Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Dr Katerina Sideri
Duration: November 2022 - October 2023
Overview
We will conduct in depth interviews with unvaccinated health care workers in Greece so as to shed light on the reasons for which they remain unvaccinated. Working within the tradition of science and technology studies (STS) we take the view that people draw upon personal associations to enact and express civic concern with an issue (see Wynne 1992), the enactment of public concern involves the articulation of threats to actors’ way of life, personal values, relationships, lived experiences, broader societal values and institutional structures (Paul et al., 2022; Bijker 2017). This line of thinking urges us to reconsider the institutional design of technical democracies. We need to dig deeper so as to understand the causes of distrust towards technical government and the ways in which public(s) (in Deweys’ sense) conceive of and want to be part in the politics of innovation. To this effect, the present research essentially seeks to understand the inner dynamics, values and experience of the public of unvaccinated health workers by means of conducting in depth interviews with 50 individuals. Bearing in mind that main policy objective of governments during pandemics include vaccination of the population so that the public health system does not break down and the economy continues to function, we will particularly address the question of effectiveness of mandatory vaccination of health workers and whether such top down regulatory measures further polarize society, to finally discuss alternative regulatory approaches and governance structures.
Project Outputs
- The Policy Brief is available here
- The Research Paper of the project, which was published as part of the GreeSE working paper series, GreeSE Paper No.196, is available upon request from the author.
Events
- Dr Katerina Sideri presented a paper in a conference organized by STS Italia in Bologna (28-30 June). It is considered the biggest event in the field of science and technology studies in Europe and Dr Sideri presented at the Panel 45: Questioning institutional science and expertise supporting complementary, alternative, or refused knowledge’ .
Research Team
Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher: Dr Katerina Sideri, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Panteion University, Greece
Co-Researcher: Ms Eleni Chanania, Research Assistant