Year 2: Expertise

It has become common to speak of the “crisis” of expertise and to link growing distrust of experts with declining confidence in authorities of all sorts. To better understand and evaluate these perceptions of crisis, Dr. Stephen Epstein focused his audience's attention on two underlying shifts in the politics of knowledge in the United States in recent decades that have transformed what it means to be an expert and who can plausibly serve as one: first, the diversification and proliferation of cultural authority, marked by a growing competition to provide answers and make pronouncements on how life should be lived; and second, the simultaneous rise to prominence of hybrid forms of “lay expertise” that include knowledge-empowered social movements. To ground his analysis, he focused on two domains—health and sexuality—where these transformations are especially evident. To bookend this analysis, Epstein traced developments from the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the recent experience of Covid-19, proposing that in the crucible of pandemics the fault lines of expertise become particularly visible. In his keynote lecture, Epstein provided a somewhat more hopeful account of the crisis of expertise, one that recognizes the risks of populist dismissal of experts but also emphasizes the potential virtues of democratic challenges to traditional expertise in the service of epistemic justice.