Expertise, collective action and critique: when expertise meets emancipatory politics

Expert knowledge has been a key problem in sociological research since the classics, and its relevance is grown with the centrality of science and technology in contemporary society. Though initially conceived as a necessary tool to tackle the complexity of public problems with the power of rationality, the use and application of expertise to solve public problems has shown its ambivalences toward ideas of progressive and democratic politics. While in a rationalist perspective, expert knowledge can be used as a tool to shed light on opaque political decision-making, in a technocratic view, the delegation to experts can neutralize democratic accountability and exclude a broader concerned public from decision-making. The chapter illustrates debates on the social dimensions of expertise since the classic ‘critical’ and ‘functionalist’ conceptions of science and technology until the currently distinctive field of science and technology studies, by giving importance to empirical sociological researches focusing on critical communities, collective actors and social movements. The contribution shows how definitions and practices of expertise are symmetrically related to definitions and practices of democracy emerged over the course of the years in various experiences and experiments. It gives a specific emphasis to cases of co-production between experts and citizens, the mobilizations of critical experts and the participation of lay-people over various publicly relevant issues affected by techno-scientific innovation. The chapter conclude with an attempt at defining how specific practices of critical expertise can contribute to progressive democratic processes fostering emancipation.