Sponsored by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects, the Workshop on Knowledge and the State this semester will explore the relationship between public governance and technical expertise. The goal of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of why public officials select and deploy the expert knowledge that they do, and how expert knowledge itself is shaped by shifting political demands and anxieties. While these questions are far from novel, the sense of the Workshop’s convenors is that across a range of domains – from climate science and clean energy to epidemiology and public health, from the economics of inflation, trade, and competition to computer science and the science of race and gender – the distinction between political and epistemic authority has become especially blurred. We will meet three times a semester, either to engage with guest speakers presenting new work on these topics, or to discuss and debate classic scholarship on the same.
Expanding upon the Workshop’s consideration of the relationship between public governance and technical expertise, Gillian Metzger (Columbia Law School) will lead a discussion centered around civil service autonomy and the role of internal agency accountability mechanisms.
Readings:
