front cover of At the Risk of Being Heard
At the Risk of Being Heard
Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States
Bartholomew Dean and Jerome M. Levi, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Leading experts in the analysis of ethnicity and indigenous rights explore the questions of why and how the circumstances of indigenous peoples are improving in some places of the world, while their human rights continue to be abused in others. Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, chapters explore how political organization, natural resource management, economic development, and conflicting definitions over cultural, linguistic, religious, and territorial identity have informed indigenous strategies for empowerment.
Combining rich ethnographic descriptions with clear theoretical analyses, At the Risk of Being Heard considers the paradoxical challenges and opportunities confronting indigenous peoples at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In the face of state-sanctioned violence, indigenous peoples encounter considerable risks when asserting their rights, especially to self-determination. Yet, if they remain silent or absent from new arenas of power, hiding in marginalized homelands or cultural practices, they risk being invisible to those allies that would aid them in their struggles for survival.
At the Risk of Being Heard offers needed insights for individuals working on issues of governance, sustainable development, resource management, globalization, and indigenous affairs. It will undoubtedly appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, history, political science, peace studies, and to those students in courses that explore relationships among postcolonial states, indigenous peoples, and human rights.
Bartholomew Dean is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas. Jerome M. Levi is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
[more]

front cover of The Atomic Archipelago
The Atomic Archipelago
US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy
Davide Orsini
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Finalist, 2023 Turku Book Award
In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the first systematic study of nuclear expertise in Italy, Davide Orsini focuses on the ensuing technopolitical disputes concerning the role and safety of US nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean Sea from the Cold War period to the closure of the naval base in 2008. His book follows the struggles of different groups—including local residents of the archipelago, US Navy personnel, local administrators, Italian experts, and politicians—to define nuclear submarines as either imperceptible threats, much like radiocontamination, or efficient machines at the service of liberty and freedom.

Unlike inland nuclear power plants, vividly present and visible with their tall cooling towers and reactor containers, the mobility and invisibility of submarines contributed to an ambivalence about their nature, perpetuating the idea of nuclear exceptionalism. In Italy, they symbolized objects in constant motion, easily removable at the first sign of potential harm. Orsini demonstrates how these mobile sources of hazard posed special challenges for both expert assessments and public understandings of risk, and in contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where unique social power dynamics held sway over the outcome of technopolitical controversies.

[more]

front cover of Capturing Finance
Capturing Finance
Arbitrage and Social Domination
Carolyn Hardin
Duke University Press, 2021
Arbitrage—the trading practice that involves buying assets in one market at a cheap price and immediately selling them in another market for a profit—is fundamental to the practice of financial trading and economic understandings of how financial markets function. Because traders complete transactions quickly and use other people's money, arbitrage is considered to be riskless. Yet, despite the rhetoric of riskless trading, the arbitrage in mortgage-backed securities led to the 2008 financial crisis. In Capturing Finance Carolyn Hardin offers a new way of understanding arbitrage as a means for capturing value in financial capitalism. She shows how arbitrage relies on a system of abstract domination built around risk. The commonsense beliefs that taking on debt is necessary for affording everyday life and that investing is necessary to secure retirement income compel individuals to assume risk while financial institutions amass profits. Hardin insists that mitigating financial capitalism's worst consequences, such as perpetuating class and racial inequities, requires challenging the narratives that naturalize risk as a necessary element of financial capitalism as well as social life writ large.
[more]

front cover of Casanova's Lottery
Casanova's Lottery
The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance
Stephen M. Stigler
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The fascinating story of an important lottery that flourished in France from 1757 to 1836 and its role in transforming our understanding of the nature of risk.

In the 1750s, at the urging of famed adventurer Giacomo Casanova, the French state began to embrace risk in adopting a new Loterie. The prize amounts paid varied, depending on the number of tickets bought and the amount of the bet, as determined by each individual bettor. The state could lose money on any individual Loterie drawing while being statistically guaranteed to come out on top in the long run. In adopting this framework, the French state took on risk in a way no other has, before or after. At each drawing the state was at risk of losing a large amount; what is more, that risk was precisely calculable, generally well understood, and yet taken on by the state with little more than a mathematical theory to protect it.

Stephen M. Stigler follows the Loterie from its curious inception through its hiatus during the French Revolution, its renewal and expansion in 1797, and finally to its suppression in 1836, examining throughout the wider question of how members of the public came to trust in new financial technologies and believe in their value. Drawing from an extensive collection of rare ephemera, Stigler pieces together the Loterie’s remarkable inner workings, as well as its implications for the nature of risk and the role of lotteries in social life over the period 1700–1950. 

