The 24th The Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science (YHYS) colloquium will be held at the University of Jyväskylä, on 21–22 November 2019, under the theme ”Wisdom in crisis”. In the pressing need to prevent the heating of our climate and mass-extinction of species, the humanity has to start using natural resources more wisely. It evidently calls for the need to improve our understanding of the different roles knowledge, and the theories we use, can take in planetary crisis.
One of the working groups at the YHYS colloquium, Experise is Crisis, is organized by Lauri Lahikainen. Societies face severe ecological threats which intermingle with socioeconomic troubles, producing wicked problems the dealing with which requires expertise across many scientific disciplines and branches of governance. At the same time, expertise itself appears to be in crisis. Climate change denial in its various guises is a particularly pernicious example of the devaluation of expert testimony in public discourse, and there are many other challenges for the epistemic authority of scientific institutions, even at the highest levels of governance and policy-making.
In this working group, scholars, students and activists examine whether expertise itself is in crisis and how, and what kinds of expertise are needed in socioecological crises, and finally, how these two questions are related. How can ignorance and uncertainty be managed in crises? How can experts respond to manufactured ignorance, denial of science, and other challenges to expertise?