Minimum Eligendum

"The Prince's Valour consists not only in resisting, but withal in weighing Dangers, and submitting to the less, when the greater is insuperable. For as it is the part of Prudence to prevent, so it is of Courage and Constancy bear patiently what is not in the power of Prudence to decline. One Peril is ordinarily the Remedy of another"

Diego de Saavedra Fajardo. Idea de un príncipe político cristiano (1640)

 

 

UIUC Geographies of Risk
September 23-24, 2010
banner georisk

The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese is pleased to announce the upcoming “Geographies of Risk,” an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the Humanities engage with the notion of risk. The conference will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that have emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different geographical, cultural and historical contexts.

Migrants settling in foreign countries and border patrols, pirates and insurance companies, biologists and ethicists, scientists and environmentalists, merchants and poets, terrorists and governments share a common activity: the assessment and management of risk. Perceptions of risk and risk-taking permeate everyday life, from the public sphere to the most intimate realms of interpersonal contact. Discussions of risk, however, have generally been limited to scientific disciplines, such as probability, game theory and actuarial science. The experts who decide when a risk is worth taking are very seldom the products of departments of literature and culture. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois proposes a conference dedicated to examining the manifold ways in which the humanities engage with the notion of risk. “Geographies of Risk” will invite reflection on the systems of knowledge that emerged to assess, distribute, and manage risk in different places and historical moments.

The operation of defining generic hazards as risks is fundamentally a struggle over representation, a field of inquiry that the humanities are in a unique position to study. As Ulrich Beck has written, since a given risk may not actually ever occur, risks have a high component of “unreality.” Therefore, risks are constructions and social definitions based on relations of definitions, the result of competing acts of representation. Thus, there are owners of the “means of definition,” mostly scientists and jurists, and citizens who lack “the means of definition” and who depend on the first group to determine when something is or is not a risk. Working at the intersections between power and representation, humanistic inquiry has a stake in asking what constitutes or does not constitute a risk and a risk worth taking.

The focus on geography in this context is related to an understanding of the term as a practical inquiry deeply rooted in the notion of space. Indeed, space is already a representation of risk insofar as it represents (or at least speaks to) border and border crossings, containment and mobility, the limits and conceptualizations of the body, and the location of collective and individual memory. For scholars in the field of colonial Latin American studies, for example, space has represented a useful tool to examine the diverse representations that distinguished the risky encounter between European and native indigenous societies. The global implications of the so-called Discovery of the Americas represented one of the many examples in which geography (as previously described) came to play a critical role in the perception of risk and risk taking. Transoceanic and transnational encounters contributed to the traveling nature of risk and its discursive components, including mapping, picturing, and representation, to name a few.

There is another element that justifies the link between “risk” and “geographies.” Until the present, genealogies of risk have generally taken the societies of the North Atlantic as their starting point, tracing how risk was “tamed” through the invention of discourses such as political economy and science, and practices such as bureaucratic rationalization, statistical analysis and insurance. As the yardstick for modernity, the Protestant, capitalist North has been imagined as a territory in which rational and calculating subjects were able to gauge and dominate risk. As Roberto Dainotto and others have shown, the eighteenth century witnessed the invention of Southern Europe as the irrational, disorderly and often dangerous counterpart to the countries of the North. Elements of this discourse have also operated in the Americas, where Spanish and Portuguese imperial legacies have served as explanation for the region’s lack of properly rationalized societies. Today, investment climates, tourist advisories, and immigration restrictions depend upon the racialization of risk in the global South.

Geographies of Risk” will bring together scholars from across the disciplines for a two day state of the art conference to be held on September 23-24, 2010. The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese will organize complementary activities that will take place in the semester before and during the conference, including a set of colloquia, graduate seminars centered on the notion of “risk,” a faculty and graduate student reading group, and a library exhibit.