Expertise, expert work and academia in the post-pandemic world: PI Seppo Poutanen

The project addresses the current and future forms of digitalized and platformized expert work. The new arrangements include possibilities such as flexibility but also precariousness with increasing projectification and short-termism. With these changes the questions of epistemic knowledge become crucial to explore in relation to expertise and expert knowledge. The new types of expertise transform the traditional expert roles and career progressions, by forming novel intersections with roles such as digital user and data producer, for example. Many pratical questions relate to how expertise and expert work are transformed in the post-pandemic world. The academia offers one empirical field to explore these aspects in the project. The project uses comparative data from Europe and is internationally connected.

The project draws advantage of the PI’s broad and multidisciplinary social science background (sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy), research on platform economy and society, and methodological strengths.