Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives

Brings together a range of empirical accounts from across different disciplines including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and medicine
Based on ethnographic case studies presented during the workshop organized by the Department of Anthropology at University College London, UK in autumn 2014
Includes critical commentaries that scrutinise the ethnographic cases to summarise, expand, supplement and challenge the arguments put forward.

Brings together long-term ethnographic research to redefine notions of risk Reveals how risk and risk categorizations are related to individual agency and community resilience Shows how societal risk can in fact forge new and positive forms of social experience

Autorentext

Beata Switek 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.

Inhalt
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. 'Aslmak tehlikeli ve yasaktr': 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?