Both a fun read and fodder for many fields, Casanova's Lottery shines new light on the conscious introduction of risk into the management of a nation-state and the rationality of playing unfair games.
[more]

front cover of The Company Doctor
The Company Doctor
Risk, Responsibility, and Corporate Professionalism
Elaine Draper
Russell Sage Foundation, 2003
To limit the skyrocketing costs of their employees' health insurance, companies such as Dow, Chevron, and IBM, as well as many large HMOs, have increasingly hired physicians to supervise the medical care they provide. As Elaine Draper argues in The Company Doctor, company doctors are bound by two conflicting ideals: serving the medical needs of their patients while protecting the company's bottom line. Draper analyzes the advent of the corporate physician both as an independent phenomenon, and as an index of contemporary culture, reaching startling conclusions about the intersection of corporate culture with professional autonomy. Drawing on over 100 interviews with company physicians, scientists, and government and labor officials, as well as historical, legal, and statistical sources and medical trade association data, Draper presents an illuminating overview of the social context and meaning of professional work in corporations. Draper finds that while medical journals, speeches, and ethical codes proclaim the independent professional judgment of corporate physicians, the company doctors she interviewed often expressed anguish over the tightrope they must walk between their patients' health and the corporate oversight they face at every turn. Draper dissects the complex position occupied by company doctors to explore broad themes of doctor-patient trust, employee loyalty, privacy issues, and the future direction of medicine. She addresses such controversial topics as drug screening and the difficult position of company doctors when employees sue companies for health hazards in the workplace. Company doctors are but one example of professionals who have at times ceded their autonomy to corporate management. Physicians provide the prototypical professional case for exploring this phenomenon, due to their traditional independence, extensive training, and high levels of prestige. But Draper expands the scope of the book—tracing parallel developments in the law, science, and technology—to draw insightful conclusions about changing conditions in the professional workplace, as corporate cultures everywhere adapt to the new realities of the global economy. The Company Doctor provides a compelling examination of the corporatization of American medicine with far-reaching implications for professionals in many other fields.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Crisis in Korea
America, China and the Risk of War
Tim Beal
Pluto Press, 2011

The South Korean warship Cheonan was sunk in mysterious circumstances on 26 March 2010. The remarkable events that followed are analysed by Tim Beal and woven into a larger study of the increasingly volatile relations between North and South Korea and US concern about the rise of China.

South Korea's stance towards the North has hardened significantly since the new conservative government came to power. Beal argues that the South moved quickly to use the sinking of the Cheonan to put international pressure on the North, even before the cause of the sinking had been established. The US followed suit by attempting to pressurise China into condemning North Korea. The media reports at the time presented an open and shut case of unprovoked North Korean aggression, but the evidence points towards the accidental triggering of a South Korean mine as the cause and South Korean fabrication to incriminate the North.

With the South bent on forcing the fall of the North's regime with US help and China unlikely to stand idly by, this book offers an essential guide to the key factors behind the crisis and possible solutions.

[more]

front cover of Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning
Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk
Diane Vaughan
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Vaughan unveils the complicated and high-pressure world of air traffic controllers as they navigate technology and political and public climates, and shows how they keep the skies so safe.

When two airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Americans watched in uncomprehending shock as first responders struggled to react to the situation on the ground. Congruently, another remarkable and heroic feat was taking place in the air: more than six hundred and fifty air traffic control facilities across the country coordinated their efforts to ground four thousand flights in just two hours—an achievement all the more impressive considering the unprecedented nature of the task.

In Dead Reckoning, Diane Vaughan explores the complex work of air traffic controllers, work that is built upon a close relationship between human organizational systems and technology and is remarkably safe given the high level of risk. Vaughan observed the distinct skill sets of air traffic controllers and the ways their workplaces changed to adapt to technological developments and public and political pressures. She chronicles the ways these forces affected their jobs, from their relationships with one another and the layouts of their workspace to their understanding of their job and its place in society. The result is a nuanced and engaging look at an essential role that demands great coordination, collaboration, and focus—a role that technology will likely never be able to replace. Even as the book conveys warnings about complex systems and the liabilities of technological and organizational innovation, it shows the kinds of problem-solving solutions that evolved over time and the importance of people.
[more]

front cover of Dealing with Risk
Dealing with Risk
Why the Public and the Experts Disagree on Environmental Issues
Howard Margolis
University of Chicago Press, 1996
For decades, policymakers and analysts have been frustrated by the stubborn and often dramatic disagreement between experts and the public on acceptable levels of environmental risk. Most experts, for instance, see no severe problem in dealing with nuclear waste, given the precautions and safety levels now in place. Yet public opinion vehemently rejects this view, repudiating both the experts' analysis and the evidence.

In Dealing with Risk, Howard Margolis moves beyond the usual "rival rationalities" explanation proffered by risk analysts for the rift between expert and lay opinion. He reveals the conflicts of intuition that undergird those concerns, and proposes a new approach to the psychology of persuasion and belief. Examining the role of intuition, mental habits, and cognitive frameworks in the construction of public opinion, this compelling account bridges the public policy impasse that has plagued controversial environmental issues.
[more]

front cover of Dedicated to the People of Darfur
Dedicated to the People of Darfur
Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope
Edited and with an Introduction by Luke Reynolds and Jennifer Reynolds
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Life's changes. They happen every day. Some large, some small. A few are very personal. Others impact the world. Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope includes original and inspiring essays that celebrate the glories gained from taking risks, breaking down barriers, and overcoming any obstacles.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, a gallery of O.Henry award recipients, and many best-selling authors come together to share personal and compelling challenges and experiences. From contemplations on past drug use to reflections on gun control, social justice, passion and its sacrifices, and adventures such as skydiving, mountain climbing, and golfing, the topics vary greatly. This kaleidoscopic anthology is a commentary on the lives of prominent literary artists and ordinary citizens who have made simple, yet powerful choices that provoked change in one's self and for humanityùmuch the same way that Luke and Jennifer Reynolds do by building this invaluable collection for readers and the world of human rights.

