ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Expert Multiplicity and Scientific Authority in the Anthropocene

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Experts are expected to do heavy lifting in the ecological polycrisis of today’s Anthropocene. Yet, science also seems ever more powerless in galvanizing publics and states into effective action. Scholarship in the history of science and STS has responded either by identifying pernicious political mobilizations designed to undermine scientific expertise or by targeting the complicity of institutionalized science captured by powerful interests. This roundtable explores instead how the increasingly plural character of knowledge itself has contributed to the growing fragility of scientific authority within inherently fractured states and diverse publics.

Hence we focus on the multiplicity of experts and their authority in modern states throughout the 20th century. Jessica Wang’s account of U.S. soil science explores the politics behind a broad consensus among agricultural experts, political leaders, and business elites about “diversified agriculture” as an essential national project in the early 20th century. Sabine Clarke considers the protean nature of “testing” in determining pesticides’ effectiveness and toxicity in British colonial Kenya during the 1940s. Lucas Mueller then asks how scientists, local populations, and municipal and cantonal politicians succeeded in introducing avalanche hazard zones in Switzerland from the 1960s to the 1990s. David Dermotain concludes by examining the inherently public–and contested–dimensions of scientific authority in the contemporary toxicology industry, with its new institutionalized sites of expertise.

These four episodes highlight the plural social and political worlds that have rendered science simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. The dual crisis of scientific authority and climate change is not simply one of entrenched political interests and capitalist imperatives. The burgeoning multiplicity of expert communities themselves, along with the institutions and publics that have proliferated to deal with all manner of environmental problems, made for an “age of fracture,” in which plural worlds have created contested sciences.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Etienne Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Participants

• David Demortain, French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)

• Sabine Clarke, University of York

Session Organizers

• Lucas Mueller, University of Geneva

• Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia