Experts in the Community
Dr Joanna Nissel is a poet and Operations Lead at Bath Spa University’s The Story Society, an interdisciplinary research centre exploring the use of Story to imaginatively connect and create change across cultures. She works across programmes that collaborate with communities, such as Paper Nations (Arts Council England) and StoryArcs (AHRC), where Story Fellows use Story to investigate challenges facing a specific community or organisation. Whilst completing her PhD on poetry mentorship in the UK today, she worked with Feeling Towns to ideate a collaborative poetry workshop format to articulate communities’ relationship to their local area, testing it at Ledbury Poetry Festival.
******
Since the introduction of the term, Fake News (Tandoc, 2019), and suspicion to medical advice growing exponentially in the Covid era, there has been a growing resistance to the figure of the expert over the past decade (Baghramian and Caprioglio Panizza, 2022). But this is the shadow self of a much more hopeful vision. Far from abandoning the wisdom and insight that expertise can yield, recent projects have recognised that expertise does not solely belong within the academy. Experts are also in the communities around us, in community settings, and this is particularly true in the context of creative practice.
One project that valued a range of expertise was Paper Nations’ Writing for All programme, led by Professor Bambo Soyinka, which co-produced projects and publications with writers across professional, academic, and community contexts. The largest subproject of the programme, The Great Margin, (of which I was Creative Producer) sought to amplify voices and tackle isolation and marginalisation, things that became even more pertinent in the context of the 2020 lockdowns. It began with a literary magazine. Although the magazine included published writers and people who had completed MAs in Creative Writing, others were previously unpublished and had gained their expertise outside of the academy.
The stories this approach yielded were rich and moving, and in the next phase of the project that transposed several pieces into poetry films, The Great Margin built on this strategy. We collaborated on one film series with The Daily Haiku, a Facebook group focusing on haiku, where everyone from complete beginners to experienced writers were welcome.
If you only have a minute or two to spare, I recommend watching ‘Home’ to experience the affective impact this range of expertise brings to bear (Soyinka et al., 2020).
Overall, this research suggests there may be many benefits if we simply ask ourselves, what if the expert is nearer than I think?
Bibliography
Baghramian, Maria, and Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, ‘Scepticism and the Value of Distrust’, Inquiry, 16 November 2022, pp. 1–28, doi:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2135821
Soyinka, Bambo (dir.), Home, prod. by Yoyo Barnsley, Joanna Nissel, and Amanda White (Bath, 2020) <https://thegreatmargin.org/haiku/home/> [accessed 22 February 2026]
Tandoc, Edson C., ‘The Facts of Fake News: A Research Review’, Sociology Compass, 13.9 (2019), p. e12724, doi:10.1111/soc4.12724
