Scientific Expertise in Situations of Controversy: A Sociological Testimony
While there is now a large amount of social science research on scientific expertise, testimonies made by sociologists who themselves participated in scientific expertise on a controversial topic remain rare. It is this type of feedback and testimony that this paper will articulate and discuss. The aim is to propose a series of reflections on scientific expertise from a personal experience: the participation of the author as a sociologist in an expert committee set up by the former French Agency for the Safety of Health, the Environment and Work (AFSSET) on the topic of radio-frequencies. Several problematic aspects of scientific expertise will thus be discussed from this concrete experience: the problem of the composition of the expert group and the issue of conflict of interest, the way in which the work of expertise is organized within the group, the effects of the presence of an observer from an association, and the differences between scientific work and scientific expertise.
This paper proposes a series of thoughts on scientific expertise, based on a personal experience as a sociologist. From October 2008 to September 2009 I was part an expert panel set up by AFSSET, the French national environmental and labour sanitary security agency (Agence française de sécurité sanitaire de l'environnement et du travail), on the topic of radio frequencies. The panel was called the GT radiofréquences. On this occasion I had to give up the position of "neutral observer" usually adopted by sociologists, since I was participating in the production of an expert report, in collaboration with those who were usually my "research subjects". This engaged position is sometimes considered to be an obstacle to analysis; it is believed to deprive the sociologist of the distance necessary to understand a situation and "objectively" account for it. My experience, reported here, was however that this position does have its advantages. Not only does it afford access to data which are seldom accessible; it is also precisely the fact of being directly concerned or even affected by certain problems that, in certain cases, enables one to identify them and assess their implications. Therefore, even though this is a personal testimony, rather than a report on research results (hence, the very few references), I do believe that this type of exercise does have its usefulness for understanding exactly what scientific expertise consists of, and for addressing certain problems that it encounters in controversial situations.
| Copyright: | © Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH | |
| Source: | Issue 01/2014 (März 2014) | |
| Pages: | 11 | |
| Price inc. VAT: | € 41,65 | |
| Autor: | Yannick Barthe  | |
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