What does archaeology and history have to do with advancing interdisciplinary futures-thinking?

Neolithic menhir (standing stone) at Glencolumbkille, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Andreas Brunn on Unsplash

In my last blog post, I wrote about some concepts that are driving my latest ideas about futures-thinking methods. In the next few posts, I’ll build on this to discuss some further inspirations for developing these methods. This blog post considers how different disciplines can come together to develop powerful futures-thinking research methods, drawing on modern archaeology and history as an inspiration.

I have been fascinated by history all my life and remain a keen reader/podcast listener of history from all periods, including prehistory. From this, I am learning that contemporary historical and archaeological research is expanding into intriguing interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists. Archaeologists have always employed sophisticated scientific methods for dating material culture artefacts and organic remains from humans and other living things together with the geographical and geological contexts in which they are found. Radiocarbon dating is one example that has been in use since the 1940s.

Now developments in techniques for analysing ancient DNA are offering new insights: for example, into the migration patterns of human species globally or how climate change over millennia has had an impact on humans. Advances in site excavation science such as Ground-Penetrating Radar and Light Detection and Ranging technologies allow for non-invasive investigations to help discover and map the locations of artefacts, ancient buildings and other structural ruins, burial sites and the like. Scientific data from these investigations are combined with analysis of written, arts-based and other textual artefacts, existing historical accounts and the insights offered by biological and cultural anthropology to generate new knowledge about the biological makeup and cultures of humans across eras since prehistoric times.

As archaeologist Davide Zorie puts it in his recent book about Viking history, bringing together techniques from humanities and social sciences with scientific methods advances archaeological research in the following ways. It can confirm findings from across datasets, identify contradictions that need examining or resolving, and complement findings, thereby mutually enriching the narratives told from each set of data/technique alone.

How do these techniques relate to interdisciplinary futures-thinking? Well, if we want to really push the boundaries in future-thinking methods, contemporary archaeology and history techniques offer a wonderful example. Researchers who use data-driven modelling and forecasting techniques, for example, typically pull in information from many different sources – but not often from the humanities or the more qualitative and interpretive side of social inquiry. Those who are interested in going beyond a human-centric focus in generating ideas for more-than-human futures can consider how insights from archaeology, history and the natural sciences can be incorporated into these imaginaries. Researchers engaging in speculative thinking who use approaches from the humanities could consider how AI techniques can be used as part of futures world-building.

One example I came across recently is the DATALAND digital art installations led by the Refik Anadol Studio. The studio uses what they call ‘the Large Nature Model’, an open source generative AI model that is trained on datasets about the natural world derived from the internet as well as from museums, universities and other research archives. These datasets combine nature-related sounds, images, scents, textures and climates measures to create a dynamic platform – a ‘living archive’ – of interactions between ecosystems as a form of multi-sensory storytelling.

The possibilities for creative future-thinking techniques and applications are endless, really …

More-than-human futures-thinking: imagining, feeling and making futures

Fractal pattern in leaves. Photo credit: PantheraLeo1359531, Wikimedia Commons.

I am currently working on a presentation for a symposium on methods for futures-thinking. I will present the concepts that underpin my futures research, give some examples of how I have used qualitative, design- and arts-based methods in previous studies, and discuss ideas for how I plan to build on these methods and extend into new directions. All my empirical methods of social inquiry are founded in concepts and theories, so I will begin with outlining some that are inspiring my thinking on futures methods. Drawing on more-than-human theory (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019; Hernández et al., 2020; Whatmore, 2006), these methods engage affective, embodied and multisensory ways of imagining, feeling and making futures. From this perspective, we can see futures as entanglements that are always shared, distributed and relational between human and more-than-human agents, constantly in the process of becoming.

