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PERITIA Conference ‘Trust in Expertise in a Changing Media Landscape’

The EU-funded research project PERITIA is organising the virtual scientific conference ‘Trust in Expertise in a Changing Media Landscape’, to be held on 18-19 March. The registration and programme are available on the event website

The event will bring together researchers from all over the world, discussing how best to assess, establish and maintain the credibility and trustworthiness of expertise in a rapidly changing media environment. 

Scholars will present their latest findings on distrust and disinformation, populist responses to expertise, and the role of journalism and platform algorithmic design in formations of public trust in science. 

The highlights of the multidisciplinary conference include keynotes by Onora O’Neill (University of Cambridge), Christoph Neuberger (University Free, Berlin), Natali Helberger (Amsterdam), and Michael Latzer (Zurich). 

A welcome keynote will be delivered by the organisers José van Dijck and Donya Alinejad (Utrecht University), which will be followed by two days with more than 40 speakers and a dozen of panel discussions. Among the topics covered by the programme are the pandemic, climate change, conspiracy theories, algorithms and social media platforms.

The conference will close with a roundtable discussion featuring Stefan Larsson (Lund University), Jo Pierson (Free University Brussels), Judith Simon (University of Hamburg), and José van Dijck (Moderator, University of Utrecht).

Registered participants will be invited to join the Digital Café, a networking platform run by wonder.me to informally meet participants and speakers during the coffee breaks and after the event. 

ALLEA is part of PERITIA as one of the project partners working on coordination, communications and dissemination. The research project, funded by the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme was launched as a continuation of the research work developed under ALLEA’s working group Truth, Trust and Expertise.

Special Issue on Vulnerability and Trust

PERITIA Special Issue on Vulnerability and Trust

How can we characterise the affective nature of trust? How can we explain the ethical demands that arise from deliberately making yourself vulnerable by trusting someone? What is the application of this to the question of the epistemic vulnerability involved in communication? And how can we explain trust and distrust of sources of knowledge in society?

These four questions are the focus of the new PERITIA Special Issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies this month. The work tackles the need to investigate what Annette Baier (1986) called “the variety of forms of trust” and “the varieties of vulnerability”.

The closing article “Vulnerability in Social Epistemic Networks” is the winner of the PERITIA special prize. In this paper, Emily Sullivan (EU Eindhoven), Max Sondag (TU Eindhoven), Ignaz Rutter (Universität Passau), Wouter Meulemans (TU Eindhoven), Scott Cunningham (University of Strathclyde), Bettina Speckmann (TU Eindhoven) and Mark Alfano (Macquarie University & Delft University of Technology) examine the nature of epistemic vulnerability within the virtual networks of social media.

Other articles in this volume include “Epistemic Vulnerability” by Casey Rebecca Johnson (University of Idaho), “From Vulnerability to Precariousness: Examining the Moral Foundations of Care Ethics” by Sarah Clark Miller (Penn State University) and “Expressive Vulnerabilities” by Joe Larios (Emory University).

The special issue is part of PERITIA’s investigation on the conditions under which citizens trust science-based policy advice. ALLEA is part of this EU-funded project that brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from across nine countries.

Read more about this publication on PERITIA’s website.

Why Trust Experts?

ALLEA’s EU-funded research project PERITIA has launched the new animation video “Why Trust Experts?“. Inspired by their principal investigator Maria Baghramian’s article “Trust in Experts: Why and Why Not”, the video invites everyone to reflect on the role of expertise in our daily lives.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown once again that experts play a key role in advising politicians and citizens. There may be no better time to ask ourselves some relevant questions about trust in expertise.

  • How does trust in experts work?
  • How is trust in science related to trust in media?
  • Why is trust in expertise important for democracies?
  • How can we learn to trust trustworthy experts?

The short animation video summarizes the key questions of PERITIA’s research in the context of today’s pandemic crisis and raises some relevant points. It touches upon the different dimensions of trust in expertise from a philosophical perspective, the influential role of media (and social media) in how we access scientific information, or the difficult balance between science independence and policymaking.

