Projects in Progress

This project explores how — at a homelessness services non-profit concerned with social justice and equitable practices — traditional meritocratic markers of success are sidelined to open up opportunities for workers who have been historically marginalized (e.g. no degree requirements or prior work experience). Instead, workers are evaluated on the basis of their lived experience of homelessness. In part due to wanting to provide better services for clients, in part to situate themselves as a more equitable or “just” workplace, this organization privileges lived experience above all else in terms of who is awarded with ample resources, respect, and rewards. While this challenges traditional notions of meritocracy, it constructs an alternative hierarchy that causes conflict between workers, and does not, in the end, result in better services for clients, or a more equitable workplace. Instead, the workplace is faced with a reconstructed status hierarchy that workers must navigate in order to maintain their employment.

The concept of “expertise” has long served as a legitimating mechanism for the reproduction of inequality, granting epistemic authority and material privilege to those whose knowledge aligns with dominant cultural and institutional norms (Au and Eyal 2022; Dreher 2016; Evans 2008). Responding to such critiques, scholars and practitioners have sought to democratize expertise by valorizing marginalized knowledge (Brady 2018; Eyal 2019). Of particular emphasis in recent years has been the legitimation of “lived experiences” as a granting a form of expertise (e.g. see Black 2025; Collins 2002; Meriluoto 2021; Moran, Martin, and Ridley 2024; Prior 2003), a typology which I call embodied expertise. Drawing on Black feminist standpoint theory and critical organizational sociology, proponents of embodied expertise contend that recognizing such experiential knowledge can remedy epistemic injustice and promote equity in professional and policy domains (Collins 2002; Duvall and Hanson 2024; Foucault 1980; Francia et al. 2023; Jauffret-Roustide 2009; Meriluoto 2018). Yet, little is known about how this reframing operates once institutionalized. Does recognizing embodied expertise actually redistribute authority, or does it reinscribe hierarchy under the guise of inclusion?

This article addresses that question through one year of ethnographic fieldwork at a homelessness services organization, supplemented by interviews with professionals across human service fields. I show that the institutional valorization of embodied expertise, while intended to elevate marginalized voices, paradoxically generated new hierarchies and moralized divisions between workers with and without such experience. Those celebrated for their lived experience often faced heightened expectations and ambivalence about their own legitimacy, while others felt disempowered to question them, resulting in inefficiency and automatic deference. In short, rather than dismantling the epistemic and organizational hierarchies it sought to redress, the institutionalization of embodied expertise reconstituted them in new forms.

These findings complicate celebratory narratives surrounding the democratization of knowledge, revealing how progressive reforms can reproduce inequality through the moralization of marginalized identities. I argue that expertise remains a relational and hierarchical construct, even when redefined in the name of justice – illustrating the limits of recognition-based reforms in addressing structural inequality