I am interested in quantum philosophical theories of time (Barad, 2007; Colman, 2023; McGrath et al., 2023; Whyte, 2018) and bringing these together with what I call ‘fractal thinking’ in new methods of futuring. The quantum philosophical approach challenges the post-Enlightenment concept of time as linear. In contrast, time is conceptualised as cyclical, dynamic and iterative: a concept referred to as ‘everywhen’ in Australian Indigenous temporalities (McGrath et al., 2023). In Native American cultures, the concept of ‘spiralling time’ encompasses this idea, so that ‘it makes sense to consider ourselves as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life’ (Whyte, 2018, pp. 228-229). Spiralling time is both cyclical and forward-moving, both predictable and irregular (Whyte, 2018). I want to explore how humans ‘make time’ together with other agents in more-than-human worlds as part of ‘spacetimemattering’, a concept introduced by Karen Barad (2007) which draws on quantum physics to refer to the inseparability of the entanglements of space, time and matter(ing).

Fractal pattern in Celtic art. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Fractal thinking is a type of pattern thinking. The fractal is a recursive never-ending pattern, created through the repetition of a simple process. Fractals are the non-uniform shapes found everywhere in the world in nature, such as trees, clouds, snowflakes, ferns, blood vessels or neuronal connections in the human body. Fractal patterns have also been used in human art and design for millennia, across cultures. Fractal thinking can be used to find order in complex systems and map how change occurs. It is already used in forecasting to make probability forecasts about such phenomena as the stock market and timing of future natural disasters. Adopting a fractal and relational systems thinking approach drawing on more-than-human and quantum philosophies of time, we can begin to recognise the non-linear patterning in these materialities of ‘making time’ – including how futures are made.

Palmistry and tea-reading equipment in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. Photo credit: Ethan Doyle White, Wikimedia Commons.

As a social researcher, I am also interested in what I call ‘lay futuring’, or the beliefs and practices underpinning how ‘non-experts’ sense and imagine futures. Across human history and cultures, people have sought ways of predicting the future, combining religion, magic and mysticism with philosophy. In prehistoric and ancient times, human and animal sacrifices were made so that their entrails could be used for divination purposes. Astrologers consulted the heavens for signs of what the future might hold, while geomancers looked to the earth and other geological features (Grafton, 2023; Moller, 2024). Many of these practices are still popular today (for example, horoscopes, tarot card reading, tea leaf/coffee grounds reading, palm reading and other forms of fortune telling).

In forthcoming inquiry, I would like to recuperate these modes of divination practices and investigate how people engage in lay futuring practices and what these understandings can contribute to a multidisciplinary approach to futures thinking. I plan to bring in sensuous futuring approaches (Pink, 2021) and to focus on the affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009), non-representational dimensions (Vannini, 2015) and embodied sociomaterialities (Verlie & Neimanis, 2023) involved in lay futuring and fractal thinking.

I am also starting to think about these research questions:

  • How do lived experiences of sociomaterialities contribute to how people imagine futures? How do we imagine futures as part of multispecies worlds located in diverse environments?
  • How do we ‘sense and ‘feel’ futures (in all senses of the word)? What will the smells, tastes, sights, feelings and sounds of the future be? How can we use our sensorium in the present to imagine sensory futures? How to imagine the unimaginable/the ineffable – the affective atmospheres of futures?
  • How can we facilitate and research how people engage in fractal and relational systems thinking? How can we encourage people to use their senses to notice patterns of change in their environments and how these changes make them feel in their bodies? How do these embodied, multisensory observations attune us to spiralling temporalities and relational agencies? How to disrupt post-Enlightenment Western notions of the linearity of time?

The next step – developing exciting methods to address these questions.

References

Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77-81.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity.

Colman, F. (2023). Quantum feminicity: modes of countermanding time. Technophany. A Journal for Philosophy and Technology, 2(1), 1-37.

Grafton, A. (2023). Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa. Harvard University Press.

Hernández, K. J., Rubis, J. M., Theriault, N., Todd, Z., Mitchell, A., Country, B., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., & Wright, S. (2020). The Creatures Collective: Manifestings. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 838-863.

McGrath, A., Troy, J., & Rademaker, L. (Eds.). (2023). Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history. University of Nebraska Press.

