Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics

Eivind Engebretsen is Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. He is Circle U Chair of Global Health and Executive Chariman of the Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE). Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. She is Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University.

• 1. Evidence in Times of Crisis; 2. Narrative Rationality and the Logic of Good Reasons; 3. Whose Evidence? What Rationality? The Face Mask Controversy; 4. Whose Lives? What Values? Herd Immunity, Lockdowns, and Social/Physical Distancing; 5. The Rational World Paradigm, the Narrative Paradigm and the Politics of Pharmaceutical Interventions; 6. Objectivist vs Praxial Knowledge: Towards a Model of Situated Epistemologies and Narrative Identification; Bibliography; Index.

'Deploying a nuanced analytical framework to tackle the social complexity of evidentiary truth, Engebretsen and Baker bring sociological order and meaning to the apparent incoherencies of collective and individual action in times of crisis. An exemplary illustration of how social science can confidently illuminate the social dimensions of truth-making without undermining its own epistemic coherence.' Inanna Hamati-Ataya, University of Cambridge