I have conducted plenty of interviews in the past. Most of them were even filmed for video projects. And yet every time I experience the same anxiety and nervousness as I did in those early interviews. It wasn’t surprising, then, that my heart was racing as I stepped into the office of an environmental engineering professor for an interview. And yet it felt as if there was something different this time. On reflection I realize that the expertise of my interviewee created a distinct affective space that I hadn’t before experienced. This has raised some analytic concerns for me that I have been trying to work through since.
The first relates to our discussions of expertise generally, whose knowledge is legitimated and whose is disregarded? It’s not so much that I worry about granting the professional expert undue authority. It seems to me that there is a usefulness to professionalized expertise which deserves some recognition, if not hegemony over epistemic authority, but rather that I don’t grant others enough. Why is it that I don’t encounter other interlocutors as bearers of a kind of expertise—in their own experiences, their communities and even their bodies as sites of knowledge production—which elicit a similar sense of epistemic asymmetry and apprehension?
Interestingly, I don’t think this is only a case of internalized bias towards professionalized forms of expertise. After all, I have interviewed plenty of professional community organizers, people with their own form of institutionally legitimated expertise, and yet that expertise never elicited the kind of affect I experienced when interviewing this professor. Of course, the extent to which this expertise is taken as legitimate and authoritative varies by context. I doubt many of the politicians or managerial and executive corporate employees, let alone their employers, who were the targets of campaigns would take community organizers as legitimate experts in any field. Nevertheless, I certainly took it is as legitimate, at least in an ideological sense, if not at an affective register.
This raises the question of how the fetishization of a particular kind of knowledge production, that which has been legitimated through its classification as Science, has shaped my encounters with interlocutors and interviewees. I struggle with this because I see value in expertise qua expertise. In my previous work there were certainly times when I would grant the analysis of those who had experience working in organizing some authority. I gave more weight to their political analysis and thus the tactics they deemed most strategic, for example, than I might a community member. I now find myself questioning both the authority I grant professionalized expertise in general, and the specific hierarchy of kinds of authority operative in my engagements with different forms of expertise.
I now find myself questioning how even granting expert activists may have foreclosed other possibilities for understanding the situations I was trying to explore. At the same time, I also continue to respect the wisdom that comes from both experience and the ability to focus so much time on a particular topic that comes with professionalization. I am not sure that there is an “answer” to the questions this has raised for me, but it has encouraged me to be more self-aware and critical of the ways I reproduce certain forms of epistemic legitimacy, both between the professional expert and layman, and even among professional experts themselves.