Science and Technology Studies (STS) has long been criticized for eroding science's authority and blurring the line between opinions and facts, and more recently for contributing to the emergence of 'far-right populists' and 'anti-science movements'. This article argues that 'post-truth politics' does not necessarily entail epistemic democratization. This claim is based on an investigation of the controversies surrounding public health policies during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the context of COVID-19 pandemics, Brazilian cities implemented social isolation policies and deployed digital systems to monitor urban mobility. This article addresses the setting of two digital technologies based on massive cell-phone data collection by private companies in São Paulo state. We relied on secondary data from multiple sources (press conferences, interviews, newspaper articles, public documents), complemented by primary data from the authors' ongoing research.
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