Moller, V. (2024). Inside the Stargazer’s Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe. Oneworld Publications.

Pink, S. (2021). Sensuous futures: re-thinking the concept of trust in design anthropology. The Senses and Society, 16(2), 193-202.

Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational research methodologies: an introduction. In P. Vannini (Ed.), Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research (pp. 1-18). Routledge.

Verlie, B., & Neimanis, A. (2023). Breathing climate crises. Angelaki, 28(4), 117-131.

Whatmore, S. (2006). Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world. cultural geographies, 13(4), 600-609.

Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 224-242.

Symposium videos – The Social Impacts of Long COVID

‘The Social Impacts of Long COVID’ online symposium I convened was held on 5 March 2024. It featured presentations from Mexico, the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.

The videos of the 18 presentations in two sessions (nine presentations in Session 1, nine in Session 2) can be found on YouTube for viewing: Session 1 here and Session 2 here.

The list of presentations is below:

Session 1:

  • Long COVID and the (mis)uses of restitution narrative: Mark D M Davis, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
  • The long haul: contested histories of Long COVID and ME/CFS in Australia: Kathy Anderson, University of Sydney, Australia
  • Australian experiences of socially and politically mediated determinants of health equity following COVID-19 infection: Danielle Hitch, Sara Holton, Bec Downing, Krishna Vakil, Catherine Bennett, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
  • Long COVID in The Conversation – the role of an academic journalism publication in media coverage: Lawrie Zion, Kate Stodart, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
  • Unveiling the socio-health effects of long COVID in adult population in Northwest Mexico: Marisol Grijalva-Castro, Juana María Meléndez Torres, Research Centre in Food & Development, Hermosillo Sonora, México
  • The profound impact of long COVID on societal structures: governmental non-intervention and the role of social determinants of health: Pantéa Javidan, Stanford University, San Francisco, USA
  • The economic burden of long COVID in the United States: evidence from the panel study of income dynamics: Matt Mazewski, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA
  • The debilitating discourses of long COVID: the public pedagogies of sporting bodies: Matt Ventresca, Georgia Institute of Technology/Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, Mary McDonald, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
  • We will not be silent: patients speak out about the role of epistemic injustice in erasing evidence of Long COVID in Australia: Pippa Yeoman, University of Sydney, and member of the Australia Long COVID Community, Robin Austin, member of the Australia Long COVID Community, Su Mon Kyaw-Myint, member of the Australia Long COVID Community, Kirsty Yeates, Australian National University, Canberra, member of the Australia Long COVID Community, Ruth Newport, administrator of the Australia Long COVID Community, Australia

Session 2:

  • The Double-Bind: long COVID and the experience of cultural forgetting: Mary Zournazi, UNSW Sydney, Australia
  • A qualitative account of psychological adaptation in long COVID: Joanne Wrench, Austin Health, University of Melbourne, Jacquie Eyres, Austin Health, University of Melbourne, Kerrie Clarke, Austin Health, University of Melbourne, Centre for Mental Health Learning, Victoria, Genevieve Rayner, Centre for Mental Health Learning, Victoria, Australia
  • Validating long COVID with data: self-tracking experiences and practices: Sazana Jayadeva, University of Surrey, UK, Deborah Lupton, UNSW Sydney, Australia
  • Living with the virus: an autoethnography of the traumatic experience of long COVID: Vivienne Matthies-Boon, Radboud University, the Netherlands
  • Establishing a Long COVID Registry – early results and future research avenues: Paula Lorgelly, University of Auckland, Jenene Crossan, Experience & Long COVID Support Aotearoa, Andrew McCullough, University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
  • “This isn’t a life”: an analysis of HRQoL in a cohort of individuals with long COVID symptoms: Paula Lorgelly, University of Auckland, Jenene Crossan, Experience & Long COVID Support Aotearoa, Andrew McCullough, University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
  • Medical ambivalence and long COVID: the disconnects, entanglements, and productivities shaping ethnic minority experiences in the UK: Damien Ridge, University of Westminster, London, UK, Alex Broom, University of Sydney, Australia, Nisreen A. Alwan, University of Southampton, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, UK, Carolyn A. Chew-Graham, Keele University, UK, Nina Smyth, University of Westminster, London, UK, Dipesh Gopal, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Tom Kingstone, Keele University, UK, Patrycia Gaszczyk, University College London, UK, Samina Begum, University of Westminster, London, UK
  • Long COVID Times: An X (Twitter) informed rhythmanalysis of the complexity of pacing in chronic illness: Sam Martin, UCL/Oxford, Emma Uprichard, University of Warwick, UK
  • Long COVID consultations between medical clinics and modern healing rituals: a case study in Switzerland: Marjolaine Viret, Francesco Panese, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

