Mitä kokemusasiantuntijat edustavat? : analyysi edustamisen politiikoista osallistamishankkeissa

Kirjoittajat

• Taina Meriluoto

Abstrakti

The article presents a case study of the politics of representation in a participatory policy implemen­tation. Building on non-institutional interpretations of representation (Saward 2011, Warren 2008), it asks how different definitions of representation are used to expand or limit possibilities for action. The case, expertise-by-experience in the Finnish social welfare sector, is investigated by making use of Michael Saward’s notion of a representative claim (2010). The article investigates what experts-by-experience are presented as representing, and how their representativeness is being legitimized. It demonstrates how the representative positions of experts-by-experience are constructed through two significantly different claims: on one hand, experts-by-experience are presented as experts of neutral and collective knowledge, on the other, experts-by-experience position themselves as ad­vocates for the interests of a marginalized group. These contradictory claims, it is argued, are in­dicative of attempts to frame the experts’-by-experience representation in a specific way. As a result, the article suggest that when investigating the newer, non-institutional forms of representation, the questions where representation is presented as taking place and who makes the representative claim, become relevant and revelatory.