Navigating the role of emotions in expertise: public framing of expertise in the Czech public controversy on birth care

Abstract

Despite the abundant scholarship on sociopolitical embeddedness of expertise, its relation to emotions remains understudied. The paper fills this gap by discussing how public framings of expertise work against the inclusion of emotional contexts, affecting what kind of professional knowledge dominates in a public debate. The analysis of the Czech public debate on birth care shows that while midwives embrace emotional contexts of birthing and integrate them as an essential part of their professional expertise, obstetricians see these contexts as troubling their expertise. This professional difference is sustained by the public framing of expertise in the media, favoring obstetricians’ expertise over midwives’. The analysis shows that public framing of expertise outweighs evidential work done by midwives and legal advisors and impacts how emotional contexts are understood in the debate. Rather than referring to feelings and personal experience of the body, the “emotional” becomes a discursive label to delegitimize professional opinion. The results raise thus important questions about how the public framing of expertise impacts whether emotional context and experiences of bodily harm are seen as relevant in policy debates and policy regulations.