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How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - I

Thu, September 5, 1:00 to 2:30pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Bayside B

Abstract

30+ years after James Hansen’s testimony on climate change before a Senate Committee in June 1988 and 40 years after Dorothy Nelkin’s early work on scientific expertise in technical controversies presents a good opportunity to raise questions about how climate change has reshaped scientific expertise and the expert. Climate change, perhaps more than any other environmental problem, has brought reflexive attention to the utility and vulnerability of scientific expertise in political and public contexts both within and outside the scientific community. This session invites empirical, theoretical, and thought-provoking papers that analyze such topics as: threats to scientific experts, subversive uses of scientific expertise, scientific expertise and political ideology, changing roles of the scientific expert, diminished authority of scientific expertise, forced or encouraged hybridity within scientific expertise, limits to expertise and their impacts on science, and other topics that fit the session. Contributions might also reflexively examine how STS research may have altered the forms and authority of scientific expertise on climate change or how STS approaches to scientific expertise may have been altered by the climate change problem. Contributions that examine cross-national differences are also encouraged.

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