Title: The contagion of uncertainty. The experts’ discourse and the construction of the pandemic landscape
Abstract: The project investigates the relationship between the condition of epistemic-managerial uncertainty in the medical-scientific and health-political fields, and the televised communication of scientific experts during the Covid-19 emergency in Italy. Through an interdisciplinary approach, which brings together the epistemologies of semiotics, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and conversational analysis, the research examines the ways in which the scientific community coped with the pandemic crisis, placing them in relation to the strategies and communicative forms implemented by the experts to provide opinions, explanations and forecasts on the emergency.
Drawing on the theories and methodologies of the various epistemologies employed, the research examines the operating logics of the two domains to which the research pays attention, those of science and generalist TV, then analysing the relational modalities through which these acted and retro-acted on each other during the emergency.
Thus, on the one hand, the practices that enable the management of scientific knowledge, first and foremost peer reviewing, are examined at a structural level, while at the same time investigating the theoretical and methodological criteria of disciplines that played a central role during the emergency, such as epidemiology and public health, and which enabled the formulation of explanations, forecasts and strategies of health policy intervention, examining their functioning during the pandemic emergency.
On the other hand, the research pays attention to the discursive regimes and genres that characterise generalist TV, especially the news talk show, in which the interventions of experts in interactions and dialogues with TV hosts and presenters took shape. The ways in which experts took on the condition of epistemic-managerial uncertainty and the role these languages and interactions played in the articulation of their discourses are examined.