Not too long ago, as struggling graduate students, Luke and Jennifer Reynolds conceived this uniquely themed volume as a way to raise funds to support ending the genocide in Darfur. Some people carry signs, others make speeches, many take action. What is most special about this book is that it extends beyond words and ideas, into a tangible effort to effect change. To this end, all royalties from the sales of Dedicated to the People of Darfur:Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope will benefit The Save Darfur Coalition, an organization that seeks to end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Degrees of Risk
Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education
Blake R. Silver
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education.

Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.

Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
The Economics of Information and Uncertainty
Edited by John J. McCall
University of Chicago Press, 1982

front cover of Embracing Risk
Embracing Risk
The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility
Edited by Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon
University of Chicago Press, 2001
For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources.

Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk is used to govern fields outside the realm of insurance, from extreme sports to policing, mental health institutions, and international law. Offering an original approach to risk, insurance, and responsibility, the provocative and wide-ranging essays in Embracing Risk demonstrate that risk has moved well beyond its origins in the insurance trade to become a central organizing principle of social and cultural life.

[more]

front cover of Endangered City
Endangered City
The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá
Austin Zeiderman
Duke University Press, 2016
Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.
 
[more]

front cover of An Epidemic of Uncertainty
An Epidemic of Uncertainty
Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi
Jenny Trinitapoli
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi that demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known.

An Epidemic of Uncertainty advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health. Over the duration of a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world.

Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behavior, An Epidemic of Uncertainty treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.
 
[more]

front cover of Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk
Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk
Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee
Duke University Press, 2005
The market for financial derivatives is far and away the largest and most powerful market in the world, and it is growing exponentially. In 1970 the yearly valuation of financial derivatives was only a few million dollars. By 1980 the sum had swollen to nearly one hundred million dollars. By 1990 it had climbed to almost one hundred billion dollars, and in 2000 it approached one hundred trillion. Created and sustained by a small number of European and American banks, corporations, and hedge funds, the derivatives market has an enormous impact on the economies of nations—particularly poorer nations—because it controls the price of money. Derivatives bought and sold by means of computer keystrokes in London and New York affect the price of food, clothing, and housing in Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, and Buenos Aires. Arguing that social theorists concerned with globalization must familiarize themselves with the mechanisms of a world economy based on the rapid circulation of capital, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee offer a concise introduction to financial derivatives.

LiPuma and Lee explain how derivatives are essentially wagers—often on the fluctuations of national currencies—based on models that aggregate and price risk. They describe how these financial instruments are changing the face of capitalism, undermining the power of nations and perpetrating a new and less visible form of domination on postcolonial societies. As they ask: How does one know about, let alone demonstrate against, an unlisted, virtual, offshore corporation that operates in an unregulated electronic space using a secret proprietary trading strategy to buy and sell arcane financial instruments? LiPuma and Lee provide a necessary look at the obscure but consequential role of financial derivatives in the global economy.

[more]

front cover of Fractured Communities
Fractured Communities
Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions
Ladd, Anthony E.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
While environmental disputes and conflicts over fossil fuel extraction have grown in recent years, few issues have been as contentious in the twenty-first century as those surrounding the impacts of unconventional natural gas and oil development using hydraulic drilling and fracturing techniques—more commonly known as “fracking”—on local communities. In Fractured Communities, Anthony E. Ladd and other leading environmental sociologists present a set of crucial case studies analyzing the differential risk perceptions, socio-environmental impacts, and mobilization of citizen protest (or quiescence) surrounding unconventional energy development and hydraulic fracking in a number of key U.S. shale regions.  Fractured Communities reveals how this contested terrain is expanding, pushing the issue of fracking into the mainstream of the American political arena.  
[more]

front cover of Freaks of Fortune
Freaks of Fortune
The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
Jonathan Levy
Harvard University Press, 2012

Until the early nineteenth century, “risk” was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.

Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions—insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets—while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk’s rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one’s own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name “financial services industry.” Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.

Amid the nineteenth-century’s waning faith in God’s providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

[more]

front cover of Hazardous Waste Management
Hazardous Waste Management
Reducing The Risk
Benjamin Goldman
Island Press, 1986
Hazardous Waste Management: Reducing the Risk is the first book to study and rate toxic waste disposal sites and to provide step-by-step guidelines for evaluation, decision, and action. The innovative and practical ranking system shows how to rate facilities on the basis of site, management, and technology.
[more]

front cover of How Our Days Became Numbered
How Our Days Became Numbered
Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual
Dan Bouk
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's "self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups, predicting their fates, and intervening in their futures. Emanating from the gilded boardrooms of Lower Manhattan and making their way into drawing rooms and tenement apartments across the nation, these practices soon came to change the futures they purported to divine.

How Our Days Became Numbered tells a story of corporate culture remaking American culture--a story of intellectuals and professionals in and around insurance companies who reimagined Americans' lives through numbers and taught ordinary Americans to do the same. Making individuals statistical did not happen easily. Legislative battles raged over the propriety of discriminating by race or of smoothing away the effects of capitalism's fluctuations on individuals. Meanwhile, debates within companies set doctors against actuaries and agents, resulting in elaborate, secretive systems of surveillance and calculation.

