Knowledge and the trash : the predominance of the expert model in the 2015 Beirut protests -

Abstract

Drawing on the concept coined by Leigh Star and Griesemer (1989), I consider the waste management problem, culminating in the protests of summer 2015, as a “boundary object” that allows focusing on local dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination. I start this study by asking: knowledge by whom, for whom and for what? In line with a phenomenological approach, I adopt a broad definition of knowledge as the commonsensical, the mundane, the scientific, the technical but also the emancipatory. I complement this definition with the concept of hegemony, and the role of intellectuals in creating the “good sense” out of the “common sense”. I explore knowledge produced through, and by the main protagonists involved in the protest movement. I try to elucidate the audience for which this knowledge was presumably intended for, and to what end. I analyze its content and the evolution of some of the concepts brought forward. I demonstrate that the expert model of knowledge production, dissemination, and use was prevailing during the protests and argue that the evidence based activist approach adopted was in dissonance with the aura of the protests - which were a wide expression of popular socio-economic discontent. Characterized by their professionalization and claims to expertise, dominant knowledge producers focused on technical knowledge production and mobilization, and on the creation of a collective network of expertise. These expert-intellectuals sought to integrate the secular, and apolitical ‘civil society’, different from the sectarian ‘communal society’; their patterns of engagement with knowledge being part and parcel of the very system they seek to address. In a local, post-Taef, Lebanese context, outside of major party politics, and notwithstanding marginalized voices, the expert-intellectual is dominant, her skilled technical knowledge employed to address responsible individuals in ‘civil society’, influence policy and attempt to see