The unknowing expert: talking to a man about supply chains

‘Expert’ or ‘elite’ interviews are often taken to be occasions when an interviewee shares specialist knowledge with a researcher. Drawing on an interview with a supermarket food safety manager, this paper explores what geographers might make of moments when ‘expert’ interviewees turn out to know little about the matters under discussion. Arguing that such moments unsettle depictions of interviewees as passive providers of knowledge or calculating co-constructors of interview accounts, it suggests that in challenging geographers’ assumptions about expertise they can disclose new avenues of research and yield novel insights into the geographies of knowledge and the politics of accountability.