Reconfiguring Expertise: AI, Relational Practice, and Clinical Learning in the Emergency Department

Public debates often cast AI as either a threat to professional expertise, risking deskilling and redundancy, or as a technical fix that enhances efficiency and liberates time. In this talk, I challenge such dichotomies by arguing that expertise is not something people have, like a resource to draw on for the successful execution of technical operations that can be automated but learned practices that are continuously evolving through collaborative work in professional communities and through negotiations of power and agency in institutions. Drawing on anthropological and STS debates on knowledge and expertise, as well as anthropological and psychological research on professional learning, I conceptualize expertise as knowledgeable practice: material, relational, and historically situated. The talk draws on ethnographic research in two Danish emergency departments during the rollout of an AI tool for fracture detection. Through interviews and participant observation, I explore how AI reconfigures diagnostic work, supervision, and collaboration. I show how clinicians navigate tensions between efficiency and learning, and how expertise, organizational rhythms and temporal logics are renegotiated across professional boundaries as new actors, including data scientists, managers and procurement staff, enter the clinical scene.

Maja Hojer Bruun is a Professor in the Department of Educational Anthropology, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University where she convenes the research programme Future Technology, Culture and Learning Processes. She edited the Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (2022) and has published extensively on emerging digital technologies based on ethnographic research. Her current research focuses on interprofessional collaborations and emerging forms of expertise involved in the development and use of algorithmic systems and AI.

This is an OxDEG Seminar Series event.