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- Convenors:
-
Konrad Kuhn
(University of Innsbruck)
Jan Hinrichsen (University Medical Centre Göttingen)
Frédéric Keck (Collège de France)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Risk technologies can be perceived as temporal, sociotechnical assemblages linking past, present and future, thereby making this future malleable and knowledgeable in its very uncertainty. The panel inquires into how uncertainties, complexities, and contingencies are dealt with in the mode of risk.
Long Abstract:
Crises such as the corona pandemic seem to suspend the normal course of life: Whereas the temporary destabilization of implicit and explicit rules of everyday life renders the future inherently fragile and unpredictable, future's very uncertainty manifests the instability and precariousness of present epistemic orders underlying those rules. Risk, perceived as socially constructed, culturally mediated, and effective in practices, is the concept which mediates between an uncertain future and a precarious present, as it is embedded in technologies aimed at governing the future. Procedures of risk determination can be interpreted as cultural forms of risk perception and assessment and therefore as specific modes of knowledge production: Risk technologies - e.g. technoscientific practices of risk assessment and management, biopolitical interventions in disease control, technologies of insurance, etc. - can be perceived as temporal, sociotechnical assemblages linking past, present and future, thereby making this future malleable and knowledgeable in its very uncertainty. Concepts and practices of risk engender "uncertainty" as the "normal" state, the "rule" of contemporary society.
This panel inquires into how uncertainties, complexities, and contingencies are dealt with in the mode of risk and the historically situated settings these practices are embedded in. We ask for papers focussing on precise empirical situations while putting under scrutiny specific risk modes, e. g. in medicine, politics, or every-day life. We welcome contemporary ethnological case-studies as well as analyses of historical material/sources. Possible analytical perspectives include (but are not limited to) medical anthropology, STS, anthropology of the future, anthropology of knowledge.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses urban governance mechanisms in Eskişehir which utilized earthquake and disaster risk discourse in order to achieve an urban renewal project. It shows how policy-making process has entangled with an emergency declaration and multiple forms of uncertainties and insecurities.
Paper long abstract:
Leaving its heydays behind, Eskişehir experienced the fate of many other disempowered cities around the world, responding to pressures of neoliberalism by seeking to regain their power (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018). With the assertion of turning Eskişehir’s village-like urban character into a European one, the metropolitan municipality started its urban rescaling program that heavily depended on urban restructuring. Waterfronts of the Porsuk River have become spaces of opportunity for a series of URPs for accumulation, economic growth, and socio-cultural transformations. The paper illuminates how the central government’s new law, “The Law on the transformation of lands under risk of disaster”, designed to renew areas deemed to be under disaster risk brought along an opportunity for Eskişehir’s municipality. In 2013, the Metropolitan Municipality of Eskişehir declared an urban renewal project on 56-hectare land with a 15.000 population. Although the municipality utilized emergency and techno-moral claims to restructure the city-spaces to prevent asserted future disasters, perception and definition of risk, as well as the future of the neighborhood and housing security, have remained uncertain. The paper discusses the entanglement of emergency claims within uncertainties of risk, ambiguities of policy-making through technomoral governance mechanisms, as well as responses from the populations who experienced various forms of vulnerabilities emerging from uncertainties and waiting.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines epistemological differences in two knowledge regimes in operation at the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as how the actors conceptualize nuclear risks temporally. It shows how nuclear inspectors attempt to ensure that the nuclear future is like the present.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1970s, the International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear inspectors go into nuclear facilities around the world to make sure that no illegal nuclear weapons are being built. In other words, they ensure that the nuclear future is like the nuclear present. Since the 1970s, the way that the IAEA has been carrying out these inspections has changed from an accounting-based audit practice to a practice of risk assessment. The precipitating event for the change in the nuclear inspectors' knowledge practices was the discovery of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s. While the old audit practices were faulted for not being able to discover what the state did not declare to the IAEA, the new risk assessment practices are criticized for putting states under permanent scrutiny and for allowing forms of knowledge (such as qualitative modes of analysis) that are deemed un-objective.
