Prof. Dr. Nikola Biller-Adorno - SG and HK

What made you decide to apply for a grant at the Leading House Asia?
The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an overabundance of information, including false or misleading information that has become an incubator for emotional responses, moral judgments, and behavioral changes in daily routines.
The project “PubliCo - an experimental online platform for COVID-19 related public perception” received funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation to tackle the infodemic emerged in the COVID-19 context, with a focus on a nuanced and in-depth understanding of public perception and a strong citizen-science component. We increasingly felt the need to critically reflect on whether this online platform developed in Switzerland with its inherent normative assumptions concerning transparency, participation, and civil rights is applicable to other socio-cultural, legal, and economic contexts around the globe, as for example Hong Kong (China) and Singapore. Our project therefore aimed at understanding these specific contexts in order to understand whether the PubliCo approach is transferable.

How did you secure a research partner?
To realize the project we relied on relationships that we had already built due to reason of the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine being a World Health Organization collaborating center.

What role did the Leading House Asia play in the programme?
Thanks to the funding we were enabled to carry out the project. It gave us the chance to exchange and reflect with partners and further researchers from across the Asian region on the transferability of the platform. This contributed to the greater sustainability of the platform developed.

What were the impacts you made through the project/partners/individual?
Habibat Sheidu, a Master's student of the Swiss Tropical and PubliC Health Institute (Basel), conducted a review of research papers discussing risk and crisis communication in Hong Kong (China) and Singapore. The process was accompanied by our partners and the results were discussed with them and other colleagues from Asia. Only through our partners’ in-depth knowledge of the regions of Hong Kong (China) and Singapore the results could be sufficiently contextualized and problematized. This allowed us to identify key points and relevant gaps to address in the further adaptation of the platform.

Testimonial: what were your personal experiences/thoughts on the bilateral cooperation experience?
“The joint meetings with our partners and other colleagues from Asia were extremely important in order to discuss the topic together. The diversity in professional and technical backgrounds from different regions and countries helped us to gain a better, broader and deeper understanding of what the strengths and limitations of such a platform might be in less democratic societies, and what adjustments might be needed to make the platform applicable in future crises around the globe.” (Dr. Bettina Schwind)

“Having the possibility to work across Countries and cultures to see whether a bidirectional risk and crisis communication approach we developed for the Swiss context could be of use and of help somewhere else in the world was a relevant experience, as it allowed us to consider our work from an entirely new and wider perspective”. (Giovanni Spitale)