This call for papers seeks to open up the concept of risk as it operates across different contexts. Risk can be a way of forging connections across temporalities, but it does so in different ways from different vantage points and with different results. Recent scholarship on crisis governance and security regimes reveals an ‘ecological’ inclination in risk calculation, as a set of practices that tracks how things are connected and manages their various projected impacts on one another (Müller-Mahn, 2013; Anderson, 2010). Scholarship on financialization demonstrates how the concept of risk creates the conditions for uneven accumulation, and uneven distribution of both wealth and precarity (Ho 2009, Li Puma and Lee 2004, Martin 2007, Stanley 2016, 2021). Risk is a concept that political movements and communities organize around, from its redefinition in the Liberatory Harm Reduction organizing as a pathway to healing from the root causes of oppression (Hassan 2022), to the centrality of risk conversations in practices of radical care around Covid transmission, to the ways that it informs how we understand our own positions and potential solidarities through differential exposures to the harms of white supremacy and cis-heteropatriarchy (Gilmore 2022). 

We are interested in understanding how different definitions of risk produce different political projects and material landscapes. In this paper session we invite a capacious understanding of risk and seek to bring together work that analyzes what risk does across multiple contexts. Here are some questions that your work could be responding to: 

What do narratives of risk do in your research context? What ecologies do narratives of risk produce? How do different forms of political organizing understand risk differently? How do various understandings of risk contribute to the way we understand and respond to crises? 

Organizers: Liz Calhoun & Merle Davis Matthews

Please submit abstracts to Liz Calhoun at calho115@umn.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: Hybrid