“The Crisis of Expertise, Revisited: How Lay Experts are Transforming the Politics of Knowledge and Authority.”

Abstract: It has become common to speak of the “crisis” of expertise and to link the phenomenon of growing distrust of experts with declining confidence in authorities of all sorts. To better understand and evaluate these perceptions of crisis, I focus attention on an underlying shift in the politics of knowledge and authority in the United States in recent decades that has transformed what it means to be an expert and who can plausibly serve as one: the rise to prominence of hybrid forms of “lay expertise.” By considering examples especially in the domain of health—including challenges posed by knowledge-empowered social movements—I seek to provide a somewhat more hopeful account of the crisis of expertise: one that recognizes the risks of populist dismissal of experts but also emphasizes the potential virtues of democratic challenges to traditional expertise in the service of epistemic justice.