In recent years, concerns about a crisis of expert authority have been expressed across the globe. Japan is no exception to this trend. Scandals surrounding the (mis)management of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster severely damaged public confidence in state institutions, posing an additional challenge for those engaged in radiological protection. This article examines how claims to expert authority are made in these conditions of low public trust. To this end, I offer an ethnographic account of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA) Workshop on Post-Accident Food Safety Science—an event staged at the request of the Japanese Cabinet Office with the aim of inspiring confidence in Fukushima produce. I analyse the practices through which the organizers craft a credible public persona using the idiom of dramaturgical improvisation; drawing attention to the ‘performed resourcefulness’ with which they adapted extant institutional scripts in response to a discerned crisis of public reason. Concretely, improvisation invites us to consider how and why nuclear policy actors have sought to demarcate two variants of the deficit model: the (psychological) discourse of ‘radiophobia’ and the (economic) discourse of ‘reputational damage’. Where prior scholarship has identified the continuities between the two discourses, an attention to this boundary work reveals the dramaturgical advantages of ‘reputational damage’ over ‘radiophobia’ in contesting critics’ claims to the mantle of victimhood, securing international support, and producing the expert’s body as a site of evidence.

中文翻译：

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临时专家：在福岛举行的经合组织核能机构研讨会上的临时授权


近年来，全球范围内都表达了对专家权威危机的担忧。日本也不例外。围绕 2011 年福岛第一核电站灾难管理（不当）的丑闻严重损害了公众对国家机构的信心，给从事放射防护的人员带来了额外的挑战。本文探讨了在公众信任度较低的情况下如何声称专家权威。为此，我对经合组织核能机构 (NEA) 事故后食品安全科学研讨会进行了人种学描述，该研讨会是应日本内阁办公室的要求举办的，旨在激发人们对福岛农产品的信心。我分析了组织者使用戏剧即兴创作的手法塑造可信的公众形象的做法；提请人们注意他们“表现出的足智多谋”，他们利用现有的制度脚本来应对明显的公共理性危机。具体而言，即兴创作让我们思考核政策参与者如何以及为何试图区分赤字模型的两种变体：“辐射恐惧症”的（心理）话语和“声誉损害”的（经济）话语。先前的学术研究已经确定了这两种论述之间的连续性，而对这一边界作品的关注揭示了“声誉损害”相对于“辐射恐惧症”在质疑批评者对受害者的主张、获得国际支持以及产生专家的观点方面的戏剧性优势。身体作为证据。