PPE colloquium Anna Leuschner

Epistemic Intimidation: How Political and Economic Interests Compromise Scientific Research

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in orchestrated attacks against scientists across a broad range of research fields, including, for example, climate science, environmental toxicology, virology (since the pandemic), as well as certain fields in social sciences, such as gender and race studies. This increase of attacks comes along with a rise of right-wing populist parties in democratic countries, undermining societal trust in science and fueling a general hostility towards scientists. In this talk, I will discuss this phenomenon, which Manuela Fernández Pinto and I, in our joint work, call “systematic epistemic intimidation,” and analyze how it affects science and society. Using climate science as a case study, I explain how systematic intimidation has distorted the generation of knowledge about the impacts of climate change.