Conference Program

Contemporary societies are increasingly defined by overlapping crises that generate conditions of persistent uncertainty, a state conceptualized as a "permacrisis" (Zatti, 2024). In these contexts, scientific experts are called upon to act not only as knowledge producers but also as public communicators and mediators between scientific institutions, decision-makers, and citizens. The Covid-19 pandemic served as a definitive "stress test" for this relationship, exposing the fragility of expert authority while simultaneously placing it at the heart of public discourse. Within the current platform-mediated information ecosystem, the circulation of knowledge is filtered through hybrid media logics and an unprecedented "infodemic" (Cosentino, 2023), which complicates traditional hierarchies of knowledge and transforms the communicative expectations placed upon professionals.

This presentation investigates the multifaceted processes through which scientific expertise is constructed, represented, and contested. The theoretical framework draws on the sociology of expertise (Eyal, 2019), the social construction of knowledge (Latour, 2005), and the dynamics of recognition in expert-public relations (Pizzorno, 2007). The contribution adopts a dual-methodological approach to capture both the subjective reflexivity of experts and the objective media landscape in which they operate.

The first part explores the experts’ self-representation through twelve focus groups involving sixty researchers from public and private institutes in geopolitics, climate studies, and healthcare. This qualitative phase investigates how experts interpret their communicative responsibilities and their perceived legitimacy when facing non-expert audiences. The findings reveal that experts’ professional identity is increasingly shaped by "reputational recognition" that transcends peer-review circles, moving toward a public validation model. Two relational configurations emerge: a trust-based model, where expertise is accepted as an authoritative guide, and a conflictual model, where expertise challenges epistemic authority, leading to symmetrical and often polarized interactions.

To complement this analysis is the study of a particular investigation: a lexicometric analysis (Baker, 2023) of the press coverage regarding the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. By applying multi-dimensional correspondence analysis and cluster analysis to an extensive corpus of national press articles, the research identifies the dominant semantic fields and rhetorical frames that shaped the public narrative of the vaccine rollout. This lexicometric component allows for a mapping of how "expert voices" were mediated, highlighting the tension between technical-scientific approach and the spectacularization of medical discourse.

By triangulating the experts' internal reflections with the external media representation of the vaccination campaign, the presentation offers a comprehensive critique of science communication in the digital era. It concludes that expert authority is no longer an inherent institutional attribute but a fluid constructed entity, negotiated through visibility, relational trust, and the ability to navigate in the informational environments.