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 responsibility
Since 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?