Situated Epistemologies: Knowledge Integration in Scenario-Based Exercises for Pandemic Science Advice

Le résumé fourni par la source

Recently, calls for interdisciplinary science advice have intensified, yet many approaches to knowledge integration overlook the epistemic politics that shape whose knowledge counts, when, and on what terms. This paper reconceptualises integrated science advice as a situated epistemic practice, drawing on feminist and STS scholarship on situated knowledges, epistemic justice, and boundary work. We examine how advisory practices reproduce and, at times, reconfigure epistemic hierarchies.. Empirically, we analyse a multi-session, scenario-based pandemic exercise conducted in the Netherlands in 2025, in which biomedical, social, behavioural, and humanities scholars collaboratively produced advice for a fictional virus outbreak. Through participant observation across three phases of an evolving crisis, we trace how different forms of knowledge are enabled or constrained. Our analysis shows that the integration of knowledges is temporally ordered. Shifts in knowledge integration underscore that epistemic hierarchies are not static but are continuously enacted through temporal, affective, and institutional arrangements. By foregrounding temporality and situatedness, this paper contributes to debates on situated epistemologies and epistemic justice by showing how advisory infrastructures can organise the co-presence of diverse standpoints. We argue that achieving more just forms of knowledge integration requires reconfiguring the temporal and institutional conditions under which different knowledges can become ‘actionable’.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.