, notably, are not promoted. Rather, the two public faces of expertise in the media are its head, Minister of Health Saad Jaber, and its spokesperson Nathir Obeidat, a doctor specializing in respiratory diseases.

In Sweden, implementation, evaluation and monitoring of public policies are carried out by agencies that are external but accountable to ministries. The Public Health Agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten, FHM, which employs 450 people) is considered to be the most powerful agency and is responsible for preparing for and responding to public health threats and crises. Its “Statsepidemiolog” (State Epidemiologist) is a crucial player of the Swedish crisis management system. This official carries the choices made by the agency on the basis of daily meetings with 15 members of the FHM. Anders Tegnell, who serves this function since 2013, has proven his skills working for the EU and the WHO and has become the face of the agency for the outside world.

The performance of authoritative advice
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the expert bodies’ decisions and recommendations are “front staged”⁴ in the media through daily updates in press conferences. The FHM and the Committee’s contributions were guided by a concern for transparency (the press conferences, around 30 minutes each, are all available on the FHM YouTube channel and the NCSCM Facebook page). Both bodies were presented by the media as playing a key role in the governments’ decisions. In Jordan, the King himself presented the Committee as “the voice everyone should listen to“. In Sweden, Tegnell and others were considered as “the people who shape the strategy“.

However, if the FHM published the models and data that guided their decisions, this disclosure never happened in Jordan. This fits with the vision of the public that experts promoted during the crisis. Medical doctors, members of the government and intellectuals portrayed Jordanians as irresponsible people in traditional and social media. On the contrary, Swedish media and public opinion polls represented individual citizens as responsive to disease control instructions. Both conceptions of the public were used to justify the government’s decisions (curfew vs guidelines). As the number of deaths increased and the authority of the FHM began to be challenged in Sweden, the agency started to blame the irresponsible behavior of some populations (immigrants, nursing homes workers, etc.) instead of reconsidering its strategy.

Controversy as to the role played by expertise in the government’s decisions was sparked in both countries. In Jordan, a member of the Committee suggested during an interview that some measures taken by the government were not scientifically but politically grounded. Many scientists in Sweden criticized the “soft” strategy through open letters and tribunes in major Swedish newspapers, as well as the preprint of alternative models. However, none of these controversies led to a change in public health politics, nor to a change in the governance of expertise.

Conclusion
Focusing on the performer side of Hilgartner’s dramaturgical framework, we find interesting similarities across these two culturally and geographically disparate countries, the parallels made more visible perhaps by the extreme stress of a pandemic. Both countries relied on a close group of selected people whose opinion and recommendations were presented as key in the final decisions. Each performance ultimately furthered the ambition of each country to be a model in its regional area. Finally, performances in both countries functioned to reveal and strengthen the lay-expert divide, as well as the divide between official and non-official experts, especially in Sweden (health bureaucrats vs academics). Further research, directed at the historical and cultural conditions of audience reception, could fill out our understanding of each performance situation and associated successes and failures.

Beyond these specific observations, using a comparative STS approach yields important insights into how particular combinations of science, technology, and governance do or do not enable effective responses to crisis. It is easy to blame the population for rushing into the supermarkets when the curfew was announced (Jordan) or the nursing home workers for not staying at home when having symptoms (Sweden). However, reducing people’s behavior to a matter of will, education or consciousness ignores the social constraints to which they are subjected. Crucially, it also prevents STS scholars, experts and publics alike from reconsidering entrenched politics of expertise and deliberating on alternatives; faced with increasing calls for expert bodies to be opened up to publics and other stakeholders,⁵ this reflection is as pressing as ever.

Elise Tancoigne is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Geneva. She studies the links between food systems, technical innovations and heritage. Her research focuses on the governance of dairy microbes since the 1970s, in Europe and the Middle East. Her previous works were in the fields of zoological taxonomy, ecosystem services and the governance of research and innovation at the European level. She likes to experiment with, and also criticize, digital humanities methods.

Marianne Noël is a sociologist/historian trained in STS, with an original background (PhD) and industrial experience in chemistry. She is currently CNRS Research Engineer at Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire 
Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), Université Gustave Eiffel (France). Her research focuses on the socio-historical changes in academic publishing and questions the economic foundations of open access policies. In her PhD (nearing completion), she examined strategies and modes/practices for the operationalization of open science in different national contexts, including Sweden.

References and Further Reading

¹Hilgartner, S. (2000). Science on stage: Expert advice as public drama. Stanford University Press. See also:
Jasanoff, S. (2005). Judgment under siege: the three-body problem of expert legitimacy. In Democratization of expertise? (pp. 209-224). Springer.

²Lidskog, Rolf. (2008). Scientised citizens and democratised science. Re‐assessing the expert-lay divide. Journal of Risk Research, 11: 69–86. doi:10.1080/13669870701521636. See also: Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood misunderstanding: Social identities and public uptake of science. Public understanding of science 1: 281–304.

³Our analysis draws on primary sources, such as government propositions, documents from the public health authorities, newspaper articles, published research, and testimonies on Twitter and Facebook. Fayez Alrafeea (University of Geneva), Montaser AK and Sandrine Testaz (Institut Français de Suède) contributed to the searches on newspapers and social media respectively made in Arabic and Swedish. We did fieldwork in the two countries before the pandemics started.

⁴Following Hilgartner, we use the metaphor of theatrical performance to analyze how scientific advice performs “backstage” and “frontstage.” This framework enables the investigation of the construction of credibility as a dynamic interaction between advisory bodies and their audiences.

⁵Demortain, D. 2020. The Science of Bureaucracy: Risk Decision Making and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Jasanoff, S. (2009). The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers. Harvard University Press.

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About This Issue

Interested in contributing? We are currently accepting pitches for contributions, including academic blog posts, personal reflections, and interviews. Please see our latest call for pitches for more information about submitting to this and future issues.

Issue Editors:

Matthew Sample, PhD (Managing Editor) is a philosopher of science and technology. His research maps the interactions between ethical ideals, emerging technologies, and democratic governance.

Anna Nguyen, MLA is currently a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Program on Science, Technology & Society. She examines literary and technoscientific representations of food in society. Her academic and personal essays reflect a core interest in how we communicate our values for science and technology using food as an everyday metaphor

Kasper Schiølin, PhD is a Research Fellow with Harvard’s Program of Science, Technology & Society and an assistant professor at Aarhus University (Denmark). He is an author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and editor of special issues and edited volumes within the field of STS and philosophy of technology. He is currently working on a project on the geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence.

Editorial Advisor: Sheila Jasanoff, PhD JD is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies (Harvard Kennedy School) and Director of the Harvard Program on Science, Technology & Society.

Questions or comments? Reach out to the STS&Crisis editorial team at: sts.and.crisis@gmail.com