Ayush Biswas

In this presentation, our team investigates how vaccine hesitancy is articulated by mobilising diverse epistemic claims (Sarrazin et al, 2024) across digital platforms in a comparative, cross-national context, which includes case studies from Taiwan, India, Georgia, and Germany. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of data sampled across diverse platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, we explore how diverse responses to vaccination emerge. Within this epistemic diversity, we trace how specific experiential data coupled with broader perceptions of national and transnational pandemic governance and communication strategies, all affect digital articulations of trust, mis-trust, distrust, and literacy. Media platforms offer a vast repository of resources, which often spans a spectrum from critical to outright conspiratorial. In our cross-national case study, we explore how they are mobilised to contest the traditional deficit model of science communication in each of our cases. The Deficit or the dissemination model (Wynne, 1993;Tayeebwa, 2022; Grant 2023) provides a top-down and asymmetrical view of science communication, where there exists a passive ‘lay-public’ and the ‘expert knowledge disseminator’. This unreflexive position of knowledge communication is unproductive, and it has been further argued that increased knowledge often among the ‘lay knower’ does not always translate into openness to new scientific methods and technologies ( Dickinson, 2005). In all four of our cases, we encountered attempts at institutional reflexivity, where both contextual and popular media strategies were adapted. However, in our presentation, we will argue that these models fail to reform an essentialised deficit model, which still exists in the ‘backstage’ of the attempts.