Every year we partner with the Campaign for Social Science to invite a speaker and a respondent to address a vital social science issue affecting our lives, and naturally this time we wanted to know how social science can help us survive the post-truth pandemic. It will be presented by Professor Trish Greenhalgh who is Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. She studied Medical, Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and Clinical Medicine at Oxford before training first as a diabetologist and later as an academic general practitioner.

Using some personal examples she will be outlining the following: "COVID-19 has changed science – perhaps forever. The pandemic and its aftershocks have shaken the pillars of dispassionate inquiry by forcing us to reconsider how academic findings are reported, disseminated, and shared with the public. How can the scientific process survive all of this? For starters, we need to draw on the social science of science, to produce a 21st-century, post-truth-aware account of what science is. Scientists will need to be more self-reflective, developing a heightened awareness of our own identities, values, and ethical commitments as researchers working for the public good. Embracing this role means engaging – however painfully – with the media, lobbyists and trolls. Through close readings of the criticism and personal attacks we receive, we can make more sense of the current political climate and identify potential methods for safeguarding empirical knowledge. We will also have to engage with how the facts we uncover are necessarily value-laden and reflect particular underlying assumptions about the nature of reality."

The respondent is Dr Mahlet (Milly) Zimeta, Head of Public Policy at the Open Data Institute (ODI). Prior to joining the ODI in September 2020, Milly was Senior Policy Adviser at the Royal Society, where she led the Society’s policy programme on Data and Digital Disruption, and Programme Manager at the Alan Turing Institute, where she managed the Turing’s research partnership programmes in Health and in Finance/Economic Data Science.

The lecture will be drawing our attention to a dangerous by-product of recent political trends and aggravated by the pandemic, which is the mistrust of academic evidence and underutilizing the social sciences to both understand and address our problems. It’s a timely talk that will provide guidance for us as academics, researchers, policymakers and publishers. The lecture will be taking place on December 10th, 2020.