Struggles over Expertise

There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this by providing more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in initiatives. Based on ethnographic research projects with marginalized people who are invited act as experiential experts, the examines actors limit open up possibilities participate. By focusing struggles concerning definition expertise, identifies threefold character practice within innovations. It involves (1) illuminating boundaries define actors’ possibilities; (2) making connection between these specific value bases; (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation.