The Politics of Uncertainty

"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 on deeply 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.

Icy futures:carving the northern sea route

The research examines intersections between globalisation and climate change in the (re)emergence of a 'Northern Sea Route' through the Russian Arctic, which some speculate could soon rival or replace the Suez Canal as major global trade artery. The research explores shifts in the contemporary shipping system, a relatively underexplored area of mobilities research, examining the affordances and risks posed to shipping and resource extraction activities by melting Arctic sea-ice, as sections of the maritime Arctic become increasingly integrated into global circuits. The research examines actual and potential developments surrounding the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Russian Arctic, examining the ways geopolitics, geoeconomics and geophysical processes collide in the ‘Anthropocene Arctic’

Processes of policy mobility in the governance of volcanic risk

Abstract —National and regional governments are responsible for the development of public policy for volcanic risk reduction (VRR) within their territories. However, practices vary significantly between jurisdictions. A priority of the international volcanological community is the identification and promotion of improved VRR through collaborative knowledge exchange. This project investigates the role of knowledge exchange in the development of VRR. The theories and methods of policy mobility studies are used to identify and explore how, why, where and with what effects international exchanges of knowledge have shaped this area of public policy. Analyses have been performed through the construction of narrative histories. This project details the development of social apparatus for VRR worldwide, depicted as a global policy field on three levels - the global (macro) level; the national (meso) level; and at individual volcanoes (the micro level). The narratives track the transition from a historical absence of VRR policy through the global proliferation of a reactive 'emergency management' approach, to the emergence of an alternative based on long-term planning and community empowerment that has circulated at the macro level, but struggled to translate into practice. This is explored using five case volcanoes: Merapi, Indonesia; Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia; Mount Rainier, USA; Popocatépetl and Volcán de Colima, México. These cases demonstrate that policymakers at active volcanoes do not always deliberately access knowledge curated at the 'core' of the global policy field and use it to rationally develop 'best practice' VRR policies. More frequently, the transient topologies that carry knowledge between volcanoes, the assemblages of mobile knowledge with evolving local politics, culture and volcanic activity, and resulting mutations have produced unique and unpredictable results at each volcano. Mobile policies may encounter local resistance, ideas may go unused for decades and evolution over time does not automatically entail 'progression' towards an ideal. This work carries lessons for those seeking 'improved' VRR through knowledge exchange, including the development of the policy field across time and strata; current understanding of 'best practices' in VRR; challenges encountered when mobilising VRR policy into different volcanic settings; and examples of efforts to overcome those challenges. Keywords — Volcanic Risk Governance, Policy Mobility Studies, Applied Volcanology, Critical Policy Studies, Disaster Risk Reduction, Volcán de Colima, Gunung Merapi, Nevado del Ruiz, Mount Rainier, Popocatépet

The Anthropology of Epidemics

Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis

Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move

Public interest or social need? Reflections on the Pandemic, Technology and the Law

In most countries the measures to deal with the pandemic were introduced through executive law-making mechanisms, which form part of the ‘law of necessity’ or ‘emergency law’. The legal formalist response to these measures accepts their proportionality and constitutionality because of their temporariness. So far, the debate among constitutionalists has focused on the contradiction between public interest (in this case concretised as public health) and fundamental rights. Additionally, the technocratic legitimacy of the measures is almost unanimously accepted. In this chapter I argue that the contradiction between health and economy, or, more accurately, between the social need for health and the partiality of economic interests, determines the scientificity of the different policy responses to the pandemic. In order to do so, the measures will be examined as a unity of (emergency) form and (politico-economic) content. The argument is that the scientific response to the pandemic is overdetermined by politico-economic priorities

Effect of nonlinear friction on the motion of an object on solid surface induced by external vibration

There are enumerable examples of natural processes which fall in the class of non-equilibrium stochastic dynamics. In the literature it is prescribed that such a process can be described completely using transition probability that satisfy the Fokker Planck equation. The analytical solutions of transition probability density function are difficult to obtain and are available for linear systems along with few first order nonlinear systems. We studied such nonlinear stochastic systems and tried to identify the important parameters associated with the dynamics and energy dissipative mechanism using statistical tools.We present experimental study of macroscopic systems driven away far from equilibrium with an applied bias and external mechanical noise. This includes sliding of small solid object, gliding of a liquid drop or a rolling of a rigid sphere. We demonstrated that the displacement statistics are non-Gaussian at short observation time, but they tend towards a Gaussian behavior at long time scale. We also found that, the drift velocity increases sub-linearly, but the diffusivity increases super-linearly with the strength of the noise. These observations reflect that the underlying non-linear friction controls the stochastic dynamics in each of these cases. We established a new statistical approach to determine the underlying friction law and identified the operating range of linear and nonlinear friction regime.In all these experiments source of the noise and the origin of the energy dissipation mechanism (i.e. friction) are decoupled. Naturaly question arises whether the stochastic dynamics of these athermal systems are amenable to Einstein\u27s Fluctuation dissipation theorem which is valid strictly for a closed thermodynamic system. We addressed these issues by comparing Einstein\u27s ratio of Diffusivity and mobility which are measurable quantities in our experimental systems. As all our experimental systems exhibit substantial negative fluctuations of displacement that diminishes with observation time scale, we used another approach of integrated fluctuation theorem to identify athermal temperature of the system by characterizing a persistence time of negative fluctuations in terms of the measurable quantity. Specific experiments have also been designed to study the crossing of a small object over a physical barrier assisted by an external noise and a bias force. These results mimic the classical Arrhenius behavior from which another effective temperature may be deduced. All these studies confer that the nonlinear system does not possess any unique temperature.Detachment of a solid sphere as well as a liquid drop from a structured rubber surface during subcritical motion in presence of external noise was examined in the light of Arrhenius\u27 activated rate equation. Drift velocity of small drops of water-glycerin solution behaves nonlinearly with viscosity which is reminiscence of Kramers\u27 turn over theory of activated rate. In a designed experiment of barrier crossing of liquid drops we satisfactorily verified the Kramers\u27 formalism of activated rate at the low friction limit

The Anthropology of Epidemics

Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis