Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

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The Crisis of Expertise, Revisited: How Lay Experts are Transforming the Politics of Knowledge and Authority

Steven Epstein

Northwestern University

November 5, 2026, 5:00pm-7:00pm
Room 210, Emerson Hall, 25 Quincy Street

Abstract

It has become common to speak of the “crisis” of expertise and to link the phenomenon of growing distrust of experts with declining confidence in authorities of all sorts. To better understand and evaluate these perceptions of crisis, I focus attention on an underlying shift in the politics of knowledge and authority in the United States in recent decades that has transformed what it means to be an expert and who can plausibly serve as one: the rise to prominence of hybrid forms of “lay expertise.” By considering examples especially in the domain of health—including challenges posed by knowledge-empowered social movements—I seek to provide 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.

Panel

Michel Anteby

Professor of Management & Organizations and Sociology, Boston University, Boston University

Laura Mamo

Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director, Wellesley Centers for Women

Oliver Rollins

Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT

Moderated by

Sheila Jasanoff

Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School

About the speaker

Steven Epstein is Professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. His research and teaching examine the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. His award-winning books include Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (1996), Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (2007), and The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life (2022).

Co-sponsored by Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Center for the Environment (A Center of the Salata Institute), and the McQuillan Institute.

Register for the in-person event here.

Poster art by Alex Wellerstein, adapting Hilma af Klimt, “US Series, Group VIII, No. 1,” 1913.