COVID-19, Expert Discourses and Community Based Research

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a mistrust of expert knowledge helped to perpetuate resistance to public mask mandates, vaccines and, arguably, played a role in harming the lives and health of thousands of people. From a sociological perspective, how can we understand this mistrust, and what are the implications for community based and participatory research?

Especially since the vaccines became free and widely available in the United States over the past year, many of us – myself included- have wondered why people would resist such an obvious and much hoped for protection from a virus that has led to millions of deaths globally. We feel sad at the loss of life that seems like it might have been avoided.

Such reflections benefit from applying sociological lessons to our world. One way to understand this resistance is to consider Michel Foucault's concept of biopower as the state’s means to administer life and death. The deployment of discourses and administrative regulations around the COVID-19 pandemic have been a rich case in the understanding of biopower, which emerge from power/knowledge regimes.

And when we consider the long history of how these same power/knowledge regimes of expert knowledge promoted pathological discourses and disciplined marginalized groups based on medical models of race, gender, sexuality, ability or neuro-normativity, the resistance makes more sense. While I am fully vaccinated and support vaccinations, I understand the resistance to such experts.

In so many ways, actions by expert regimes of knowledge/power generated the alienation and mistrust, leading those who feel disenfranchised to question legitimacy and follow charismatic leaders, oracles and mystics who share ‘secret’ (sic) that ‘they’ don’t want you to know. (See book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell). Conspiracy theories, secret medical cures or ‘evidence’ has been widely distributed on social media and through YouTube or podcast hosts who are ‘just asking questions’ to be ‘open’ to ‘other points of view’ without the “bias” of peer review and institutionalized sources (sic). This cultural milieu reflects a contemporary nihilism whose independence from dominant and elite systems or corporate or state control are a façade perpetuated by the AI algorithms that regulate and redirect the acquisition of information through increasingly digitized media systems. Much has been written about political polarization resulting from social media, but there has been little consideration given to alternative means of knowledge construction as a social project.

Enter community based research. As practitioners of participatory models of community-based research, we engage in a social project that offers an alternative to either the expert regimes or the messianic cults of internet conspiracy theorists. We seek to transform power/knowledge regimes by de-centering the role of academics and democratizing the process of knowledge production. In the process, participants engage in critical inquiry that requires deliberate, rigorous interrogation of assumptions and belief systems that based on collecting and systematically analyzing empirical evidence.

Community Based Research (CBR) or similar forms known as Participatory Action Research (PAR), Participatory Research, Community Research or other terms, has its origins primarily in the global south via simultaneously evolving projects in Colombia, India, Mexico, Tanzania and other locations (Fals-Border 2001). Although it takes many forms, CBR attempts to democratize and decolonize the knowledge creation process by re-imagining relationships between researchers and subjects of research. In CBR, traditionally excluded non-academic subjects bring subjugated knowledge to the research process by contributing to the topics of inquiry, defining questions, contributing to methodological decisions, data collection, analysis, writing and dissemination. Furthermore, an underlying purpose of CBR is to not only describe the conditions in the world, but to guide actions that lead to organizational or policy changes that will decrease systemic injustices and inequities.

Montell, Amanda.(2021) Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. Harper Collins Press: New York, NY.

Fals-Borda, Orlando. 2001. “Participatory (Action) Research in Social Theory: Origins and Challenges (Chapter 2)” in Handbook of Action Research and Participative Inquiry and Practice Edited by Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pp.70-80.