Recently, within welfare policy, social work practice and research institutions, more attention has been paid to bringing ‘experiential knowledge’ into policy and social work practice as a fully-fledged knowledge perspective, alongside practical policy and scientific knowledge.
In the welfare policy, the ambition is formulated to underpin the policy with ‘scientific knowledge and knowledge by experience’. However, this focus on experiential knowledge is at odds with neoliberal developments in social work and social work education that seek to preserve rather than challenge the status quo in society, leading to ‘epistemic injustice’. Indeed, bringing in experiential knowledge is insufficient to break the hegemony of dominant professional knowledge. Indeed, research shows that truly listening to people with experiential knowledge is very difficult. This is also a problem in social work courses, where, on the one hand, experts by experience are recruited, but on the other hand, they also risk being treated as pawns rather than pioneers.  

In this project, we want to investigate how knowledge by experience can be developed in a way that leads to more ‘epistemic justice’.