Is experience expertise?

Dr Elizabeth Frost,

University of The West of England, Bristol

I am going to take a few minutes to look at some of the kinds of meanings contained in the notion that ‘experience’ can be understood as ‘expertise’, in other words that because one has lived through something one becomes an ‘expert’ on it

I will relate some of my comments to, and use some examples from, ideas about service user involvement as embraced currently in English social work.

Firstly I would like to set the tone by reminding us of probably the most useful notions in relation to knowledge and indeed all social phenomena that Foucault and the post-structuralists offered us :-

• Nothing – no phenomena, no explanation, no excuse - has a single, fixed, meaning: all meanings are multiple and changing, no meanings are completely knowable

• Everything is dangerous

The value of privileging experience over other forms of knowledge, (and therefore rendering the service user as expert)

• Liberatory politics

• Democracy

• Social levelling

• Voice…etc.

Some problems with privileging experience over other forms of knowledge

The politics of individual responsibilitySince the 1980’s demolition of the idea of

the welfare state (services cradle to grave ) it has suited the government to address all people as able to resolve some/all of their own problems, and as consumers rather than recipients of services.

The (spurious) notion of ‘choice’

The social work orthodoxy of the deification of victimhood – somehow by virtue of having been oppressed you automatically become wise and good. Experience can damage, make bitter, distort etc as well as make wise and good.

‘Service user’ is not a total identity and does not come with personality characteristics attached, though it is beginning to be constructed as such in the UK.

Are models from the politics of oppression and liberation applicable?

What do we understand identity as being? The critique of the notion of the ‘rational’ individual

– do any of us really know what we are doing? Are we emotionally driven, unconscious, defended?

‘Subjects whose inner worlds cannot be understood without knowledge of their experiences in the world, and whose experiences of the world cannot be understood without knowledge of the way in which their inner worlds allow them to experience the outer world’ (Hollway and Jefferson, 2001, p.4.)

The denial of dependency and need- we can’t face these in others because they remind us of our own?

• ‘I think of my work as helping… I have some specialist knowledge that my patients do not (always) have; I do not consider this makes me better at life, though some people seem to think it should. Like …diagnostic categories, sometimes it is helpful to me and my patients, sometimes it gets in my way but not my patients’, sometimes vice versa. My work is aimed at enabling the patient to find a way of living free of me… (Craib , 1998 p.59)

The limits of experience

It is not a guarantee of expertise or knowledge – it may blinker you to other people’s different experience (example of why in the UK we used to have only mature social work students. Limits e.g. of mothering as generalizable; experience is emotional, personal, partial )

May simply be the repetition of dominant discourse?