Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jessica Bland
(University of Cambridge)
Lalitha Sundaram (University of Cambridge)
Shahar Avin (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
How do we act as local communities, institutions or a nation state when facing planetary catastrophes? Exploring tensions between distant, highly uncertain existential risks and present action through exercises that bring futures into the present.
Description
This combined panel-workshop addresses a temporal and scalar challenge in risk governance: the disconnect between abstract catastrophic threats with huge uncertainty about their likelihood and the lived present where action must occur, and where multiple claims regarding the importance and urgency of different issues are continually vying for attention and resource.
Criticisms of existential risk studies include being overly-focused on a small number of futures valorised by elites, and reliant on a narrow set of ethical assumptions not shared by the global population.
Attempts to assess risk against the totality of human existence across all of space and time often lead to extreme generalisation. The psychological and practical distance creates paralysis: when futures feel abstract and far away, present action becomes difficult to justify or motivate. Yet effective responses require acting now within specific institutional, community, and material contexts.
Existential risk assessments can also make assumptions about the nature of unprecedented phenomena, failing to acknowledge a wide range of possible futures. They can easily close down more expansive thinking that reflects the range of concerns and values of those involved.
There have been recent moves to open up this field of study. However, when actively pursuing inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural exploration, boundaries around objects of concern and methods of investigation are, rightly, subject to ongoing renegotiation.
We welcome contributions that use STS perspectives to explore how anticipatory assessments of global catastrophe can be reimagined to build resilience across scales—social, institutional, and ecological. Submissions may examine how futures are enacted in present practices, how socio-technical imaginaries shape perceptions of proximity and urgency, and how participatory methods can open space for plural, situated, and resilient futures.
The workshop will demonstrate practical exercises developed by a group of researchers attempting to respond to these challenges.