Abstract
Expertise presents an enduring political problem. It is, on one hand, essential to a functioning society. On the other hand, it is inextricably entwined with hierarchies and power disparities. A society based solely on the rule of experts would surely be no democracy, yet neither would a society with no experts. It is sensible to promote the spread of expertise through technological literacies and skills. However, the public will never all simply become experts. Indeed, the empowered individual actor imagined by neoliberalism and do-it-yourself technology philosophies strains both individuals by dissolving their institutional and community support structures. We argue in this Special Issue that expertise and publics are mutually constitutive rather than oppositional. These essays foreground how expertise is constituted, communicated, and evaluated. The process of analyzing expertise’s roles and functions resurfaces vital concerns for the current historical moment of heated populism and social media platforms.
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