The Social Impacts of Long COVID Symposium – registration now open

The Social Impacts of Long COVID online symposium is taking place on 5 March, with 18 presentations spread across two sessions – one in the morning, one in the evening (Australian Eastern Standard Time). The program has been organised to best fit the time zones of presenters, who hail from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, the USA, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Several presentations involve co-authors who have lived experience of Long COVID.

Registration is free and open to all. Details are here, including list of papers and presenters.

My academic publications for 2023

Books

  • Lupton, D. (2023) The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Risk (revised 3rd edition). Abingdon: Routledge.

Book chapters

  • Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., Nichols, E., Lupton, D., Forsdike, K. and Thorpe, H. (2023) Experimenting with research creation during a pandemic: making time capsules with girls in sport. In Andrews, D., Thorpe, H. and Newman, J. (eds), Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages. Cham: Springer, pp. 241-267.

Journal articles

  • Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2023) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, 25(2), 192-205.
  • Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2023) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, 38(3-4), 594-607.
  • Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2023) The materialities and embodiments of mundane software: exploring how apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, 47(2), 398-413.
  • Watson, A., Wozniak-O’Connor, V. and Lupton, D. (2023) Health information in creative translation: establishing a collaborative project of research and exhibition making. Health Sociology Review, 32(1), 42-59.
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccines among Australians during the Delta variant wave: a qualitative interview study. Health Promotion International, 38(1). Available online at https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daac192
  • Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2023) Australians’ experiences of COVID-19 during the early months of the crisis: a qualitative interview study. Frontiers in Public Health (11). Available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1092322
  • Lupton, D., Fuentes, A. and Mingo, EG. (2023) Presente y futuro da la sociologia digital: entrevista a Deborah Lupton. Teknokultura, 20(2), 239-242.
  • McLean, J., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2023) Young people and TikTok use in Australia: digital geographies of care in popular culture. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2230943
  • Butler, E. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel: risk and socio-spatialities in Australians’ accounts of border controls during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2240290
  • Lupton, D., Noremberg Schubert, Luz David, M.M., Coelho de Oliveira, D. Arthur Saldanha dos Santos, D.A. (2023) Entrevista com Deborah Lupton. Revista Cadernos de Campo, 23(1). Available online at https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/cadernos/article/view/18350
  • Lupton, D., Wozniak-O’Connor, V., Rose, M. and Watson, A. (2023) More-than-human wellbeing: materialising the relations, affects, and agencies of health, kinship and care. M/C Journal. Available online at https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2976
  • Boydell, K. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty. Medical Humanities, online ahead of print. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012768    
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Sociocultural dimensions of health: contributions to studies on risk, digital sociology, and disinformation. Reciis: Revista Electronica de Comunicacao Informacao & Inovacao em Saude. 17(4). Available online at https://doi.org/10.29397/reciis.v17i4.4036

Creative works

Reports and briefing papers

My two submissions to the Australian government COVID-19 Response Inquiry

I have just made two submissions to the Australian government ‘COVID-19 Response Inquiry’.