Dan Bouk reveals how, in a little over half a century, insurers laid the groundwork for the much-quantified, risk-infused world that we live in today. To understand how the financial world shapes modern bodies, how risk assessments can perpetuate inequalities of race or sex, and how the quantification and claims of risk on each of us continue to grow, we must take seriously the history of those who view our lives as a series of probabilities to be managed.
[more]

front cover of Insurance Era
Insurance Era
Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America
Caley Horan
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life.

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.
[more]

front cover of Leisure and Death
Leisure and Death
An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying
Adam Kaul
University Press of Colorado, 2018

This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology.

These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living.

An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer

[more]

front cover of Lesser Harms
Lesser Harms
The Morality of Risk in Medical Research
Sydney A. Halpern
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Research physicians face intractable dilemmas when they consider introducing new medical procedures. Innovations carry the promise of preventing or curing life-threatening diseases, but they can also lead to injury or even death. How have clinical scientists made high-stakes decisions about undertaking human tests of new medical treatments? In Lesser Harms, Sydney Halpern explores this issue as she examines vaccine trials in America during the early and mid-twentieth century.

Today's scientists follow federal guidelines for research on human subjects developed during the 1960s and 1970s. But long before these government regulations, medical investigators observed informal rules when conducting human research. They insisted that the dangers of natural disease should outweigh the risks of a medical intervention, and they struggled to accurately assess the relative hazards. Halpern explores this logic of risk in immunization controversies extending as far back as the eighteenth century. Then, focusing on the period between 1930 and 1960, she shows how research physicians and their sponsors debated the moral quandaries involved in moving vaccine use from the laboratory to the clinic.

This probing work vividly describes the efforts of clinical investigators to balance the benefits and dangers of untested vaccines, to respond to popular sentiment about medical hazards, and to strategically present risk laden research to sponsors and the public.

“Concise and extremely well-written. . . . A fascinating synthesis of sociology, history, and institutional theory.”—Samuel C. Blackman, Journal of the American Medical Association

[more]

front cover of Leveraged
Leveraged
The New Economics of Debt and Financial Fragility
Edited by Moritz Schularick
University of Chicago Press, 2022
An authoritative guide to the new economics of our crisis-filled century. Published in collaboration with the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

The 2008 financial crisis was a seismic event that laid bare how financial institutions’ instabilities can have devastating effects on societies and economies. COVID-19 brought similar financial devastation at the beginning of 2020 and once more massive interventions by central banks were needed to heed off the collapse of the financial system. All of which begs the question: why is our financial system so fragile and vulnerable that it needs government support so often? 

For a generation of economists who have risen to prominence since 2008, these events have defined not only how they view financial instability, but financial markets more broadly. Leveraged brings together these voices to take stock of what we have learned about the costs and causes of financial fragility and to offer a new canonical framework for understanding it. Their message: the origins of financial instability in modern economies run deeper than the technical debates around banking regulation, countercyclical capital buffers, or living wills for financial institutions. Leveraged offers a fundamentally new picture of how financial institutions and societies coexist, for better or worse.  

The essays here mark a new starting point for research in financial economics. As we muddle through the effects of a second financial crisis in this young century, Leveraged provides a road map and a research agenda for the future.
[more]

front cover of Looking Forward
Looking Forward
Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America
Jamie L. Pietruska
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, “weather prophets,” business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future. Private and government forecasters competed for authority—as well as for an audience—and a single prediction could make or break a forecaster’s reputation. 

Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
[more]

front cover of Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk
Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk
Fertility and Danger in West Central Tanzania
Denise Roth Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2004

In Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk, Denise Roth Allen persuasively argues that development interventions in the Third World often have unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania, this rich and engaging ethnography of women's fertility-related experiences highlights the processes by which a set of seemingly well-intentioned international maternal health policy recommendations go awry when implemented at the local level.

An exploration of how threats to maternal health have been defined and addressed at the global, national, and local levels, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk presents two contrasting, and oftentimes competing, definitions of risk: those that form the basis of international recommendations and national maternal health policies and those that do not. The effect that these contrasting definitions of risk have on women's fertility-related experiences at the local level are explored throughout the book.

This study employs an innovative approach to the analysis of maternal health risk, one that situates rural Tanzanian women's fertility-related experiences within a broader historical and sociocultural context. Beginning with an examination of how maternal health risk was defined and addressed during the early years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika and moving to a discussion of an internationally conceived maternal health initiative that was launched on the world stage in the late 1980s, the author explores the similarities in the language used and solutions proposed by health development experts over time.

This set of "official" maternal health risks is then compared to an alternative set of risks that emerge when attention is focused on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth at the local level. Although some of these latter risks are often spoken about as deriving from spiritual or supernatural causes, the case studies presented throughout the second half of the book reveal that the concept of risk in the context of pregnancy and childbirth is much more complex, involving the interplay of spiritual, physical, and economic aspects of everyday life.

[more]

front cover of Modes of Uncertainty
Modes of Uncertainty
Anthropological Cases
Edited by Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Modes of Uncertainty offers groundbreaking ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective. Our world, the contributors show, is increasingly populated by forms, practices, and events whose uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk—and thus it is vital to distinguish between the two. Drawing the lines between them, they argue that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appearance of new risks and dangers—which no doubt abound—but also on how uncertainty itself should be defined, and what the implications might be for policy and government.
             
