ABSTRACT

Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book’s chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion.

The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend deeply on political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new – more collective, mutualistic and convivial – politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle.

Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.

Size: 0.68 MB
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chapter 3|13 pages

Sharing risks or proliferating uncertainties?

Insurance, disaster and development
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chapter 4|15 pages

The unravelling of technocratic orthodoxy?

Contemporary knowledge politics in technology regulation
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chapter 5|12 pages

Control, manage or cope?

A politics for risks, uncertainties and unknown-unknowns
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chapter 6|14 pages

Expanding cities

Living, planning and governing uncertainty
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chapter 7|14 pages

Uncertainty in modelling climate change

The possibilities of co-production through knowledge pluralism 1
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chapter 8|14 pages

Disease outbreaks

Navigating uncertainties in preparedness and response
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chapter 9|14 pages

Disasters, humanitarianism and emergencies

A politics of uncertainty
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chapter 11|13 pages

Disputing security and risk

The convoluted politics of uncertainty
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chapter 12|10 pages

Unsettling the apocalypse

Uncertainty in spirituality and religion
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