By Elisa Lello and Niccolò Bertuzzi.
Scientific knowledge and traditional epistemic authorities are the object of growing skepticism in Western societies. Scholars contextualized such a phenomenon into a wider coming to light of an anti-science or post-truth era, in a debate centred on the concepts of epistemic populism and, in particular, 'science-related populism'.
Our study focused on popular dissent toward compulsory vaccination and pandemic management policies during the Covid-19 pandemic, a topic which is generally identified, and also by Mede and Schäfer’s work, as a crucial example of science-related populism.
We focus on Italy, the first Western country to be hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and one that, according to the Oxford University Stringency Index, has taken particularly stringent measures to tackle the health crisis.
Our work
We started from a paradox that has been little studied. While the association of these protests with the right, even the extreme right, has often been taken for granted in newspapers and on television, how is it that these positions are also decidedly widespread even within left-wing public opinion and movements, both internationally and in the Italian context?
And above all, how is it that the polarisations resulting from opposing readings of the Covid issue have caused such deep and painful ruptures within many ecological movements that even today certain wounds are difficult to heal and often seriously hamper mobilisation?
Our hypothesis is that paying attention to the internal political heterogeneity of these protests, and in particular to the links between criticism of science and environmentalism, can highlight the limits of the populist reading and contribute to the elaboration of a more adequate theoretical framework.
This is the point of departure for our methodological design, which relies on qualitative research as the most appropriate means of exploring how (classic) vaccine-hesitancy claims intersect with emerging issues related to new technologies, the eco-climate crisis, and the broader role of science in policy-making.
In addition, qualitative research has proved particularly effective in investigating frame-bridging operations between Covid-related issues and environmentalist claims, and in identifying the semantic nuclei on which these are developed.
Salient results
Our analysis highlighted the consolidation of worldviews in clear opposition to hegemonic values, where the criticism of science, rather than being related only (and mainly) to populism, finds a more appropriate explanation in a denunciation of the intrusiveness of capitalism in science production. These positions converge on a critique of reductionism, in the climatic/environmental field as well as in the health field. Our interviewees’ skepticism, indeed, is not about the existence of environmental problems or climate change, but mainly concerns the mainstream narrative that these can be addressed through solutions offered by green capitalism or purely technological solutions.
These reductionist approaches are rejected in favor of more complexity-oriented ones and the claiming of self-determination that extends from the issues of food and the ecology to include the issue of health: From Big Farms to Big Pharma, echoing our blog’s title.
Implications
Our findings underline the need to rethink interventions aimed at responding to the challenge of popular skepticism toward science. The priority is not to “explain” the benefits of research to supposedly ignorant or overly emotional citizens, but to take seriously critiques that denounce the intrusiveness of capitalism in scientific production and point to the contradictions created by the increasing scientization of politics.
On the other hand, our findings are useful for rethinking operationalization processes, particularly in quantitative research, in order to avoid falling into the uncritical use of epistemic categories, the recovery of the Deficit Model, the preference for psychological explanations, and, therefore, the depoliticization of citizens’ agency in terms of epistemic possibilities.
Furthermore, by putting into dialogue different strands of scholarship literature, we situated the issue of science-related populism within a less abstract opposition between democracy and populism, capable of taking into account the real changes that Western representative governments are undergoing. In this way, we highlighted the explicit and implicit positionings in the literature on epistemological populism and the risks associated with a self-absolving abuse (by political and scientific institutions, the media, etc.) of the concept of populism.
Read the original article: From Big Farms to Big Pharma? Problematizing science-related populism