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During the 1980s, an acute and deadly epidemic appeared in the United States. AIDS, a disease that initially affected mainly gay men, required a rapid and effective treatment. Due to tough regulations form government agencies and the stigma surrounding the disease, it would take a long time for a treatment to be developed. To break the silence, demand action and push for changes to combat the AIDS epidemic, the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed. A network formed around their actions that created an environment capable of developing new treatment methods. Using interviews, articles, and reports, this analysis will draw on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to examine how ACT UP mobilizes lay expertise and navigates conflicts within its network to influence research processes and AIDS treatment. This analysis highlights the mobilization of lay expertise and shows how the constructive management of conflicts within networks can play a crucial role in challenging established research structures, influencing decision-making processes, and ultimately shaping the response to public health crises like the AIDS epidemic.

'Experiential knowledge' has been identified as a key epistemic resource used by lay people to contest medical authorities and build new knowledge related to health. The Internet has created unprecedented opportunities for such experience-based epistemic projects. This article contributes to understandings of the as yet under-theorised concept of experiential knowledge by analysing accounts of a group of Swedish women who claim that their use of contraceptive copper IUDs has led to systemic side effects not recognised by health care providers. Based on digital group interviews and written essays, we distinguish between three components or stages of experiential knowledge at work in the women's use of experience as an epistemic resource: somatic knowing, collective validation and self-experimentation. Drawing on a critical realist framework, we defend a notion of experiential knowledge as crucially, while only partially, based on a bodily and practical access to aspects of reality organised by extra-discursive principles. By providing theoretical complexity to the notion of experiential knowledge, we contribute resources for discriminating between and evaluating various experience-based claims, something that is particularly needed in the current 'post-truth' era where experience-based knowledge claims pointing in divergent directions flourish.

As an epistemic authority providing valid knowledge and measures for handling current environmental problems or preventing new ones from occurring, environmental expertise is a crucial factor in regulation and in the development of environmental discourses. At the same time, scientific expertise is also questioned; its capacity to deliver both trustworthy and relevant knowledge is contested. This situation constitutes the point of departure for this chapter, which critically discusses the meaning and implications of environmental expertise. Starting with an exploration of current trends within, and challenges to, expertise, it discusses why expertise needs to comprise other forms of knowledge than only scientific ones. It presents several theoretical proposals for tackling the situation of contested expertise, all of which stress the need to re-draw the boundaries between experts and non-experts. The chapter investigates how these proposals differ in terms of who, what, why and how to include non-scientific knowledge. By way of conclusion, it raises questions about the role of expertise in the current quest for social transformation.

This crossing boundaries section addresses the substantial aspects at stake in reshaping the nexus between science, politics and society triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this regard, three main dimensions are explored: first, the emerging forms of science-related populism and how political narratives challenge and dispute prevailing scientific knowledge; second, the platformization of science communication and the active role of users and communities in consuming and spreading online misinformation; third, the role of lay expertise in contesting the epistemic authority of science during the health emergency. The authors explore the related topics by mobilizing different theoretical frameworks from STS studies, media studies and legal science, also moving from empirical to theoretical level in order to challenge the “surface” of a multilayered phenomenon.

The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease. We outline how the policy debate is being framed by UK institutional actors, finding evidence of a dominant discourse in which the policy approach is defined through a deficit model of public understanding of science and in which a technical approach to feasibility and safety is deemed as sufficient grounds for good policymaking. Deploying a deliberative focus group methodology with lay publics across different sites in the north of England, we find that these institutional framings are poorly aligned with participants’ responses. We find that unease regularly overflows the focus on safety and feasibility and cannot be satisfactorily explained by a lack of understanding on the part of participants. We find that scholarship from science and technology studies productively elucidates our participants’ largely sceptical positions, and orientates strategies for responding to them more effectively.

Élaborée pour résoudre de façon pratique des difficultés d’accès à une population, la technique d’enquête qui fait l’objet de cet article repose sur l’usage de photographies. Si l’épure de la technique se laisse assez bien résumer comme le passage d’un entretien libre à un entretien centré, via une étape qui utilise des mots qualificateurs, les résultats de l’enquête invitent à être attentif à plusieurs dimensions qui dépassent les technicités usuelles d’analyse de l’image et à les problématiser en termes de « prises » (ici, selon une sociologie pragmatique). Indicielles ou iconiques, les prises révèlent en fait un double ancrage dans la réalité photographiée, renforcé ou non par des mises en récit. De même, la capacité de thématiser et de valoriser signe une expertise capable de dire des situations qui se tiennent. Enfin, l’implication des enquêtés dans la réalisation de supports de communication à partir des photos va bien au-delà d’une contrainte d’engagement réussie et interroge la dissymétrie enquêteur/enquêté., Images to Raise Words: On the Sociological Power of PhotographyDesigned to favour a better access to a specific population, the technique of interview discussed here is based on photographs. Roughly speaking, it may be characterized as a move from a free interview to a centered one, via a step where standard words are used to qualify the pictures. It appears that we need to connect explicitly the usual techniques of coding the way people take a hold on pictures and a strong body of hypothesis (belonging here to pragmatic sociology). This allows us to identify two main ways to be anchored in the photographied reality, supported (or not) by narratives. The research also shows that the high ability to set themes and to give them the weight of values may be related to an expertise of lay persons. And, finally, when interviewed persons agree and take pleasure in sharing pictures with an anonymous other they are supposed to inform, it asks questions to the ordinary accepted dissymetry between the scholars and their public.