Delighted to announce the publication of this book, available open access here:
https://www.routledge.com/Power-Knowledge-and-Covid-19-The-Making-of-a-Scientific-Orthodoxy/Broadbent-Streicher/p/book/9781041224822
This book is an attempt to make sense of what happened at the science-policy interface during the Covid-19 pandemic. It asks not only what scientific claims were made, but how certain positions came to acquire exceptional authority, to stand for “the science”, and to shape policy on that basis. Through a series of case studies on modelling, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, dissent, and the politics of “following the science”, it argues that a scientific orthodoxy emerged during the pandemic.
A scientific orthodoxy is a dynamic arising at the science-policy interface in which some parts of science come to stand for the whole, and to wield outsized authority. The book analyses scientific orthodoxy into five elements: methodological rigidity, scientific dogma, suppression of dissent, illegitimate indirect political authority, and scientific injustice. For each, it offers a set of criteria – or tests – and shows how they were satisfied during the pandemic. The aim is not retrospective score-settling, but explanation: to understand clearly enough what happened that similar failures might be avoided in future crises.
The book’s approach aligns closely with CPEMPH’s commitment to philosophically serious, empirically engaged inquiry into questions in epidemiology, medicine, and public health that matter beyond the academy. It also reflects an international partnership. One of its distinctive features is that it does not treat Covid-19 simply as a story about Britain or the United States. It draws on material from a range of settings and argues that one-size-fits-all scientific and policy frameworks often obscured local realities, especially in lower-resource contexts. Global South perspectives are not an optional supplement to the analysis, but part of what makes better sense of the pandemic possible.
The wider questions raised here extend well beyond Covid-19. How should expertise function in emergencies? What happens when scientific disagreement is narrowed too quickly? Under what conditions does scientific advice properly guide policy, and under what conditions does it harden into something more like orthodoxy? These are not questions confined to one pandemic. They are likely to recur wherever scientific authority and political decision-making converge under pressure.
Power, Knowledge, and Covid-19 is published by Routledge. Its open-access publication was supported by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham, funded by Wellcome.
CPEMPH 