Organizing contributions from various anthropological subfields—including economics, business, security, humanitarianism, health, and environment—Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow offer new tools with which to consider uncertainty, its management, and the differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to it. Taking up policies and experiences as objects of research and analysis, the essays here seek a rigorous inquiry into a sound conceptualization of uncertainty in order to better confront contemporary problems. Ultimately, they open the way for a participatory anthropology that asks crucial questions about our contemporary state. 
[more]

front cover of Parkour and the City
Parkour and the City
Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sport
Kidder, Jeffrey L.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes, resembling urban gymnasts to passersby and awestruck spectators. In Parkour and the City, cultural sociologist Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger.
 
Parkour’s modern development has been tied closely to the growth of the internet. The sport is inevitably a YouTube phenomenon, making it exemplary of new forms of globalized communication. Parkour’s dangerous stunts resonate, too, Kidder contends, with a neoliberal ideology that is ambivalent about risk. Moreover, as a male-dominated sport, parkour, with its glorification of strength and daring, reflects contemporary Western notions of masculinity. At the same time, Kidder writes, most athletes (known as “traceurs” or “freerunners”) reject a “daredevil” label, preferring a deliberate, reasoned hedging of bets with their own safety—rather than a “pushing the edge” ethos normally associated with extreme sports.  
 
[more]

front cover of The Politics of Possibility
The Politics of Possibility
Risk and Security Beyond Probability
Louise Amoore
Duke University Press, 2013
Since September 11, 2001, the imagination of "low probability, high consequence" events has become a distinctive feature of contemporary politics. Uncertain futures—devastation by terrorist attack, cyber crime, flood, financial market collapse—must be discerned and responded to as possibilities, however improbable they may be. In The Politics of Possibility, Louise Amoore examines this development, tracing its genealogy through the diverse worlds of risk management consulting, computer science, commercial logistics, and data visualization. She focuses on the increasingly symbiotic relationship between commercial opportunities and state security threats, a relation that turns the trusted, iris-scanned traveler into "a person of national security interest," and the designer of risk algorithms for casino and insurance fraud into a homeland security resource. Juxtaposing new readings of Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, Massumi, and Connolly with interpretations of post–9/11 novels and artworks, Amoore analyzes the "politics of possibility" and its far-reaching implications for society, associative life, and political accountability.
[more]

front cover of Probable Justice
Probable Justice
Risk, Insurance, and the Welfare State
Rachel Z. Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Decades into its existence as a foundational aspect of modern political and economic life, the welfare state has become a political cudgel, used to assign blame for ballooning national debt and tout the need for personal responsibility. At the same time, it affects nearly every citizen and permeates daily life—in the form of pension, disability, and unemployment benefits, healthcare and parental leave policies, and more. At the core of that disjunction is the question of how we as a society decide who should get what benefits—and how much we are willing to pay to do so.

Probable Justice​ traces a history of social insurance from the eighteenth century to today, from the earliest ideas of social accountability through the advanced welfare state of collective responsibility and risk. At the heart of Rachel Z. Friedman’s investigation is a study of how probability theory allows social insurance systems to flexibly measure risk and distribute coverage. The political genius of social insurance, Friedman shows, is that it allows for various accommodations of needs, risks, financing, and political aims—and thereby promotes security and fairness for citizens of liberal democracies.
[more]

front cover of Refiguring Race and Risk
Refiguring Race and Risk
Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State
Roberta Wolfson
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.
[more]

front cover of Reporting on Risk
Reporting on Risk
How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Other Hazards
Eleanor Singer
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
After acts of airline terrorism, air travel tends to drop dramatically—yet Americans routinely pursue the far riskier business of driving cards, where accidents resulting in death or injury are much more likely to occur. Reporting on Risk argues that this selective concern with danger is powerfully shaped by the media, whose coverage of potentially hazardous events is governed more by a need to excite the public than to inform it. Singer and Endreny survey a wide range of print and electronic media to provide an unprecedented look at how hundreds of different hazards are presented to the public—from toxic waste and food poisoning to cigarette smoking, from transportation accidents to famine, and from experimental surgery to communicable diseases. Their investigations raise thought-provoking questions about what the media tell us about modern risks, which hazards are covered and which ignored, and how the media determine when hazards should be considered risky. Are natural hazards reported differently than man-made hazards? Is greater emphasis placed on the potential benefits or the potential drawbacks of complex new technologies? Are journalists more concerned with reporting on unproven cures or informing the public about preventative measures? Do newspapers differ from magazines and television in their risk reporting practices? Reporting on Risk investigates how the media place blame for disasters, and looks at how the reporting of risks has changed in the past twenty-five years as such hazards as nuclear power, birth control methods, and industrial by-products have grown in national prominence. The authors demonstrate that the media often fail to report on risks until energized by the occurrence of some disastrous or dramatic event—the Union Carbide pesticide leak in Bhopal, the Challenger explosion, the outbreak of famine in Somalia, or the failed transplant of a baboon heart to "Baby Fae." Sustained attention to these hazards depends less on whether the underlying issues have been resolved than on whether they continue to unfold in newsworthy events. Reporting on Risk examines the accuracy and the amount of information we receive about our environment. It offers a critical perspective on how our perceptions of risk, as shaped by the media, may contribute to misguided individual and public choices for action and prevention in an increasingly complex world. The authors' probing assessment of how the media report a vast array of risks offers insights useful to journalists, policy analysts, risk specialists, legislators, and concerned citizens.
[more]

front cover of Rights, Restitution, and Risk
Rights, Restitution, and Risk
Essays in Moral Theory
Judith Jarvis Thomson
Harvard University Press, 1986

Moral theory should be simple: the moral theorist attends to ordinary human action to explain what makes some acts right and others wrong, and we need no microscope to observe a human act. Yet no moral theory that is simple captures all of the morally relevant facts.

In a set of vivid examples, stories, and cases Judith Thomson shows just how wide an array of moral considerations bears on all but the simplest of problems. She is a philosophical analyst of the highest caliber who can tease a multitude of implications out of the story of a mere bit of eavesdropping. She is also a master teller of tales which have a philosophical bite. Beyond these pleasures, however, she brings new depth of understanding to some of the most pressing moral issues of the moment, notably abortion. Thomson’s essays determinedly confront the most difficult questions: What is it to have a moral right to life, or any other right? What is the relation between the infringement of such rights and restitution? How is rights theory to deal with the imposition of risk?

[more]

front cover of Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
Laura Hart
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In disease cluster communities across the country, environmental contamination from local industries is often suspected as a source of disease. But civic action is notoriously hampered by the slow response from government agencies to investigate the cause of disease and the complexities of risk assessment. 

In Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town, Laura Hart examines another understudied dimension of community inaction: the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging, disconnect, and disruption in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context where the imperative for self-protection is elusive, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Considering a future where debates about risk and science will inevitably increase, Hart considers possibilities for the democratization of risk management and the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
[more]

logo for American Library Association
Risk and Insurance Management Manual for Libraries
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2005

logo for American Library Association
Risk and Insurance Management Manual for Libraries, Updated
Sally Alexander
American Library Association, 2021

front cover of Risk, Courage, and Women
Risk, Courage, and Women
Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry
Karen A. Waldron
University of North Texas Press, 2007

front cover of The Risk of Economic Crisis
The Risk of Economic Crisis
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1991
The stunning collapse of the thrift industry, the major stock slump of 1987, rising corporate debt, wild fluctuations of currency exchange rates, and a rash of defaults on developing country debts have revived fading memories of the Great Depression and fueled fears of an impending economic crisis. Under what conditions are financial markets vulnerable to disruption and what economic consequences ensue when these markets break down?

In this accessible and thought-provoking volume, Benjamin M. Friedman investigates the origins of financial crisis in domestic capital markets, Paul Krugman examines the international origins and transmission of financial and economic crises, and Lawrence H. Summers explores the transition from financial crisis to economic collapse. In the introductory essay, Martin Feldstein reviews the major financial problems of the 1980s and discusses lessons to be learned from this experience. The book also contains provocative observations by senior academics and others who have played leading roles in business and government.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Risk Revisited
Pat Caplan
Pluto Press, 2000

front cover of The Risk Society Revisited
The Risk Society Revisited
Social Theory and Risk Governance
Eugene Rosa
Temple University Press, 2015

Risk is a part of life. How we handle uncertainty and deal with potential threats influence decision making throughout our lives. In The Risk Society Revisited, Eugene A. Rosa, Ortwin Renn, and Aaron M. McCright offer the first book to present an integrated theory of risk and governance.

The authors examine our sociological understanding of risk and how we reconcile modern human conditions with our handling of risk in our quest for improved quality of life. They build a new framework for understanding risk—one that provides an innovative connection between social theory and the governance of technological and environmental risks and the sociopolitical challenges they pose for a sustainable future.

Showing how our consciousness affects risk in the decisions we make—as individuals and as members of a democratic society—The Risk Society Revisited makes an important contribution to the literature of risk research.

[more]

front cover of Risk Topography
Risk Topography
Systemic Risk and Macro Modeling
Edited by Markus Brunnermeier and Arvind Krishnamurthy
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The recent financial crisis and the difficulty of using mainstream macroeconomic models to accurately monitor and assess systemic risk have stimulated new analyses of how we measure economic activity and the development of more sophisticated models in which the financial sector plays a greater role.

Markus Brunnermeier and Arvind Krishnamurthy have assembled contributions from leading academic researchers, central bankers, and other financial-market experts to explore the possibilities for advancing macroeconomic modeling in order to achieve more accurate economic measurement. Essays in this volume focus on the development of models capable of highlighting the vulnerabilities that leave the economy susceptible to adverse feedback loops and liquidity spirals. While these types of vulnerabilities have often been identified, they have not been consistently measured. In a financial world of increasing complexity and uncertainty, this volume is an invaluable resource for policymakers working to improve current measurement systems and for academics concerned with conceptualizing effective measurement.
[more]

front cover of The Risks of Financial Institutions
The Risks of Financial Institutions
Edited by Mark Carey and René M. Stulz
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Until about twenty years ago, the consensus view on the cause of financial-system distress was fairly simple: a run on one bank could easily turn to a panic involving runs on all banks, destroying some and disrupting the financial system.  Since then, however, a series of events—such as emerging-market debt crises, bond-market meltdowns, and the Long-Term Capital Management episode—has forced a rethinking of the risks facing financial institutions and the tools available to measure and manage these risks.

