When Crises Speak: Rethinking Knowledge, Time, and Authority in Public Health and Environmental Governance
On July 7, 2025, the seminar "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ethics and Governance in Times of Crisis" was jointly hosted by TORCH and UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology) CISAR (Center for Interdisciplinary Scientific Awareness and Research, directed by Professor Hyomin Kim).
The event brought together four scholars affiliated with TORCH and two Korean researchers to explore how crises challenge dominant understandings of knowledge, time, and institutional authority—drawing on recent developments in public health ethics, medical regulation, and environmental governance.
Professor Hyomin Kim presented a case study on conflicts surrounding the governance of high-level radioactive waste repositories in Korea, highlighting how temporality, expertise, and legitimacy intersect in contested policy fields.
Visiting Professor Eunseon Park shared a case of environmental activism, focusing on the NGO Listen to the City and its resistance to the ecological destruction of a river in Korea.
1. Justification of Coercive Public Health Measures
Dr. Alberto Giubilini examined the ethical foundations of coercive public health policies, which often require individuals to make personal sacrifices for the collective good. He argued that such measures are ethically justified only when they enforce moral obligations that are independently valid, not excessively burdensome, and clearly linked to meaningful public health goals. Legal requirements should impose the least possible demand on individuals; when this is not achievable, states have a duty to provide appropriate incentives or compensation.
2. Moral Agency of Institutions
Professor Angeliki Kerasidou addressed the emergence of artificial intelligence in medicine and questioned the prevailing emphasis on cultivating public trust. She argued that trust should not be treated as a prerequisite but rather as an earned outcome of sustained ethical engagement and institutional accountability. As digital health systems become increasingly complex—with the involvement of global consumer technology corporations—the need for enforceable, transparent regulatory structures becomes all the more urgent.
3. The Temporality of Crises
Professor Patricia Kingori challenged the conventional linear narrative often used to describe public health emergencies—beginning, peak, and recovery. In contrast, lived experiences of crisis are frequently non-linear: cyclical, suspended, or recursive. She posed critical questions: For whom is a crisis truly over when mass transmission ends? And who is excluded or forgotten when institutions declare its official conclusion? Her talk called for new conceptual and analytical frameworks to engage with the fragile, uneven temporalities of crisis.
4. Forms of Knowledge and Epistemic Authority
Professor Nayanika Mathur explored the epistemology of human–nonhuman relations in the context of the Anthropocene. While global institutions such as the IPCC frame environmental crises through quantified data, Mathur emphasized the importance of localized, affective, and momentary forms of knowing the nonhuman. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India, she examined how decisions—such as identifying so-called “man-eating” big cats—are often based on embodied, situated knowledge that eludes bureaucratic logic. Anthropology, she argued, has the potential to reshape governance by centring marginalized, relational modes of knowing that operate outside formalized structures.
Together, these presentations illuminated the urgent need for new theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that can accommodate the polyvocal, non-linear nature of contemporary crises. Such frameworks must move beyond technocratic models of governance to embrace epistemic pluralism—one that privileges embodied, situated knowledge alongside quantified data, recognizes the temporal multiplicities of crisis experiences, and interrogates the conditions under which institutional authority is constructed, contested, and legitimized. This intellectual agenda calls for interdisciplinary collaboration that can bridge the humanities and social sciences to develop more nuanced understandings of how power, knowledge, and temporality intersect in moments of societal disruption, ultimately contributing to more just and responsive forms of governance in an era of perpetual crisis.
