Experiential Expertise: complicating categories of lived experience

Caitríona Beaumont, London South Bank University; Eve Colpus, University of Southampton & Ruth Davidson, Queen Mary University of London

https://doi.org/10.58077/KJ2Z-KK77

Lived experience is a familiar term in the vernacular of histories of experience and emotions.[1] And it is a term now firmly embedded in everyday conversations beyond academia, regularly alluded to in the media, and in public, policy and political debate. A powerful example of this was given by British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. He acknowledged the significance of lived experience in politics highlighting that in his cabinet ‘we have people who know at first hand the difference government can make in people’s lives. We have a housing secretary who grew up in council housing. An education secretary who relied on free school meals. And a health secretary who relied on the NHS for his own cancer treatment’.[2] Drawing on a lived experience lays claim to authenticity gained via living through an experience of a phenomena, for example of poverty, trauma, disability, illness, bereavement, racism and sexism.[3] Lived experience can therefore be defined as ‘personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people’.[4] ‘Communities of experience’, the concept developed by Ville Kivimäki, Antti Malinen and Ville Vuolanto, reveals how individuals coalesce around lived experiences, form a community, and then use their collective experiences to engage in activism. These repertoires of agency and activism reveal how experiences can be used effectively to bring about change over time and throughout history.[5]

Harnessing experiential expertise within these ‘communities of experience’ is a powerful way to legitimate activism. Experiential expertise occurs when knowledge is gained from personal experience of, and emotional response to, a particular phenomenon.[6] Experiential expertise is therefore an alternative form of expertise gained not through education, training or working in a skilled occupation, but from everyday lived experience. Experiential expertise has been utilized by historians, for example Jennifer Crane, to highlight the ‘interplay between politics of experience, expertise and emotion’ whereby experiential expertise enables individuals and groups to ‘become agents in, and subjects of, rather than objects of social policy and practice’.[7] In Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experience, expertise and activism we further develop the concept of experiential expertise and apply it to new and diverse case studies. Here we illustrate how lived experience was successfully harnessed by individuals and ‘communities of experience’ to underpin welfare activism in twentieth century Britain.[8]

In this article we want to build on this body of work. We achieve this by turning our attention to a category of experiential expertise that complicates understandings of lived experience within the history of experience. This is the occurrence of mediated experiential expertise. In mediated experiential expertise, the deployment of experiential expertise happens where the expertise is not exclusively retained by the individual who has the experience but rather is conducted between and across different actors. There can be layers of shifting emphasis between the communication of personal experience and the representation of that experience by an external individual or group. An important distinction must be drawn here. Mediated experiential expertise is not an experience that is ‘constructed by other people’. The construction of the experience originates directly from the lived experience. What mediated experiential expertise enables is the amplification of the expertise gained from lived experience to increase its potential in bringing about social, political or economic change.

Omitting mediated experiential expertise from the history of experience risks overlooking the complex processes by which experiential expertise is acquired. As Joan Scott cautioned, experience is ‘neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested’ and therefore historians must be attuned to the production of that knowledge which ‘retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories’.[9] Within the history of experience, mediated experiential expertise requires us to think differently about the question of the authenticity of lived experience, and how it is re-purposed for activism. In the following examples, taken from our work on the history of women’s voluntary activism in twentieth century Britain, we demonstrate how a mediated experiential expertise has been used effectively to enhance the lives of a wider group directly impacted by a negative lived experience.

With a privileged background and an English degree at Oxford University the poverty and housing campaigner, Audrey Harvey (1912-1997) might not appear on the face of it to be an experiential expert. However, using the framing of mediated experience allows us to consider her as such. Rejecting her social advantages, she worked in a Citizen’s Advice Bureau in the East End of London for over twenty years, one of London’s poorest communities.[10] This gave her a granular appreciation of the multiple ways in which the social security system was failing poor families and led her to both publish and advocate on behalf of the poor, including publishing advice handbooks, articles in the national press and an influential pamphlet, Casualties of the Welfare State.[11] In all her work it is the voices and experiences of those poor families which are to the fore and on which she based her findings. Significantly, she did not use this activism to seek professional or academic roles. Rather she remained a lifelong grassroots worker offering advice and support on an array of housing issues to those in need. As the welfare rights activist Tony Lynes observed, she was ‘a different kind of expert, whose knowledge was based on daily observation of the ways in which social services tried and too often failed to meet the needs of working-class families’.[12]