The Risks of Financial Institutions examines the various risks affecting financial institutions and explores a variety of methods to help institutions and regulators more accurately measure and forecast risk. The contributors--from academic institutions, regulatory organizations, and banking--bring a wide range of perspectives and experience to the issue. The result is a volume that points a way forward to greater financial stability and better risk management of financial institutions.

[more]

front cover of The Social Life of Financial Derivatives
The Social Life of Financial Derivatives
Markets, Risk, and Time
Edward LiPuma
Duke University Press, 2017
In The Social Life of Financial Derivatives Edward LiPuma theorizes the profound social dimensions of derivatives markets and the processes, rituals, and belief systems that drive them. In response to the 2008 financial crisis and drawing on his experience trading derivatives, LiPuma outlines how they function as complex devices that organize speculative capital as well as the ways derivative-driven capitalism not only produces the conditions for its own existence, but also penetrates the fabric of everyday life. Framing finance as a form of social life and highlighting the intrinsically social character of financial derivatives, LiPuma deepens our understanding of derivatives so that we may someday use them to serve the public well-being.
[more]

front cover of Sweetness in the Blood
Sweetness in the Blood
Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes
James Doucet-Battle
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A bold new indictment of the racialization of science

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

[more]

front cover of Tangled Diagnoses
Tangled Diagnoses
Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk
Ilana Löwy
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Since the late nineteenth century, medicine has sought to foster the birth of healthy children by attending to the bodies of pregnant women, through what we have come to call prenatal care. Women, and not their unborn children, were the initial focus of that medical attention, but prenatal diagnosis in its present form, which couples scrutiny of the fetus with the option to terminate pregnancy, came into being in the early 1970s.

Tangled Diagnoses examines the multiple consequences of the widespread diffusion of this medical innovation. Prenatal testing, Ilana Löwy argues, has become mainly a risk-management technology—the goal of which is to prevent inborn impairments, ideally through the development of efficient therapies but in practice mainly through the prevention of the birth of children with such impairments. Using scholarship, interviews, and direct observation in France and Brazil of two groups of professionals who play an especially important role in the production of knowledge about fetal development—fetopathologists and clinical geneticists—to expose the real-life dilemmas prenatal testing creates, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of biomedical innovation, the politics of women’s bodies, disability, and the ethics of modern medicine.
[more]

front cover of To Test or Not To Test
To Test or Not To Test
A Guide to Genetic Screening and Risk
Zallen, Dorris Teichler
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Tests are a standard part of modern medicine. We willingly screen our blood, urine, vision, and hearing, and submit to a host of other exams with names so complicated that we can only refer to them by their initials: PET, ECG, CT, and MRI. Genetic tests of our risks for disease are the latest trend in medicine, touted as an approach to informed and targeted treatment. They offer hope for some, but also raise medical, ethical, and psychological concerns for many including when genetic information is worth having.

To Test or Not to Test arms readers with questions that should be considered before they pursue genetic screening.

  • Am I at higher risk for a disorder?
  • Can genetic testing give me useful information?
  • Is the timing right for testing?
  • Do the benefits of having the genetic information outweigh the problems that testing can bring?

Determining the answers to these questions is no easy task. In this highly readable book, Doris Teichler Zallen provides a template that can guide individuals and families through the decision-making process and offers additional resources where they can gain more information. She shares interviews with genetic specialists, doctors, and researchers, as well as the personal stories of nearly 100 people who have faced genetic-testing decisions. Her examples focus on genetic testing for four types of illnesses: breast/ovarian cancer (different disorders but closely connected), colon cancer, late-onset Alzheimer's disease, and hereditary hemochromatosis. From the more common diseases to the rare hereditary conditions, we learn what genetic screening is all about and what it can tell us about our risks.

Given that we are now bombarded with ads in magazines and on television hawking the importance of pursuing genetic-testing, it is critical that we approach this tough issue with an arsenal of good information. To Test or Not to Test is an essential consumer tool-kit for the genetic decision-making process.

[more]

front cover of Tolerance and Risk
Tolerance and Risk
How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims
Mitra Rastegar
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

How apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population

Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.

Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.

Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims. 

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Tomorrow's Troubles
Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance
Georgetown University Press, 2022

The first examination of predictive technology from the perspective of Catholic theology

Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society. In business and politics alike, institutional structures manage risk by controlling the behavior of consumers and citizens. New technologies comb through past data to predict and shape future action. Choosing between possible future paths can cause anxiety as every decision becomes a calculation to achieve the most optimal outcome.

Tomorrow’s Troubles is the first book to use virtue ethics to analyze these pressing issues. Paul Scherz uses a theological analysis of risk and practical reason to show how risk-based decision theory reorients our relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities—and fosters a deceptive hope for total security. Scherz presents this view of temporality as problematic because it encourages a desire for stability through one’s own efforts instead of reliance on God. He also argues that the largest problem with predictive models is that they do not address individual reason and free will. Instead of dwelling on a future, we cannot control, we can use our past experiences and the Christian tradition to focus on discerning God’s will in the present.

