Rethinking construction expertise with posthumanism

Abstract

Expertise is commonly understood to be a distinct, even defining, aspect of being human: an attribute related to our efficacies to come to know and influence the, mostly non-human, world around us. In construction, expertise is commonly defined as the acquisition of skills and knowledge related to new technical processes, organizational routines, health and safety codes, even cultural norms. Despite the development of rule-following ‘expert systems’ in construction and beyond, the proposal that non-human technologies and artefacts can share our expertise is thus to be regarded with doubt: humans are human because of their lived expertise to undertake tasks faster and better than machines and other non-humans. Increasingly, however, this anthropocentric view of expertise can be challenged by a ‘posthuman turn’ that is gathering pace across the social sciences and humanities. The work of four seminal posthuman thinkers is drawn upon to evaluate the distinct, and varied, contribution that posthumanism might make to how we understand notions of construction expertise. Fictional examples of construction practices illustrate the challenge and theoretical and practical opportunities in rethinking construction expertise via posthumanism.