COVID-19 showed us that expertise plays a huge impact into decision-making. Do you want to learn more on how politicians use research to create new policies? Do you want to know more about how in the past expert knowledge was communicated to the larger public?

If you want to learn more about the complex entaglements between expertise and politics, join our summer school Confronting the Crisis of Expertise.

The course will make connections between historical and current issues related to expertise by analyzing the genealogy of interventionist techniques and social inquiries. We analytically investigate the differences as well as convergences between East and West with regards to their data cultures and truth regimes in order to analyze the validity, intelligibility, and portability of scientific facts/ phenomena when being tested, communicated, appropriated across time and space.

The course is organized along three thematic tracks (topics).

The first topic, Cold War and the genealogies of technologies of intervention provides the historical background for ideas concerning the production and use of science for political intervention.

The Cold War gave rise to notions of expertise at the intersection of social science, corporations, and planning systems, not only in the US but in Europe as well, as discussed in the sessions under the second topic, Truth regimes / East-West data cultures. We will focus on the broader issue of social inquiry for governance purposes rather than social sciences per se, with due consideration for the specificities as well as the relationships between fields like sociology, economy, statistics, and environmental science.

The third topic, Evidence-basedpolicies within East-West interactions invites students to reflect on the legacies of Cold War technologies of intervention and the uses of data for policy making and economic development in the present.