27 September 2022 – ‘Narrativity and the Crisis of Evidence’

Speakers: Marta Arnaldi (Oxford), Mona Baker (Oslo), Eivind Engebretsen (Oslo)

In this Translating Illness video podcast, Marta Arnaldi discusses with authors Mona Baker and Eivind Engebretsen their new publication, Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics: Scientific vs Narrative Rationality and Medical Knowledge Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book moves from, and goes beyond, the scenario of the COVID-19 crisis to ask in what ways the pandemic transformed the ‘specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern’.

Are scientists interpreters? What is the boundary between facts and fiction? Does it make sense to distinguish between the so-called objectivity of science and the subjectivity of the humanities? If these divides, as Baker and Engebretsen put it, have become unsustainable, how do the futures of research and policy look like as we step into a new era in the history of science and thought?

With special thanks to the University of Oxford’s Educational Media Services, where this episode was filmed.

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