Tomorrow’s Troubles offers a thoughtful new framework that will help Christians benefit from the positive aspects of predictive technologies while recognizing God’s role in our lives and our futures.

[more]

front cover of Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind
Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind
Risk, Radiation, and Distrust of Government
Weingart, John
Rutgers University Press, 2007

It is an unenviable task, but one that all state governments face: finding a final “resting place” for low-level nuclear waste from power plants, hospitals, university laboratories, and other industries. John Weingart was the official in New Jersey who for many years led this onerous charge. This book is the story of how he and a commission appointed by the governor, instead of imposing a top-down solution, designed an approach that would confront public fears by seeking a community that would volunteer to host a disposal facility. Initially, this novel approach was surprisingly successful, as leaders in a dozen municipalities stepped forward to say they might be interested. Once their interest became known, however, the process in each town derailed. Residents demanded assurances of zero-percent risk and expressed profound distrust of government assertions and promises.

Waste Is a Terrible Thing to Mind is a compelling, suspenseful, and amusing insider’s account of New Jersey policy and politics, but it is also a larger saga of the challenges facing society in the post–9/11 era when the public’s distrust of government is increasing at the same time that its sensitivity to health and safety threats is heightened.

For more information, see:
http://wasteisaterriblethingtomind.com/

"Written with a wry sense of humor, it is a pleasure to read and could provide the blueprint for future efforts to find locations for controversial land uses."
- Marie Curtis, Executive Director, New Jersey Environmental Lobby

"A penetrating look at one state's struggle with radioactive waste ... offering some tantalizing reflections on the public understanding of science and how we, in a democratic society, deal with complexity and uncertainty."
- Jay Kaufman, State Senator, Massachusetts State Legislature

"A provocative story, laced with humor, demonstrates how public distrust of government can make it impotent. It should be read by anyone working on public policy issues, especially planning, growth, and the environment."
- Harriet Keyserling, Former Energy Committee Chair, South Carolina State Legislature

"Readers interested in environmental policy, land use and how governments make decisions will learn much from this fine reflective insider's account. It's also a primer on how to survive and thrive in state government."
- David N. Kinsey, Visiting Professor, Woodrow Wilson School Princeton University

"... a fascinating case study of how a government agency creatively tried to solve an intractable public issue. Although the agency failed in its quest to recruit a town to host a low-level radioactive waste site, Weingart's detailed and often humorous narrative of the agency's efforts is a clear winner."
- Jack Sabatino, Judge, New Jersey Superior Court

"... a very engaging and sometimes discouraging case study about the pitfalls and perils of trying to site a controversial facility the right way."
- Gregg Larson, Administrator, Center for Biometric Research, University of Minnesota

[more]

front cover of What Do Gay Men Want?
What Do Gay Men Want?
An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity
David M. Halperin
University of Michigan Press, 2010

“Compelling, timely, and provocative. The writing is sleek and exhilarating. It doesn’t waste time telling us what it will do or what it has just done—it just does it.”
—Don Kulick, Professor of Anthropology, New York University

How we can talk about sex and risk in the age of barebacking—or condomless sex—without invoking the usual bogus and punitive clichés about gay men’s alleged low self-esteem, lack of self-control, and other psychological “deficits”? Are there queer alternatives to psychology for thinking about the inner life of homosexuality? What Do Gay Men Want? explores some of the possibilities.

Unlike most writers on the topic of gay men and risky sex, David Halperin liberates gay male subjectivity from psychology, demonstrating the insidious ways in which psychology’s defining opposition between the normal and the pathological subjects homosexuality to medical reasoning and revives a whole set of unexamined moral assumptions about “good” sex and “bad” sex.

In particular, Halperin champions neglected traditions of queer thought, including both literary and popular discourses, by drawing on the work of well-known figures like Jean Genet and neglected ones like Marcel Jouhandeau. He shows how the long history of of gay men’s uses of “abjection” can offer an alternative, nonmoralistic model for thinking about gay male subjectivity, something which is urgently needed in the age of barebacking.

Anyone searching for nondisciplinary ways to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS among gay men—or interested in new modes of thinking about gay male subjectivity—should read this book.

David M. Halperin is W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality, Professor of English, Professor of Women’s Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.

[more]

front cover of Women at the Early Modern Swedish Court
Women at the Early Modern Swedish Court
Power, Risk, and Opportunity
Fabian Persson
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
What was it possible for a woman to achieve at an early modern court? By analysing the experiences of a wide range of women at the court of Sweden, this book demonstrates the opportunities open to women who served at, and interacted with, the court; the complexities of women's agency in a court society; and, ultimately, the precariousness of power. In doing so, it provides an institutional context to women's lives at court, charting the full extent of the rewards that they might obtain, alongside the social and institutional constrictions that they faced. Its longue durée approach, moreover, clarifies how certain periods, such as that of the queens regnant, brought new possibilities. Based on an extensive array of Swedish and international primary sources, including correspondence, financial records and diplomatic reports, it also takes into account the materialities used to create hierarchies and ceremonies, such as physical structures and spaces within the court. Comprehensive in its scope, the book is divided into three parts, which focus respectively on outsiders at court, insiders, and members of the royal family.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter