Dr Jessica Kirk1
1Monash University, Clayton, Australia
Biography:
Jessica Kirk is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University, Australia and a 2025 DECRA Fellow. Her research focuses on global health politics, critical approaches to security, and the politics of expertise and knowledge production. Her DECRA project examines the global management of health misinformation and the effectiveness of different initiatives. She is the author of More than a Health Crisis (MIT Press, 2023) and has published in journals including International Studies Quarterly, Political Studies, International Political Sociology, and others.
Abstract:
Emergency contexts play an important role in how expert advice is formed, given, and received. Experts are under greater time pressure, must operate under greater uncertainty, and their advice can have more significant and immediate impact. Previous literature has also outlined how emergencies encourage a greater or lesser desire for technocracy in politicians, the media, and the public. Yet while this provides an idea of the context in which experts make decisions during an emergency and the pressures from this, it provides little understanding of how this context is understood and acted upon by experts themselves. How do experts conceptualise emergency and how does this impact on their advice, their behaviour, and their understanding of their role in emergency policymaking? Using data from interviews with public health experts in the US during COVID-19, this paper argues that, like others, experts conceptualise and respond to an emergency context in different – and occasionally competing – ways. Specifically, some experts report a heightened sense of risk that altered their advice, while others suggest a concern that their colleagues’ views are skewed. In addition, experts report self-censorship and silencing of scientific debate by other colleagues out of a perception that an emergency requires a ‘united front’. Connecting this to theories of emergency politics from critical security studies, this paper identifies how experts are also security actors and calls for greater attention to their agency within emergency politics.