Abstract

Voronka critically analyzes the risk of strategic essentialism while considering ‘lived experience’ as expert knowledge. Although strategic essentialism seems to be a useful category to create political solidarity among a marginalized group, it also holds the risk of essentializing experiences, and thus works against the same premises from where critical questions against dominant knowledge systems begin. While recognizing this risk, Voronka also discusses its contextual usage while dealing with a constituency—the survivors of the mental health system—that is fragile. In this commentary, I bring a few points for further discussion. Does lived experience create ‘expert’ knowledge? Whose experiences are we...