A Community of Expertise: Positioning the UK Environmental Breast Cancer Movement

Abstract

My research over the last six years has identified the challenge posed by the environmental breast cancer movement to the dominant epidemiological paradigm of breast cancer (Potts 2001, 2004a). This perspective is both ideological, resting in analysis of the political economy of cancer, and pragmatic in its insistence on the salience of a public health approach to the disease. Importantly, it has also taken a radical epistemological approach, demanding the inclusion of the embodied expertise of women with breast cancer in relation to an understanding of disease aetiology (Potts 2004a). This chapter will examine these elements in the context of the emergence of a community of expertise, variously constructed, that constitutes an alternative discourse to the dominant paradigms of the disease. Significantly, the challenge of this perspective, and its ideological, pragmatic and epistemological elements, arise within the shifts of the relations of science in society. As Nowotny states, ‘reliable [scientific] knowledge … is no longer self-sufficient or self-referential … it is being challenged by a larger community that insists its voice should be heard and that some of its claims are as valid, on democratic grounds, as those of more circumscribed scientific communities’ (2003: 155).