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Technical Expertise Meets Public Deliberation: Going Beyond Laboratory Studies to Understand the Expert/Lay Divide
Thu, September 5, 4:30 to 6:00pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Eight, ProteusAbstract
President Obama’s Open Government Initiative primed technical experts from several agencies to experiment with participatory technology assessment (pTA), a deliberative method for eliciting lay citizen input prior to making policy decisions. Technical expert involvement with pTA opened up an opportunity to expand on what we understand as expertise, which traditionally has been defined through observations derived from laboratory studies. Expert experiences with pTA design and implementation represents a new location for the study of the expert/lay divide and expert reflexivity. During these experiences they are directly confronted with the value-laden nature of knowledge production, bringing into tension the exclusionary authority of expertise on the one hand and the inclusive nature of democracy on the other.
This study seeks to explore the value of pTA as a boundary object that challenges the linear model of knowledge production and expertise. We use three cases of government agencies adopting pTA in partnership with a boundary organization, Experts and Citizens Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST), to explore whether pTA represents technical expert experiences that challenge traditional models of expertise. This study builds off previous work that uses boundary metaphors to understand expertise in the policy arena and presents a theoretical framework for challenging standard presentations of the expert/lay divide and understanding the multiple ways that experts negotiate procedures and outcomes of pTA in different organizational contexts. Furthermore, this paper presents early results from ethnographic interviews and document analysis collected to test this theoretical framework.