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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dutch training programs, sites in which struggles around experiential knowledge manifest, this paper follows how aspiring experts by experience learn to make lived experience legible as experiential knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Experts by experience are imagined as capable of building intimate and horizontal relations, especially with people deemed “hard-to-reach” or “care-avoidant.” In Dutch mental health care and welfare landscapes, experiential expertise has become increasingly central, bringing about a proliferation of training programs for aspiring experts by experience. In these training programs, lived experience – imagined to be outside the domain of professionalism and institutions – is transformed into experiential expertise that can be employed in the role of expert by experience.

To better understand how experiential knowledge gains authority and reshapes mental health care and welfare, we need more insight into its production. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in training programs for aspiring experts by experience, I analyze the production of experiential knowledge. Training programs are sites where struggles and tensions around the role and promises of experiential knowledge coalesce. How do aspiring experts by experience learn to be the harbinger of institutional change, as well as an efficient broker between “life world” and “system world”? How are tensions between the desire to acknowledge authentic, individual experience as a source of knowledge, and the desire to standardize the role of expert by experience as an institutional identity negotiated? And how do participants both learn to liberate themselves from pathologizing labels, while taking on an institutional identity reliant on labels? While reframing their experiences in new scripts, and learning how to relate to those they work with, I show how aspiring experts by experience navigate these tensions in the production of experiential knowledge.