Disciplinary Borders and Tensions Between Academic and Field Expertise and How They Produce Knowledge and Ignorance in Occupational Health
This paper presents potential avenues for developing forms of interdisciplinarity able to identify the remaining blind spots between health and work. Based on examples discussed during an interdisciplinary seminar (2014-2015) and an international symposium (2016), the paper analyzes the consequences of the dependence of expertise on historically constructed knowledge and disciplines (in particular epidemiology). It also analyzes the impact of the lack of scientific research in certain themes on the capacity to develop a counter-expertise. It finally looks at how to make scientific knowledge more accessible and useful to people whose health is directly at stake. Far from definitively answering these questions, this article simply reports on how the problems were outlined and discussed by various categories of actors having participated in these meetings.