Introduction

Abstract

These are anxious times for expertise. Competing claims about vaccine efficacy and mask mandates swirl in an increasingly chaotic online environment. Media coverage of ongoing crises routinely highlights the splintering of epistemic authority as a major issue in the fight against COVID-19, climate change and climate denialism, dangerous misinformation, and structural racism. All of these can reasonably be interpreted as crises of expertise, part of a larger rupture in supposedly established practices of truth and trust on which science, medicine, and public health depend. Whether or not such a prior paradigm of expertise existed (and there is reason to doubt that it did), our moment raises crucial questions about the nature and future of expertise. What is it like to be an expert?The essays in this collection offer different ways of posing or answering this question. They consider the problem of expertise in its historical and ethical dimensions at once, in cases ranging from early modern poison trials to sports analytics in the twenty-first century. Each author offers a moment in the evolution of expertise that raises the question of how experts know what they know and do what they do—and how the rest of us come to depend upon, or grow skeptical of, those same capacities. Taken as a whole, the collection builds on two generations of scholarship in science and technology studies, layering activism and aesthetics onto the epistemic and political foundations of expertise. They explore recurring relations between forms of expertise grounded in the experiential, and those grounded in authority, professional institutions and qualifications, or disembodied or routinized procedure. They suggest the challenges to and dangers of institutionalizing expertise, and point to the constitutive role of technologies involved in expert practice. Finally, they offer new directions to those who would look to history as a guide to whether and how to place our faith in experts.