Rhetoric of Expertise

Reliance on expertise has become so commonplace in American culture that it is virtually impossible to avoid. Relying on expertise is one way we delegate the contents of our busy lives and defer to authority in the interest of being efficient. In The Rhetoric of Expertise, E. Johanna Hartelius investigates how expertise is negotiated as a function of the rhetorical situation, its participants and constraints. Specifically, she asks: What rhetorical strategies do different groups employ to compete for expert authority and legitimacy when they conflict with one another? Each chapter focuses on a particular context-politics, history, medicine, and information. By demonstrating that expertise is managed through argumentation, The Rhetoric of Expertise informs a number of practical issues: how the nation's political world is run, why some forms of medical expertise are deemed credible while others are derided, what the differences are between historical scholarship and the memory of lived experience, and why new information producers are causing such a stir.

E. Johanna Hartelius is assistant professor of rhetorical studies at Northern Illinois University.