Based on research conducted since 2011, this paper examines the epistemological differences in the two safeguards knowledge regimes as well as how the actors conceptualize nuclear risks temporally. The movement to nuclear risk assessment at the IAEA makes explicit domains of uncertainty about the future and simultaneously reveals the precariousness of the present which the actors themselves are highly uncomfortable with. Both the diplomats and the bureaucrats at the IAEA struggle with risk assessment; the former want it as their exclusive domain, whereas the latter are exhausted by the endless iterative cycle of risk evaluation where the uncertain future is constantly encroaching upon the present.
Paper short abstract:
I analyse a programme ran by the ICRC in Rio's favelas as a humanitarian risk technology which, although aimed at taming future uncertainty, can lead to moments of paralysis when action is necessary to safeguard oneself from violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the indeterminacy inherent to risk management as an exercise of classifying reality. Since 2009, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has operated in Rio's favelas to help reduce the impact of armed violence on public services and local residents and. In contrast with war settings, where the organization provides emergency medical relief, in Brazil the ICRC implements a program called Safer Access Framework (SAF), an immaterial form of humanitarian action. SAF consists of a risk management technology that aims to help public healthcare and education staff to manage everyday risks related with armed violence that they might encounter in their daily work. As workers are asked to classify risk in their work surroundings according to colour levels (green to red), uncertainties about the nature of armed violence that can be heard but not seen contribute to make risk indeterminate. Moral uncertainties about enacting advised protocols to mitigate risk (e.g. leaving work early) further contribute to create moments of paralysis at a public clinic in Duque de Caxias, Greater Rio, where fieldwork was conducted. While techniques of risk management aim at taming future uncertainty by foregrounding action in the present, this paper argues that the indeterminacy inherent to risk assessments as a form of classification can lead to states of paralyzing indecision.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focus on the Brazilian insurance industry to analyse how the monetized uncertainty and, in turn, the protection selled by the insurance companies, both become valuable commodities, central to governing the future and calculating risks.
Paper long abstract:
The anthropology of finance has already taught us that instability and crisis characterize the culture of the global financial market elites. Over the past two decades, social scientists concerned with the advances of neoliberalism have drawn attention to processes of "economization of uncertainty" central to the reproduction of global financial capitalism. There are two sides to these processes. On the one hand, there are a whole series of technical and political apparatuses aimed at reducing uncertainty and selling security (insurance policies and risk management technologies, etc.). On the other hand, and at the same time, social studies of the financial sector have pointed to a reverse side of statistical risk and probability technologies that are concerned not only with reducing uncertainties, but also with creating earnings opportunities in the uncertain future. With a certain level of control, it is desirable to assume risks for future gains. From the perspective of sectors of the Brazilian financial elites, it is the tension between managing risks and taking risks that is on the agenda. From data produced in ethnographic research on the Brazilian insurance market, a market that is precisely on the frontier of these perspectives, I see how the monetized uncertainty and, in turn, the security of the protection markets, both become valuable commodities. In this context, both the calculation of risk and the protection markets that sell security gain even more prominence and expand into new zones of accumulation.
Paper short abstract:
Through extensive use of toxic remedies, the museums have tried to control the risk of loosing their buildings to rot. This practice was seen as successful, but today, we are trying to uncoil the backlash, analyzing the former knowledge practices and to find a future for the toxic heritage.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we enter the open-air museum through the back door and focus on how the museum's production of timescapes is infused with toxins. Throughout the 20th century, a close entanglement has taken place between pesticides, timber and homes. Museum director Hans Aall's book from 1925 is based on Norsk Folkemuseum's work of preserving artifacts and buildings. Here, he gives a careful description of how the coal-tar product Karbolineum is applied to almost all parts of a museum building during its re-erection to control the risks associated with fungi, insects and rotting wood.
Toxic substances stop decay and protect things from their own materiality. The buildings were intended to last forever as "historical documents". This practice is a linear notion of conservation that derives from the idea of museum as a place for eternity; where time ceases.
Toxic substances do not merely change things epistemologically. The chemical technology also changed the buildings materiality. The museum conservators tried to control the future, but produced a toxic environment where the legacies of past practices endure.
Many buildings at open-air museums are poisonous and becomes a biological risk for surrounding nature, people working at the museum and the audience. The recognition that many of the perhaps most beautiful cultural-historical museum buildings - including medieval buildings - contain toxic residues, will influence future practices. In this paper we will present how risk handling practices have been changing throughout 150 years and reflect on how these risks may be handled today.