This book untangles the relationship between expert categorisations of risk and the on-the-ground experiences of untrained ‘ordinary’ people who may be routinely subjected to significant danger in a variety of extraordinary contexts. It considers political, ethical and moral dimensions of risk and calls for more targeted ethnographic research, designed to reveal how grass-roots risk dispositions and practice intersect with official discourses, individual agency and community resilience.
Table of Content
Chapter 1. Introduction: Ordinary life, extraordinary risk: On the normalisation of significant risk-taking in precarious contexts.- Part I. Self-Constitution: Defiance, endurance and choice.- Chapter 2. ‘Knowing how to walk’: Risk, violence and practices of endurance in urban Brazil.- Chapter 3. Risk negotiations in the mines of Potosí: Implications for rethinking current Health and Safety approaches.- Chapter 4. Regenerative medicine, unproven therapies and the framing of clinical risk.- Chapter 5. Commentary: Clear and present danger: Dodging and dealing with risk and uncertainty in everyday life.- Part II. Shifting dangers: Macro and micro politics of risk.- Chapter 6. ‘Keeping the conversation going’: Understanding risk in a context of escalating conflict in Syria.- Chapter 7. The Edgeworker’s Habitus: Climbing and Ordinary Risks.- Chapter 8. Commentary: Action, edgework, and the situated logics of risk.- Part III. Environmental threat and cultural possibility: Risk and the contemporary city.- Chapter 9. ‘Asılmak tehlikeli ve yasaktır’: Unintelligible mobility and uncertain manhood in Istanbul’s Old City.- Chapter 10. Ordinary life in the shadow of Vesuvius: Surviving the announced catastrophe.- Chapter 11. Keeping disasters under control: Anticipation, cyclones and responses to uncertainty.- Chapter 12. Commentary: Interpretive risk ethnography as a means of understanding risk problems: Encounters with the ordinary-extraordinary and what comes after?
About the author
Beata Świtek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Allen Abramson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at University College London, UK.
Hannah Swee is a climate and capacity building specialist for the United Nations.
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