Jana Bacevic

10/10 no notes

people say this to me in relation to an alarming number of things (crossing the border into UK; writing my book) with alarming frequency 😁

psst! friends! friends! I think I am actually writing my book 😬

Travelling on the Eurostar is a good reminder that yes, it is actually possible for trains to be quiet. No listening/watching videos on spakerphones, interminable phone convos, braying drunken lads and/or lasses, and constant auditory harassment by announcements. 😌🌱

From the grève feministe mobilisation/march yesterday 💜✊️

April 2020 – Jana Bacevic 1 post published by Jana B during April 2020

Yes, Boris Johnson is a buffoon and a fool. But, as a reminder, that he did not act alone; just like in 2020, he serves as a convenient decoy to continue with business as usual. janabacevic.net/2020/04/

He can be 'soft' and allegedly 'charmed' because it costs him nothing to do that. Thinking that this somehow fundamentally (or even temporarily) changes anything is naïve beyond description. Politics does not run on personal affinity.

I mean honestly I've looked at a few clips of the alleged Mamdani triumph over Trump meeting, and the only thing obvious is that Trump is really threatening & domineering in the conversation. He'll do away with Mamdani (sorry, train a 'lone madman' to do it) any day. Please don't be so stupid.

The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It

And it's not just global leaders who speak this way: this is the consensus in economics and tech — and among the climate scientists and advocates who are perhaps most influential in the news media.

I explain it all in detail here, and show you how to fight back.

bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Saw someone with a laptop sticker "tout brûler sauf les livres" and very much here for this

There's no such thing as just 'following the science' – advice is political | Jana Bacevic As we’re seeing in this pandemic, politicians tend to favour the evidence that supports their argument , says the sociologist Jana Bacevic

for those of you with short memories or subject to progressive erasure by AI (I asked my students into 2022 if they knew any sociological interventions in Covid-19 and they jointly responded "no"), I wrote the gist of this critique in April 2020: @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This part from the #Covid19 inquiry speaks directly to something myself and Linsey McGoey wrote about in 2020 (published as journal article in 2024 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....): the construction of *impossibility to act* as the key feature of post-liberalism (a thread 🧵👇)

...which may, godforbid, *actually* change the status quo. Which is the one thing that the UK has been remarkably successful at avoiding for the last...500? 600? 900? years

it's also (and this is where I think it may not be entirely accidental) one of the things that keep the UK's 'middle' class in tepid zombie-like state with occasional vague gestures at "injustice" by e.g. shopping at Oxfam. any serious taxation and you'll have a seriously engaged body of voters...

hmm. I think one important element (not that that is fixed by *not* taxing the middle income band, of course) is the disproportionate cost of housing/education/childcare, which the upper percentile feels less (= inherited, incl. offshore wealth), but the middle stratum bears pre-taxation.

I suspect the best approach to answering this question is to ask

and also, frankly, because construction of epistemic authority. I can't describe the number of times I was invited to hear someone explain the use of science in the Covid-19 pandemic, often in their new book. Where was mine? I was stuck in teaching/admin in a new job, and frankly burnt out by ☝️

Why this massive thread? Because👇 questions remain important, and some of us have been working on these topics for years. Which gets conveniently omitted when academic trend-chasers land on a topic. I am currently developing another big project on non-prediction; I hope I'll get a chance to do it.

There's no such thing as just 'following the science' – advice is political | Jana Bacevic As we’re seeing in this pandemic, politicians tend to favour the evidence that supports their argument , says the sociologist Jana Bacevic

yep, as per www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

and, for fans of political economy and those inclined to think universities are innocent/ignorant in these matters, I wrote a contribution to the special issue of Globalisations in 2020, drawing the lessons from Covid-19 for the future of climate governance:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

YouTube video by The Philosopher "Authority and the Politics of Expertise": Jana Bacevic with FB

You can watch me discussing this with Federico Brandmayr (also a contributor to the thematic issue, as well as the editor of the EJST special issue on 'excuses') in the @philosopher1923.bsky.social Spring 2021 seminar series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9B0...

"Epistemic Autonomy and the Free Nose Guy Problem" by Jana Bacevic (Keywords: Knowledge, Trust, Expertise) "Is 'trust in science' just the flipside of trust in religious or, for that matter, political authority?"

and in the @philosopher1923.bsky.social thematic issue on Authority and expertise, in June 2021: www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/epistem...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

This argument came out in theoretical/philosophical form in the European Journal of Social Theory's special issue on 'sociological excuses' (especially recommended for fans of Arendt and/or the Frankfurt School): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Why We Don’t Act - Boston Review Why do we fail to predict—and even more importantly, prevent—social and political crises?

I also wrote a piece for the @bostonreview.bsky.social special issue on responsibility and scientific humility, in December 2021: www.bostonreview.net/forum/prepar...

Relatedly, I continued writing on non-prediction, and what the other case of (non)prediction I am specialising in, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, can tell us about expertise and knowing the future: thedisorderofthings.com/2020/07/03/o...

the key messages from this piece were: claims of ignorance OR uncertainty are a delay tactic to make later policy choices seem inevitable or the only course of action. COUGH COUGH climate change.

The British government’s Covid strategy was never designed to manage the virus | Jana Bacevic and Linsey McGoey An illusion of incompetence and ignorance has allowed No 10 to exploit the pandemic for economic and political gain, say sociology professors Jana Bacevic and Linsey McGoey

This led to the second @theguardian.com piece in July 2021, where we made the political implications of the non-management of Covid-19 explicit: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

June 2020 is also when we (Linsey and I) wrote and submitted the first version of the paper (to a different sociological journal). A year later, we uploaded it (luckily) to a publicly available repository: osf.io/preprints/so...

Science in inaction – The shifting priorities of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 highlights the need for publicly accountable expert advice. - Impact of Social Sciences The phrase following the science is repeated frequently in relation to government policies to address COVID-19. However, what this science might be and how it is better than other ‘sciences’ is less f...

In addition to @theguardian.com and Discover Society, the op-ed appeared - with different emphases, sometimes in translation - on multiple platforms, including @lseimpactblog.bsky.social blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

There's no such thing as just 'following the science' – advice is political | Jana Bacevic As we’re seeing in this pandemic, politicians tend to favour the evidence that supports their argument , says the sociologist Jana Bacevic

for those of you with short memories or subject to progressive erasure by AI (I asked my students into 2022 if they knew any sociological interventions in Covid-19 and they jointly responded "no"), I wrote the gist of this critique in April 2020: @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...