The first submission summarises relevant findings from my four-year ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19′ project. The submission can be downloaded below.

submission-to-the-covid-inquiry-lupton-finalDownload

The second submission, written with Dr Kerryn Drysale, provides relevant findings from our project ‘Diverse Experiences and Understandings of Immunity in the Pandemic Age’. It can be downloaded below.

submission-to-covid-inquiry-2023_lupton-and-drysdaleDownload

The social impacts of long COVID online symposium

5 March 2024

Convened by Professor Deborah Lupton, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

This online symposium examines the social impacts of long COVID across a range of geographical locations and socioeconomic contexts.

Abstracts for possible presentations are invited from researchers on the following topics or any others related to the social impacts of long COVID:

  • How living with long COVID affects people’s identities, social and family relationships, life opportunities and inclusion in society
  • The economic impacts of long COVID
  • How long COVID is affecting workplaces and educational settings
  • How people with lived experience of long COVID are supporting and learning from each other
  • Long COVID activism
  • Media portrayals of long COVID
  • Arts-based and other creative responses to the experience of long COVID

To submit an abstract for consideration, please email Deborah Lupton (d.lupton@unsw.edu.au) with a description of your proposed presentation (around 200 words in length) as well as a presentation title and the name/s and affilation/s of the presenters. Deadline for abstracts: 12 midnight in your time zone, 1 February 2024.

Once I see what time zones accepted presenters are in, I will try to structure the time of the event so that it fits presenters’ (and my) time zone as well as I can.

New report out – Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19 Stage 4 Survey Findings, 2023

I have just published the findings of Stage 4 of my ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19′ project. The summary and key findings from this survey are provided below. The entire 25-page report is available for download here.

lupton-2023-report-of-stage-4-survey_australians-experiences-of-covid-19Download

Summary

The national online survey findings reported in this report are from the most recent stage of the ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19’ project. Conducted in mid-September 2023, this representative survey investigates 1,000 Australians’ experiences of COVID-19 and preventive practices such as vaccination and face mask wearing, their perceptions of COVID-19 risk, who they think are the most trusted sources of COVID-19 information and their views on the federal and their state/territory governments’ current management of the pandemic. The survey results show that the pandemic continues to badly affect Australians in terms of accumulated infections and prevalence of long COVID. Yet respondents were equivocal about the extent to which COVID-19 is a continuing risk to Australians. For the most part they were not strongly supportive of continued preventive actions against infection such as face mask wearing and vaccination. They did not hold high trust in any COVID-19 information source, including medical experts and scientists. Respondents were divided about how well their governments were managing the pandemic.

Key findings

  • More than two-thirds of respondents (68%) reported having had at least one COVID-19 infection to their knowledge. One third (32%) reported one infection. A further 22% reported two infections, with a total of 13% experiencing three or more. Younger people reported more infections than older people, as did those in the middle household income category.
  • Of those who reported COVID-19 infections, 40% had experienced long COVID. More younger people experienced long COVID symptoms, while far fewer people on the lowest household income level reported long COVID.
  • The respondents reported a high take-up of the first three COVID-19 vaccines. The vast majority (93%) responded they had been vaccinated, with 21% having had two doses and 36% reporting three doses. However, after three doses, the proportion drops considerably.
  • Responses were mixed concerning plans for future COVID-19 vaccination. A total of 36% said they were planning to get another vaccine in 12 months, a similar proportion (37%) said no, and 27% were unsure. Those in the oldest age group were more likely to say that they were planning to get a further COVID-19 vaccination, as were people living in a capital city or regional city.
  • Face mask wearing as a personal practice was low. Only 9% of respondents said that they always wore a face mask to protect themselves against COVID-19 when inside public places. A further 26% said that they sometimes used a mask in these settings. This is a combined total of just over one-third of respondents (35%) who were still masking at least sometimes. Younger respondents were more likely to wear face masks than those in the older groups, as were those in the middle income category.
  • Support for face mask mandates for healthcare workers while at work was higher, with 58% in at least partial support. Here again, younger people and those in the middle income category were more supportive of mandating face masks for healthcare workers.
  • Doctors were considered the most trustworthy sources of COVID-19 information (60%), followed by experts in the field (53%), Australian government health agencies (52%), global health agencies (49%), scientists (45%), community health organisations (35%), Australian government leaders (31%) and other healthcare providers (28%). News reports (17%), friends and family (13%), social media (7%) and religious institutions (3%) were considered the least trustworthy. Older people were more likely to trust doctors and Australian government health agencies. The youngest group was the least trusting of scientists and experts in the field. Those in towns were less trusting of Australian government leaders, global health agencies and experts. Those in the lowest income category trusted news sources more than those in the other categories. A greater percentage of respondents in the two higher income categories said they trusted global health agencies.
  • A slight majority (59%) thought that COVID-19 was still posing a risk to Australians: 17% said definitely, while a further 42% saw COVID-19 as somewhat of a risk. This left 28% who did not view COVID-19 as much of a continuing risk, and 13% who thought it not a risk at all. The oldest age group saw COVID-19 as more of a continuing risk to Australians than did the younger groups, as did respondents located in regional cities and towns and those in the middle income category.
  • Respondents were mixed in their assessments of how well their federal and state/territory governments were currently managing COVID-19. They were evenly divided between positive assessments (36% for both federal and state/territory governments) and more equivocal assessments: 34% (federal) and 32% (state/territory). The youngest and oldest age groups were least positive about their governments’ management of COVID-19. People in towns were less positive than those in capital cities or regional cities. People with the middle levels of household income were more positive than those in other income categories.

