“Lay Participation and the Rhetorical Production of (In)expertise”
Channel: Helsinki Collegium
Date: 2018-11-16

The international symposium "Politics of participation: Anthropological reflections on power and interaction" took place at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on October 18-19, 2018.

Panel 2: Institutions and the Regimentation of Participation
Chair: Don Kulick, Distinguished University Professor, Anthropology, Uppsala University

E. Summerson Carr, Associate Professor, Social Service Administration, University of Chicago: “Lay Participation and the Rhetorical Production of (In)expertise”

The enactment of expertise frequently relies upon would-be experts’ ability to establish hierarchical relationships with laypeople, as well as with relevant objects of knowledge.  Institutions stabilize these relationships not simply by organizing certain things into experts’ purview, but also by organizing certain people out of the ability to interact with, evaluate, and know those things.  In such cases, the projection of expertise hinges on laypeople’s relative passivity in the knowledge production process.  This can hold true—and perhaps particularly so—when the object of expertise is the laity itself.

In light of the aforementioned tendencies, laypeople—and especially laypeople accustomed to participatory democratic ideals—sometimes dismiss expertise as elitist and irrelevant.  In the United States, for instance, there is a long history of public mistrust of (select) forms of expertise, with which experts must grapple in order to survive. Drawing on my ethnographic engagement with American behavioral therapists, who are intent on democratizing relationships with clients and laypeople, this paper explores the relationship between the dynamics of expertise and the politics of participation.

The behaviorists I study explicitly disavow expertise, framing clients as co-participants, or “partners,” in the therapeutic process.  In American psychotherapies, the idealization of clinical participation is hardly novel, paralleling discourses of political participation. (Think: the father of American self-psychology once compared his clients to Freedom Riders).  However, the (in)experts I engage are especially intriguing in their development and deployment of a complex set of rhetorical devices, which are designed to funnel expert claims through the voices of their client co-participants.  Focusing on how “participation” is rhetorically achieved in this case, I highlight ways that (expert) power and knowledge can be at once kept and given away.