STS Research Seminar: 'Experts, post-truth and populism: what role for STS?'

Experts, post-truth and populism: what role for STS? - Prof Robert Evans, School of socail Sciences, Cardiff University. To receive the joining instructions, please email sts@ucl.ac.uk.

In this talk, Prof Evans will reflect on the dilemmas created for a socially constructivist STS created by the electoral success of Donald Trump. Prof Evans argues that it is possible to defend the institutions of science as an important, even necessary, part of democratic societies without assigning epistemic superiority to science or giving up any of the important insights from STS studies about the way science works. In doing so, Prof Evans shows that science can be treated as culturally distinct from politics and that this separation is the key to understanding how and why science can be used to inform policy-making and support democracy more generally. The argument matters, despite the highly visible use of science in the response to the coronavirus pandemic and the success of Joe Biden in the US Presidential elections, which might seem to presage a return to ‘business as usual’ and more traditional STS concerns with the ‘over-reach’ of expertise. Such an approach view seems short-sighted, however, as populist politicians may enjoy future electoral success, not least in the US, and STS still needs a way of saying that some knowledge-making practices are preferable to others it if it deal with epistemic injustices in a symmetrical way.