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Contribution short abstract:

Responding to recent “pedagogies of uncertainty” produced by interpretive, cultural and relational risk theorists we present local responses and expert portrayals of industrial decarbonization elucidating affective engagements with host communities through an analytic praxis of reparative readings.

Contribution long abstract:

Risk anthropology has flourished in the wake of engagements with the work of interpretive, cultural and relational risk theorists. Challenging questions have been posed (constituting “pedagogies of uncertainty”) about situations of indeterminacy, practices of intelligibility, and the dynamic interplay of temporalities in real-world risk problems (e.g. Switek, Abramson and Swee, 2022). Scholarship has involved revisiting Beck’s world risk theory as an a priori understanding of insecurities associated with local and global risks and impacts. On this footing, risk study into local responses and expert portrayals of industrial decarbonization (ID) has generated methodological and analytical strategies elucidating affective engagements within host communities. We draw on data from ID research at two industrial places on the south Wales coast interpreted through analytic praxis of reparative readings of what we term mini-icons provided to research participants as triggers for emotional engagement. This research developed a nuanced visual practice, articulated through a framework of liveliness of objects relevant to participants’ lives, drawing out the affective forces that flow through or inhabit localised experiences of uncertainties. Understandings across temporalities were gathered that invoke depressive readings of present and future risks. Our research makes apparent both gaps and alignments between what can loosely be termed industrialist vision makers and local digestors of such plans. Gathering responses to expert portrayals of risk as well as their proposed solutions through reparative framework, creates a coherent space enabling risk reasoning to become articulated as reparative and multiple without binary reductivity bleaching out potential problems as well as unifying possibilities.