Abstract
‘Coronavirus could kill off populism’ (Financial Times June 20, 2020), ‘Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity’ (The Guardian, April 18, 2020), ‘Where the Virus Is Growing Most: Countries With “Illiberal Populist” Leaders’ (New York Times, June 2, 2020), ‘How European populists are using coronavirus as a political tool’ (Al-Jazeera, March 3, 2020), ‘The populist revolution may become a victim of Covid-19’ (The Economist, April 16, 2020) – the first coronavirus outbreak turned the spotlight on a complex yet underexplored topic: the relationship between populism and science. The chapter provides an introductory overview of the topic: it situates the challenges of the populist discourse in relation to the processes of knowledge production; it discusses the concepts of epistemic populism and populist epistemologies and clarify the tensions around “anti-“, “pseudo-“ and “counter-“ science; it offers an overview of the case studies analysed in the book.
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Notes
- 1.
The discussion on current epistemological controversies is a relevant topic of discussion for sociology and philosophy of science (e.g. Maslanov, 2021) – however, in this introduction we specifically focus on political and cultural sociological literature.
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The authors wish to thank Tommaso Vitale for the valuable comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Giorgi, A., Eslen-Ziya, H. (2022). Populism and Science in Europe. In: Eslen–Ziya, H., Giorgi, A. (eds) Populism and Science in Europe . Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_1
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