Unpacking Expertise - I: Data, the Digital, and Organizations

Abstract

The study of expertise brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to ask questions about who does expertise, how experts define themselves, what kinds of social and cultural things expertise can accomplish, and whether we should define expertise in terms of boundaries, networks, fields, alliances, objects, cultural work, or jurisdictions. Long a central topic of the STS literature, especially as expertise pertains to expert practice, the study of expertise has also transformed the sociology of professions, the history of science, and medical anthropology, forcing scholars to grapple with questions about politics and science, performance and assemblage, and state and governance. Further, the rise of populism around the globe has forced commentators from the left and right to ask if we are undergoing a “crisis of expertise” and to ask new and old questions about who has the right to produce knowledge, to make normative judgments, and to distinguish between lay and expert knowledge. This panel seeks papers that respond to these broad and provocative issues. Theoretical and empirical works are both welcomed. We are especially interested in pushing beyond existing theoretical frameworks and engaging with new empirical questions related to the global south and to the relationship between expertise and race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. This panel therefore seeks to both “interrupt” existing literature on expertise and “regenerate” the interdisciplinary field in new directions, in line with the 2019 conference theme.

Chair

• Luciana de Souza Leao, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Data (and) Science(s): The Double Movement of Continuity and Experimentation in Expertise Production - Philipp Brandt, University of Mannheim

• Digital Distrust Theory: On the Internet, Power, and Expert Authority Crisis - Magdalena Halina Góralska, Koźmiński University in Warsaw

• Expert Identity in the Science-Based Organizations - Olga Lelebina, ISG International Business School; Claire Picque, Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL University

• Reinventing Expertise in an Age of Platforms - Shreeharsh Kelkar, University of California, Berkeley

Session Organizer

• Paige Sweet, Harvard University