Expertise as perspectives in dialogue

Expertise is situated in the sense that we can scaffold or obstruct the capacity for providing expert insight and choose to create environments and relationships in which different perspectives are heard and understood, due to skilful facilitation, preparation, expectation-setting, and thoughtful configuration of systems and structures. As a result, the people providing those perspectives can be seen as experts where expertise is built upon knowledge or experience, but it arises from extensive efforts in seeking to understand something; it is borne out of a hard-earned familiarity with the contours of a particular set of problems.

In this chapter, we examine the notion of expertise by experience with reference to mental health research, discussing some of the objections commonly raised against its legitimacy. The best way to characterise the integration of different forms of expertise is to describe the process as a case of perspectives in dialogue. A perspective is a way of referring to how something appears from a particular standpoint, which acknowledges the relevance of that standpoint to what is foregrounded. A dialogue is a means of sharing insights, carried out to support reciprocal understanding. Co-design and co-production approaches encourage perspective taking and use group processes and facilitation to support community consensus building. It is through such collaborative and relational processes that common objections against the legitimacy of expertise by experience can be addressed.