Exploring Expertise: Uncertainty, Knowledge, and Trust in Democracies (15-16 June 2012)

This working conference explores the growing public ambivalence over the role of expertise in addressing uncertainty and fostering improvement in every sphere of social life. As the political, environmental, economic, and epistemological insecurities of a globalized world become more acute, both the desire for expertise and the mistrust of its practitioners expand.

A large body of research has considered the emergence of the expert as a social actor, along with the multiple layers of modern expertise. There are typologies of expertises and meta-expertises as well as of experts’ pathologies. Following anthropologist Dominic Boyer, the workshop takes seriously the place of desire, fantasy and anxiety in the production of expert knowledge and offers opportunity for a broader exploration of the conflict and complicity among publics, institutions, and experts. The reception of expert advice and interventions is rarely unmixed enthusiasm. What kinds of fears and fantasies, projections and resentments enter this communicative encounter? The question invites multiple disciplinary approaches, theoretically, methodologically, and also empirically. Expertise is perhaps most obviously a core component of public administration, policy debate, and crisis management. In recent years it has become ever more prominent a feature of organizational life. But expertise also pervades our pleasures, evaluating goods and creating experiences of leisure, culture, and consumption. Not least, expertise informs the "private" and intimate spheres of domestic life, sexuality, and self-fashioning: in the contemporary fairy tale of life fulfillment, the magical helpers play the critical role.

The workshop was initiated by Don Brenneis (Dept. of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz, Fellow June 2012), Regina Bendix (Institute of Cultural Anthropology, Associate 2011-12), Kilian Bizer (Dept. of Economics, University of Göttingen), and Dorothy Noyes (Dept. of English and Mershon Institute, Ohio State University, Fellow 2011/12).