Make conferences COVID safe

Throughout the COVID pandemic, I have been an advocate for ensuring the events held by universities, including conferences, seminars and talks open to the general public, are safe and accessible. I have repeatedly called for events organisers and venue managers to do their best to make events COVID safe (mostly using Twitter/X to do so, but also sending emails to organisers).

As I wrote in a piece for Croakey this week, misinformation and lack of visibility about the continuing risks posed by COVID is rife across all sectors of life. As a consequence, fewer people are realising just how serious the risks are, even while new viral subvariants continue to emerge and medical research on the impacts of even ‘mild’ COVID infection (long COVID) is continually being published (see, for example, a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal ).

A review article in Nature Reviews Microbiology published at the beginning of 2023 contended that:

In addition to providing education on long COVID to the biomedical community, we need a public communications campaign that informs the public about the risks and outcomes of long COVID.

In the absence of government-run campaigns, have been doing my best to engage in public communication about COVID risk – including to my academic colleagues. Three months ago, I published a set of guidelines on this blog to help organisers ensure that their events would not become super-spreader occasions. These guidelines offer opportunities for event organisers to expand access and improve inclusion not only for people who want to avoid COVID infection but also those who are disabled, are carers, have little travel funding or live in countries where visas for travel to conferences are denied, or who want to reduce their carbon footprint.

Advocating for COVID safe and otherwise more accessible academic events is proving an ever more serious challenge in an information environment (even at universities) in which it seems to assumed that the worst of the pandemic is over and many protections for event attendees have either been dropped or are not adhered to. For example, ‘strong recommendations’ for people to wear masks to protect themselves and each other seem to be little observed.

Over the past year, I had seen many reports of academic events offering no online options for participation. I had heard of many conferences where people had tested COVID positive while attending or soon after returning home. But what is happening at the writers’ conference being held at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus in Vermont, USA, really alarms me. Reports have come through on Twitter/X about over 10% of attendees reporting COVID infections. Those infected are reporting that they have been given little support by the event organisers, have been sent home while ill and infected, and that the rest of the conference was continuing with few mitigations in place to protect those still on site.

Is this the future of academic conferences? Little care taken to protect attendees, covering over the harsh realities of what has happened to those who were infected, expecting people to leave immediately, even when they are very ill and pose a risk to anyone they may come into contact while travelling home?

It seems it is time to redouble my efforts to draw attention to these issues. We need to #MakeConferencesCOVIDSafe. The lives and health of academics and other knowledge workers (such as these talented writers) – across the age span and seniority levels – should not be placed in further jeopardy.

