Fwd: Invitation to the Public Lecture of Gil Eyal: "The Crisis of Expertise and the Question of Trust"

[Loïc Riom]

FYI

Dear colleagues

Together with Philippe Saner, I am organizing the international workshop on "The Rise and Crisis of Expertise", funded by the SNSF and the Research Commission of the University of Lucerne. 

As a prelude to the workshop, the sociologist and science researcher Gil Eyal (Columbia University) will give a public lecture (plus Q&A) entitled 

«The Crisis of Expertise and the Question of Trust».

The event will take place on June 5 from 17h00 in room HS 5 in the main building of the University of Lucerne, followed by a reception.

It would be great to have you there! 

For better planning, please register for the event by June 3 by sending an e-mail to philipp...@unilu.ch.

With best regards

Désirée (Waibel) & Philippe (Saner)

Abstract:

The covid-19 pandemic made visible to many what sociologists and STS scholars have diagnosed earlier as a systemic and recurrent crisis of trust in science and expertise. Neither of these two terms – “expertise” and “trust” – however, are well-understood or have an unambiguous meaning. In this talk, I will trace multiple causes of the crisis, but will focus especially on regulatory science. The temporal structure of the facts produced by regulatory science differs from Kuhnian “normal science,” even as they carry profound distributional implications. As a result, they suffer from a set of congenital problems that provoke mistrust in a way that normal science facts do not. While “expertise” is often offered as an answer to these problems, I will argue that it is rather a symptom of the malaise, reflecting a situation where it is no longer clear how to decide between competing claims to authority as experts. Finally, the crisis is often represented as a matter of trust and mistrust, but I will argue that our theories and measures of trust are inadequate and shot through with profound ambiguities. We need to abandon the idea of trust as some social glue that holds societies together, and replace it with a theory of trusting as skilled, practical action. Such a theory offers many insights about the sources of the crisis and how to counteract it.