Social movements’ trust, distrust, and use of experts’ knowledge

The topic of trust in experts has been increasingly salient. Especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, experts have become the target of distrust in many countries. We approach this topic from the point of view of social movements, which have been producers and advocates but also challengers of scientific and expert knowledge. In this paper, we explore the dynamic of trust and distrust in scientific and expert knowledge from the perspective of social movements. We want to understand and show how social movements perceive scientific and experts’ knowledge and how that perception shapes their trust in experts and scientists and their interactions. Our comparative analysis is based on the empirical material obtained from the focus groups composed of two social movements from Italy and two from Serbia, one socio-economic-oriented and one environmental social movement per county. We selected these cases for comparison since Italy has a long tradition of political engagement of social movements, while in Serbia, grassroots social movements entered the extra-institutional political arena more recently. Our goal is to scrutinize if older/more recent traditions of political engagement, on the one side, and/or issues, on the other side, may lead to different attitudes (e.g. critic, confrontational, supportive) and strategies towards (socially recognized) scientific knowledge, as well as to different practices of knowledge production.