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The phrase recently used by Kamala Harris was once seen as a way to speak truth to power, but it has become increasingly abstract
Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris told a TV interviewer the other day that she had promised Joe Biden that she would always share with him her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront”. That sounded comforting, but should it? This expression has a fairly standard application among qualitative sociologists, where it comes up in work that explores individual subjectivity. How to record and communicate “lived experience” has been a topic of earnest professional debate, sometimes involving appeals to the philosophical traditions of phenomenology. Yet the future vice-president assuredly wasn’t promising a former vice-president to deliver the results of a technical sociological method applied to her own case.
Needless to say, the expression has, over the past decade or so, escaped the academy and assumed a somewhat different set of meanings. At first, it tended to designate firsthand experiences that were specific to women, minorities and other vulnerable groups. During last year’s Democratic primaries in the United States, one supporter of Julián Castro (who served in Barack Obama’s cabinet) was quoted saying: “It is important to have somebody who has the lived experience of being a brown person in this country on that stage – a dark-skinned Latino man.” Yet semantic sprawl had already set in; it turns out that “ordinary people” could be in possession of lived experience, too. Elizabeth Warren, before her run in the primaries, said that politicians such asBarack Obama, being overly impressed with hopeful economic statistics, were blind to “the lived experiences of most Americans”. Pete Buttigieg, another contender, remarked that when Democrats were over-focused on Trump-bashing, “it didn’t seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans”. If you were the sort of person who felt estranged from the coastal elites, it emerged, you, too, might have lived experience. Continue reading...