In the dedicated webpage “Why trust Experts?“, PERITIA delves into these key questions including resources. The page is available to help you learn more about the topic and find more scientific contributions to the debates from the team and their partners.

About PERITIA

PERITIA is a Horizon 2020-funded research project exploring the conditions under which people trust expertise used for shaping public policy. The project brings together philosophers, social and natural scientists, policy experts, ethicists, psychologists, media specialists and civil society organisations to conduct a comprehensive multi-disciplinary investigation of trust in and the trustworthiness of policy related expert opinion. As part of consortium of 11 partners from 9 countries, ALLEA leads the work on public engament and interaction of the project.

Who to trust on Covid-19?

ALLEA is pleased to announce the PERITIA webinar ‘Who to trust on Covid-19: When science advice gets “dirty” in the political mud’. The event will take place on 2 November (14:00-15:00 CET) and is part of the Berlin Science Week. Registration is already open.

The one-hour Q&A webinar will delve into the impact of this pandemic on trust in expertise with a particular focus on three questions:

  • What lessons can we draw from the handling of the pandemic for understanding trust in policy-driven expertise?
  • How have different countries dealt with the delicate enterprise of communicating and relying on uncertain and evolving evidence and advice in extremely difficult times?
  • Is a loss of public trust in expertise the “collateral damage” of this crisis or are people trusting experts more than before?

PERITIA experts will join the discussion with Dr Shane Bergin, who will moderate an interactive debate where participants will lead the questions of the roundtable. The speakers include:

Prof Maria Baghramian
Professor of American Philosophy at University College Dublin
PERITIA Lead Investigator

Tracey Brown
Director of Sense about Science

Prof José van Dijck
Professor of Media Studies at University of Utrecht

Prof Bobby Duffy
Director of The Policy Institute at King’s College London

Dr Carlo Martini
Assistant Professsor of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University

PERITIA is an EU-funded research project and ALLEA is part of the consortium. The project explores the conditions under which people trust expertise used for shaping public policy. It brings together philosophers, social and natural scientists, policy experts, ethicists, psychologists, media specialists and civil society organisations to conduct a comprehensive multi-disciplinary investigation of trust in and the trustworthiness of policy related expert opinion.

Trust in Expertise at times of Covid-19

The EU-funded research project PERITIA just launched its first newsletter dedicated to Covid-19 and trust in expertise. The issue includes highlights from the first five months of the project with a selection of essays, news, interviews, blog posts, and podcasts from its team dealing with how the pandemic is affecting trust in expertise and science advice systems. A general introduction to the project’s research agenda emphasizes three key questions:

  • What is the role of expertise in democracies?
  • How should science inform political decisions?
  • How can we prevent a populist backlash against expertise?

If you are curious about how PERITIA’s team has engaged in public debates and research around these questions, we kindly invite you to take a look and let us know what you think. If you enjoy it, don’t forget to subscribe here.

The project is conducting a comprehensive multi-disciplinary investigation of trust in, and the trustworthiness of, policy-related expert opinion. Its research will develop a theoretical framework to understand the fundamentals of trust, which will be complemented empirically with surveys and in-lab experiments.

Science advice and public engagement

A central part of PERITIA’s work will consist of a comparison of existing science advice mechanisms in four European countries. PERITIA researchers will investigate how expert advice is elicited and which of the available models is more trust enhancing.

The project’s plans also reach beyond research. Investigators seeks to design effective indicators and tools to build trust in expertise informing policy. Their conclusions will be tested in a series of citizens’ forums where experts, policymakers, and citizens will engage in face-to-face discussions on climate change.

ALLEA is a partner in the PERITIA consortium, which is formed by eleven organisations from nine countries, and is leading its work on communications and public engagement. The project is a follow-up of the ALLEA working group Truth, Trust and Expertise.