Short Abstract

In this workshop, we interrogate anthropological methodologies in relation to the epistemic demands of lived experience expertise. We reflect on situated knowledge production to understand what is at stake – what moves us – in sites of peer support as an object of study and a disciplinary practice.

Long Abstract

This workshop examines lived experience and anthropological knowledge across peer support practices in diverse sites. While originally based in networks of informal care and mutual aid, peer support is increasingly being professionalised in contexts including mental health, immigration support, addiction and recovery, gang-related violence, post-carceral reintegration, and more. This development asserts that a lived proximity to affective, material, and political realities yields a knowledge distinct from the expertise of hierarchical or institutional formulations. Simultaneously, as discourses of “lived experience” spread, questions of what exactly constitutes lived experience surface and trouble these sites of relating to others. As peer support roles enter into weakening welfare states and structures of care, this unique labour, which moves the self in ways that demand affective resonances, material commitments, and political imaginaries, becomes ever more complicated.

There is a resonance between the epistemic efforts of lived experience expertise and the work of anthropology, which similarly depends on vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to engage knowledge as a co-productive process (Hastrup 2014; Mosse 2025; Stodulka et al. 2018). Taking these concerns as critical objects of ethnographic study, we invite contributions that consider diverse sites of peer support, and/or how the experiences we carry as ethnographers inform our attentions, our questions, and our relationships to power/knowledge. We aim to think reflexivity and transformation alongside our interlocutors, always recognising that knowledge is partial and made in relation (Cubellis 2020, 2027; Seise 2027; Strathern 2005), exploring what resonances this holds for contemporary understandings of affects, materialities, and political subjectivities.