The Politics of "People With Lived Experience": Experiential Authority and the Risks of Strategic Essentialism

Commentary
by
Voronka, Jijian

Release Date

2016

Geography

USA

Language of Resource

English

Full Text Available

No

Open Access / OK to Reproduce

No

Peer Reviewed

Yes

Objective

I engage longstanding feminist, postcolonial, and post-structural philosophical debates that have queried the possibilities, limits, and conditions of drawing on experience as expertise, and apply these debates to show what can happen when we rely on strategic essentialism under the rubric of ‘lived experience’ to authorize our power.

Findings/Key points

PWLLE status has implications dealing with systems of power, representation, the value of bodies, and system reform

Keywords

Advocacy
Peer/PWLLE program involvement