Expertise in/of co-Creation: The Care Work of Citizen Participation

Recent years have seen substantial interest in, and experiments with, public participation in environmental and scientific research and decision-making. In this paper we explore a case of such citizen participation, a co-creation project that aimed to bring together citizens, researchers, and artists to bring about sustainable futures. Drawing on recent theories of the nature of expertise, we argue for the importance of understanding it as involving practices of care, attachment, and affect. In investigating how expertise is performed and negotiated within this case, we find that expertise is distributed across the project, including in the work of organising it. This organisational work, in particular, often involves engagement with the moral imperatives of participation and with embodied and relational skills necessary to it. The analysis thus contributes to discussion of the ways in which different forms of expertise may be present in citizen participation in science, and to understanding the kinds of skills that are necessary for successfully supporting such participation.