Experiential Expertise: complicating categories of lived experience

In this article we turn 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.