SLSA 2025 CFP: “Risk”
Corvallis, Oregon
Oregon State University
August 21-24, 2025
Stream Proposal Deadline: January 10, 2025
Proposal and Panel Deadline: February 17, 2025
To think in terms of risk is to imagine the future as a set of foreseeable possibilities and to ameliorate the potentially hazardous ones through action in the present. Distinct from danger, which is seen as inchoate and incalculable, risk carries with it the notion of statistical, probabilistic, or otherwise enumerated legibility, and the costs and benefits of prospective courses of action are given the narrative authority of mathematical language. But even as risk posits itself as a rational approach to considerations of the future, it ignores the mythology of its own construction: risk is, as its critics note, always a process of storytelling. Put slightly differently, risk management is not just a mathematical but also an affective exercise involving anxieties, fears, rational or irrational speculations, (dis)honorable activities, and ethical claims. Furthermore, the ways risk is managed – through techniques like data mapping and visualization, actuarial accounting, and insurance bands – help to create social – and not merely mathematical – perceptions about who, what, and where might be “risky.” Risk, therefore, is a discourse that constitutes subjects and is capable of perpetuating cycles of injustice and immiseration.
This call for papers asks readers to consider risk as both a formal/generic term and as a term that shapes and is shaped by the contents of literature, the arts, and cognate disciplines. How do risk and other related concepts (danger, hazard, speculation, debt, credit, assurance, insurance) work to colonize the future, construct forms, and produce narratives? How does a history of risk and the language used to describe it (adventure, projecting, imagination, curiosity, novelty) help us to understand the past’s future and its hazards? How has risk been enlisted in representations of social Others for progressive or regressive ends? How does risk throw into relief or complicate ethical relationships between nations, between cultures, between communities, and between humans and the natural world?
We welcome papers that address these concepts as well as proposals (presentations, panels, streams, workshops, and roundtables) on other subjects that fall within SLSA’s mission to explore the cultural and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. We are taking steps now to ensure that the conference will be accessible and welcoming to all SLSA members by pursuing low-cost housing for graduate students and contingent faculty and by reaching out to Oregon State University’s KidSpirit to facilitate childcare for academics traveling with small children.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Climate
Futures Past
Disaster Relief
Prostheses
Human and Animal Health
Disease
Artificial Intelligence
Tipping Points
Infrastructure
Privacy
The Commons
Geopolitics and Biopolitics
Capitalism
Sustainability
Surveillance
Regulation
Conflict
Exposure
Data Visualization / Narratization
Program Committee (Corvallis): Raymond Malewitz, Tekla Bude, Surabhi Balachander, Evan Gottlieb
Look for the SLSA 2025 Conference website to debut in a few weeks!
