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VolkswagenStiftung: Corona Crisis and Beyond – Perspectives for science, scholarship and society

Joint work with Lauren Cubellis, PhD, MPH (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

This project considers how the evidence and ethics of research and political discourse are negotiated by scientists, policy makers, and the general public in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has generated an unprecedented situation in which the pressure on data to inform, guide, and correct emerging policy procedures is immense. While crisis situations can serve to generate innovation in the face of uncertainty, this innovative energy also challenges established protocols and best practices regarding the production and validation of new evidence. In the current crisis, the negotiation of emergent demands adaptable forms of evaluation and assessment, collaboration across scientific teams, and the rapid synthesis of often contradictory data. Naturally, the pandemic did not exclusively impact the medical research field, but also research culture in other non-medical fields.

One of the critical questions this project will therefore ask is how the pandemic has affected research practices throughout Europe in other fields such as the social sciences and how researchers were dealing with these unprecedented circumstances on a professional and private level. We wanted to investigate, if there was a change in the value of the research produced during the pandemic – in the sense that valuing is an ongoing practice of negotiation and justification –, which were conditions of intense uncertainty? How does the desire, across many levels of society, for positive outcomes influence the structures of research and data collection? What risks and orders of value or worth are being prioritized, and how and by whom are these decisions made under such conditions? Finally, how do scientists, health care providers, and policy makers understand themselves to be acting responsibly (or not) in the absence of a clear narrative around the significance of emerging data?

To create an environment in which we could potentially answer those questions, we hosted a series of workshops over the course of the last three years, starting with digital meetings, and finally, when the pandemic allowed in April 2022, an in-person meeting at the University of Tübingen. Over four days, we tried to think together about crisis, the modes of caring that are enacted through and in response to crisis, the affects and temporalities crisis and care mobilize, and to resist, in an explicit and overly determined sense, the pressure to produce something. Relieving that pressure, and resisting the temporalities of crisis that shape both every encounters and academic agendas, we found ourselves developing something more akin to a syllabus, and enacting, through reflexive practice, a means of speaking with each other that facilitated dynamic, critical, and thoughtful discourse, and a feeling of community and collaboration that might be sustainable over a long-
term horizon. This syllabus is what we will expand on further in our discussion.


The talk will take place online (via Zoom). If you would like to join, please follow this link:
https://zoom.us/j/96822543209?pwd=My9vQ2NtSHhaMnpzWnpJZldib3gyUT09

The Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker-Colloquium hosts weekly talks from guests and members of the CFvW-Center.

For more information on the CFvW-Colloquium see
https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/228607

For more information on the CFvW-Center see
https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/170583