A key challenge for science in – and ‘for’ – the Anthropocene hangs on the extraordinary influence and authority that scientific knowledge now has in shaping public decision-making. Of course, science is needed to develop constructive and adaptive responses to many of the challenges of the Anthropocene. But it is also the case that it is only through science that we can even identify many of the challenges we now need to address, AND that science has been instrumental in CREATING many of those challenges in the first place. In short, then, science and its claims to definitive ‘knowledge’ are now inseparably woven into human lives and societal decisions affecting us all. An inescapable outcome of this, though, is that science now needs to be explicitly engaged with the questions of justice to which it gives rise in wielding that authority; regarding, say, public health guidance, environmental issues or the introduction of new technologies. And this gives rise to a novel form of justice: epistemic justice. In Episode 22, we discuss this crucial agenda with leading expert on question of justice and scientific expertise, Professor Gwen Ottinger. Drawing on her extensive experience working for participatory processes in environmental justice campaigns that have depended on authoritative scientific claims (e.g. to prove harm), Gwen argues that there are deep-seated problems afflicting current relations between science and society, regarding a ‘moral brokenness’ manifest in a ‘scientific chauvinism’ that is the antithesis of epistemic justice. Join us for a profound exploration of this key challenge for science today, in which we explore crucial ideas of epistemic and reparative justice, ‘careful knowing’, ‘fact-shaming’ and how scientific credentialism is the last remaining ‘acceptable’ snobbery… and, crucially, what
we can do about this.