New book now out – ‘Risk’, 3rd edition

The third revised edition of my book Risk, first published in 1999, and second edition published in 2013, is now out. The book has been extensively revised and expanded to take account of the risks that have emerged over the past decade.

A link to the book on Routledge’s website is here and the Google Books preview is here.

Below is the Preface I wrote for the third edition.

In the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century, risk was a key word in both public forums and academic research. The word ‘risk’ was used across social domains and institutions. The sociocultural and political aspects of risk and identifying the reasons for this intensification on risk identification, communication and management were a major preoccupation in the social sciences. The release in 1992 of the English translation of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was one of the initial impetuses for this academic focus. Simultaneously, however, the scholarship of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault on the care of the self and the governance of populations, and that of British social anthropologist Mary Douglas on the symbolic dimensions of risk cultures began to be taken up by social researchers and theorists. Their writings were extensively used by others exploring the reasons for why risk had become such a vibrant concept and discussing the implications for social identities, group membership and the management and control of diverse societies.

I wrote the first edition of Risk, published in 1999, for Routledge’s Key Ideas series. In the book, I laid out a schema in which I categorised the Beck approach as ‘the risk society’ perspective, Foucauldian insights as ‘the governmentality’ perspective and Douglas’ scholarship as ‘the cultural/symbolic’ approach. I elaborated on each of these three perspectives and provided examples of how they had been applied to empirical investigations into risk-related understandings and practices. The second revised edition of Risk came out in 2013. In updating the book, I added discussion of some additional theoretical perspectives, discussed some topics that had newly been labelled as risks and included findings from empirical studies that had been conducted since the first edition was published.

It is now a quarter of a century since the first edition of Risk appeared. Over this time, I have noticed that the topic of risk has gradually taken a back seat in social and cultural theory and research, despite its continuing salience to major problems and crises across the world. There have been various ‘turns’ emerging in theory over this time that in some ways have supplanted the ‘risk turn’. The ‘affect turn’ and the ‘materialism turn’ are two key developments. Some scholars have attempted to bring these bodies of theory together by examining the affective or sociomaterial dimensions of risk. However, thus far, this scholarship has largely remained on the fringes of risk research.

In revising Risk for its third edition, I therefore thought it important to make a strong call for a ‘re-turn’ to sociocultural risk theory in a way that incorporates insights from these theoretical developments and addresses the latest catastrophes besetting the world. At the time of writing, the world is faced with frightening disasters and emergencies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine that commenced in early 2022 continues unabated, with no clear end in sight, while the crisis affecting displaced people in other nations such as Syria, Venezuela, South Sudan and Afghanistan continues to create hardship, poor health and uncertainty for these groups. The COVID-19 crisis, confirmed as a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, is still raging globally. Citizens of the world’s most populous country, China, are facing rapid spread of the disease for the first time, following its leaders’ decision to drop many of the strong prevention strategies that have successfully controlled the outbreak in that nation. The climate emergency and associated risks of environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, emerging diseases affecting humans and other animals, and devastating natural disasters such as wildfires, floods, droughts and landslides has yet to be properly addressed by governments, national leaders and peak global organisations. There are global food and fuel shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine, other disruptions in supply chains due to the COVID emergency, and many nations face an economic recession and severe cost of living crises.

Together, these emergencies appear so intractable and unsettling as to be labelled as constituting a ‘permacrisis’: a term chosen as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022. Yet we are living in a world in which the existence of risk is constantly debated, misinformation and disinformation are rife and spread quickly and easily through online media, and where governments and institutions continue to avoid taking decisive action even when there is general agreement that a serious threat exists. Understanding how people, social groups and social organizations understand, respond to and act on threats, hazards and dangers is more important than ever. This third edition has been updated to confront these issues, including the addition of an entirely new chapter that focuses on risk misinformation, scepticism and denial, using the climate and COVID-19 crises as case studies.