Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives: Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts [Hardcover]

This book untangles the relationship between expert categorisations of risk and the on-the-ground experiences of untrained ordinary people who may be routinely subjected to significant danger in a variety of extraordinary contexts. It considers political, ethical and moral dimensions of risk and calls for more targeted ethnographic research, designed to reveal how grass-roots risk dispositions and practice intersect with official discourses, individual agency and community resilience.

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 Potos?: 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 Edgeworkers 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. As1lmak tehlikeli ve yasakt1r:  Unintelligible mobility and uncertain manhood in Istanbuls 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. Commental)