Guest Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Guest Editor's Introduction Ahmed Bawa (bio) the sars-cov-2 pandemic upended most aspects of human existence, disrupting national and global economies, requiring severe lockdowns and the shutting of schools and universities, and severely impacting human health. While official figures indicate that more than 6 million human beings lost their lives to the pandemic, as further national analyses of excess deaths are made, this is almost certainly an undercount. In South Africa, for instance, it is estimated that the mortality figures are underestimated by a factor of 3. This represents deep human suffering with continuing, severe long-term effects. Science was drawn into the fray to answer the urgency for solutions to address the pandemic, a call for "speeded-up" science. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said in an interview with Ian Sample of the Guardian, "It has been utterly exhausting at times. I've been involved in plenty of intense scientific competitions but this is different. You have this sense that every day counts, that what you are working on may save some lives and that you cannot make mistakes, you cannot afford to give anything less than 100%" (Sample 2020). The pandemic also drove the "industrial" use of new technologies, some of which were previously restricted to research laboratories. Though slow at first, the social sciences were mobilized in many parts of the world to address the behavioral aspects of the response to the pandemic, the socioeconomic implications of the policy options adopted by governments, and the long-term psychosocial effects of infection. The individual and social costs of the pandemic's devastating impact on schools have yet to be understood. [End Page ix] Even though in the past science has been galvanized for other large sociopolitical, military-industrial, and economic purposes, such as the Manhattan Project in the US to produce the atomic bomb, in many respects the pandemic is an unprecedented event in the history of science in bringing into close interplay science, politics, policy, and profit and forcing scholars into uncomfortable spaces with high levels of risk-taking, public scrutiny, political manipulation, and battles to improve the popular construction of understandings of scientific findings. In addition to doing science, scholars also have to navigate, at breakneck speed, this complex social space with the political shenanigans, public distrust, large public sector investments in private sector laboratories, and so on. Other grand human challenges, like global warming and climate change, force science and scientists into similar nexuses. Many branches of science have for a considerable period been self-referential with internally defined forms of quality assurance based primarily on peer review. Public, nonexpert scrutiny was very much on the agenda during the pandemic, as each nation had its own high-profile media events where heads of state addressed the public flanked by leading scientists, the latter seen as providing the most upto-date information about the progression of the pandemic and the measures to mitigate its worst impacts. They were sometimes placed in positions where they appeared to legitimize policy decisions. With the rise of populism and political expediency, as happened in the United States and Brazil, for instance, when the science didn't speak to the political agenda, this produced tensions between scientists and politicians, leaving the public to be the arbiters of "truth." While not a new phenomenon, the shifts in the boundary conditions for "truth" are pertinent when there appears to be a growing erosion of trust in science and scientists. Although this is not at all a universal phenomenon, it is increasingly influential through the politicization of the role of experts. It is exacerbated by the use of social media platforms to generate and distribute (dis)information at furious rates. [End Page x] The emergence of yet another cold war, this time between the United States and China, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and numerous other geopolitical tensions threaten to split the world of science just when there is need for concerted global action to address grand challenges, such as those captured in the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. They are simultaneously local and global in scale, and addressing them requires science systems to...