Goñi, I. (2025)
For years, we’ve been told a simple story about how experts relate to society: first came the deficit model, where the public was seen as simply lacking knowledge and experts were there to fill the gap. Then came the dialogue model, promising two-way conversations and participation. It sounds like progress, but reality is far more complex. Experts don’t just move from deficit to dialogue. They mix and match, sometimes putting others 'in deficit', sometimes just seeking to affirm their own identities, sometimes trying to re-signify the challenges of their work. These framings are not purely rational; they are shaped by emotions, routines, and lived experiences, by feeling proud, offended and even abandoned by society. Drawing on Latin American traditions of Participatory Action Research and Humberto Giannini’s philosophy of conviviality, I propose a different lens: a relational model. One that sees experts as affective, situated actors and embraces hybridity instead of forcing us see experts through the binaries of dialogue and deficit. Because if we want inclusive science–society policies, we need to understand the messy, human side of expertise.
In this chapter, I argue against the traditional STS motto of “from deficit to dialogue”. This motto has served to dichotomise experts’ framings of science-society relations, as those which reflect rationalistic impulses versus the (good ones) that embrace more horizontal two-way relationships with the public. Moreover, this motto reflects a narrative of progress—from deficit to dialogue—in which the continued presence of deficit, as a marker of a previous stage, puzzles and is considered a bug. Against this background, I use my experience analysing expert opinions from the 2021 Chilean Strategy for Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation (STKI) to show that alternative models to the “deficit vs. dialogue” are possible. Informed by Latin American Participatory Action Research theory and the philosophy of Humberto Giannini, I argue for a relational model marked by the hybridity of framings used by experts to negotiate multiple social relations. Under this model, expert framings can be explained by both cognitive and affective dimensions experienced in everyday life. Overall, I assert that the study of expert framings of science-society relations can be seriously invigorated once we see past our self-imposed binaries.