SPPH’s Public Health Practice team faciliates community-based and experiential learning opportunities and collaborations between our students, faculty, staff, and partners at the local, state, national, and global levels. We seek to provide opportunities that lead to the application of public health knowledge and skills in real world settings to make a meaningful impact and improve health outcomes.
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Upcoming Events
Knowledge of AIDS Workshop Keynote Speaker Dr. Steven Epstein
Speaker:
Dr. Steven Epstein
Professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities
March 27th, 2025
Noon to 1:30p.m. presentation
1:30-2pm Meet and Greet
Lunch on a first come first serve basis
Location: Open Gates 1st Floor
Part of the NSF-funded “Knowledge of AIDS” Network Workshop
Abstract: It has become common to speak of the “crisis” of expertise and to link growing distrust of experts with declining confidence in authorities of all sorts. To better understand and evaluate these perceptions of crisis, I focus attention on two underlying shifts in the politics of knowledge in the United States in recent decades that have transformed what it means to be an expert and who can plausibly serve as one: first, the diversification and proliferation of cultural authority, marked by a growing competition to provide answers and make pronouncements on how life should be lived; and second, the simultaneous rise to prominence of hybrid forms of “lay expertise” that include knowledge-empowered social movements. To ground my analysis, I focus on two domains—health and sexuality—where these transformations are especially evident. To bookend my analysis, I trace developments from the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the recent experience of Covid-19, proposing that in the crucible of pandemics the fault lines of expertise become particularly visible. Throughout, I seek to highlight recent scholarship that contributes to the rethinking of expertise. My aim is to provide a somewhat more hopeful account of the crisis of expertise, one that recognizes the risks of populist dismissal of experts but also emphasizes the potential virtues of democratic challenges to traditional expertise in the service of epistemic justice.

Event Information
Meet the Team

Leslie Stalnaker, MPH
