AO: The editors believe that the task of academia is to question the silences that technoscientific politics engender - to parse the values, interests and purposes that so often remain hiddne when objectivity is the criterion of legitimacy.
AO: Editors believe that foregrounding assumptions, frameworks, and terms of reference is important so that readerscan participate in the multiple registers of questioning that are important for strategizing “counter-expertise.
AO: Reflexive critique denatures the counter-experts own descriptions and supports the development of modes of expression through which claims to validity can be made without dependence on the prerogatives of “objectivity.”
AO: The editors note that the most difficult demand is to speak within the language and logic of particular institutional spaces (e.g. the court room, mainstream press, etc.). The spaces do not allow time for the reflexivity elaborated in the academic writing. The challenge for academic work is to find idioms for what dominant political logic ignores.
AO: The editors explicitly call the diversity within direct advocacy organizations as “collaboration” rather than collegiality or solidarity (which connote sameness of those who work together).
AO: Fortun and Cherkasky introduce essays that speak from the “messy middle” between the university and direct engagements with politics to suggest how “critiques of expertise can operate in settings rife with demands for positivist polemics.” This reminds me of the polemics that Green describes.
AO: The editors argue that counter-experts at the level of the organization recognize how power works - not as brute force but by establishing what counts as a legitimate statement.
AO: Editors are responding to binaries of political vs scholarship (academia vs direct advocacy) to argue that such reductions are ill-fitted to the complexities of the world. Editors note that keeping the relationship between scholarship and politics uneasy, under question and in tension can be strategic and productive (143).
AO: Fortun and Cherkasky develop the term “counter-expertise” to conceptualize ways that people who work with one foot in academia and one food in direct advocacy for political change take responsibility for expert knowledge and status while questioning the conventional role that experts play in framing political choices (141). They highlight that there needs to be continued direct engagement with politics by “counter-experts.”
AO: This editorial intro by Fortun and Cherkasky focuses largely on the meta, nano and practice (micro) levels of conceptualizing “counter-expertise”.