ANTH 380 - Anthropology of Risk and Uncertainty

Risk has become a major theme shaping our contemporary life. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are two most recent contentious domains where the intimate and the personal are entangled with the global scale through risk. But what is risk? Is it an external reality that can be objectively calculated? Is it a subjective experience lived and assessed differently across the globe? Is it the primary qualifier of our late modernity? What are the interplays between the notions of risk, uncertainty, and danger? This course unpacks the socio-political worlds of risk. Through ethnographic and science and technology studies (STS) informed accounts across the globe on various topics such as health, toxicity, disasters, economics, safety, security, and climate, we will scrutinize the multi-faceted aspects of risk. By examining competing social theories of risk, ethnographic studies of culturally diverse ways of assessing and managing risks, historical analyses of how risk emerges as a techno-political domain of intervention, and STS accounts of how risk expertise is created and circulated, this course divulges the polysemous, productive, and ultimately contentious life of risk.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the anthropology department’s SETS concentration.
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.