In England during the middle decades of the twentieth century, sub-standard housing was an everyday lived experience for many working-class women. Throughout these years housing shortages, overcrowding, lack of running water and the persistence of slum conditions, were common hardships of daily life. For example, in 1931 70,000 houses in Manchester were condemned as unfit for human habitation and in London over 30,000 of the city’s poor were living in slum like basement dwellings.[13] In 1937 it was reported that some 57,000 homes in rural areas were unfit for habitation.[14] In response over 30 voluntary women’s groups, for example the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, the Mothers’ Union and the National Council of Women, came together to campaign on housing issues during the 1930s and 1940s. By forming the Women’s Advisory Housing Council (WAHC) in December 1936 these groups drew directly on the experiential expertise of women to draw attention to the housing needs of the working-class housewife and mother. Although the leadership of voluntary women’s organisations was predominantly middle-class, they successfully harnessed the experiential expertise of working-class members to campaign for housing reform. This mediated experiential expertise was achieved through local branch meetings and surveys of members. So even though the leadership did not have experience of living in inadequate homes, they were able to utilize the experiential expertise of their members to demand change. In giving evidence to the wartime Design of Dwellings Committee (1941) the WAHC drew on these lived experiences. In the immediate post-war years their demands for hot running water, well-designed kitchens, indoor bathrooms and homes with gardens set minimum standards for public housing schemes.[15]

These two examples of mediated experiential expertise demonstrate that within the history of experience the concept of lived experience is multifaceted and complex. Positive outcomes can result when the experiential expertise of ‘communities of experience’ is harnessed by others to amplify demands for change. This process of amplification is facilitated using mediated experiential expertise. Considering the mediated possibilities of experiential expertise opens up new debates about the concept of lived experience and how experiences influence history. Moreover, complicating the categories of lived experience and experiential expertise, by showing how expertise can be mediated, reveals new possibilities for agency and activism across time and space.

Notes

[1] See for example: Josephine Hoegaerts and Stephanie Olsen, ‘The History of Experience: Afterword’, Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800-2000, eds Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki and Tanja Vahtikari (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Stuart Middleton, ‘The concept of “experience” and the making of the English Working class, 1924-1962’, Modern Intellectual History 13 (2016): 197; Chris Millard, ‘Using personal experience in the academic medical humanities: a genealogy’, Social Theory and Health, 18 (2020): 184-198; Selina Todd, ‘Class, experience and Britain’s twentieth century’, Social History 39 (2014): 489-508.

[2] Keir Starmer, ‘Opinion’, The Guardian, 13 July, 2024.

[3] It is important to acknowledge that examples of experiential expertise leading to activism in the British context are not solely the preserve of left-wing activists or the expression of personal hardship and pain. As an example, the activism of the middle-class campaigner Victoria Gillick in 1980s Britain, in preventing contraceptive advice being provided to girls below the age of 16 without parental permission, was underpinned by her religious faith.

[4] Oxford University Press. ‘Transcendentalism’, Oxford Reference. Accessed 8 July, 2024. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100109997.

[5] Ville Kivimäki, Antti Malinen and Ville Vuolanto, ‘Communities of Experience’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experiences, 2023.

[6] Thomasina Borkman, ‘Experiential Knowledge: A New Concept for the Analysis of Self-Help Groups’, Social Science Review, 50 (1976): 445-456.

[7] Jennifer Crane, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000: Expertise, Experience, and Emotion. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 2.

[8] Caitríona Beaumont, Eve Colpus and Ruth Davidson (eds), Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experience, expertise and activism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, in press 2024). The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who have sex with women, bereaved families, community groups, individuals living in poverty, health service users, and people of faith.

[9] Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 14 (1991): 779-80, 797.

[10] Citizens Advice Bureau are an independent organisation specialising in confidential information and advice to people with legal, debt, consumer rights and housing issues in the UK. They emerged in the 1930s and continue to provide advice services today.

[11] Audrey Harvey, Casualties of the Welfare State (London: Fabian Society, 1960).

[12] Tony Lynes, ‘Audrey Harvey obituary’, The Guardian, 14 April 1997, 19. For further examples of the way that experiential expertise can challenge hegemonic narratives around forms of knowledge see our co-edited collection Everyday Welfare in Modern British History.

[13] John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815-1985 (London: Methuen, 1986): 243.

[14] Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013): 168.

[15] The Design of Dwellings Committee was set up to consider how the design of homes and housing estates could be improved. Burnett, A Social History of Housing: 297–300. See also Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Where to Park the Pram? Voluntary Women’s Organisations, Citizenship and the Campaign for Better Housing in England, 1928-1945’, Women’s History Review, 22 (2013): 75-96.