‘Geographies of Risk’ podcast

Preface

With bloodless technicality, risk can be defined as function of two terms: hazard – a damaging “event” of a given type and magnitude, with some probability of occurrence, that impacts people or assets (things of value to someone); and consequence – typically represented as some measure of people affected or assets damaged by a given hazard event.

My own research involving risk, particularly in coastal settings, is situated in bloodless technicality. Buildings and erosion rates are amenable to number-crunching. To illustrate: consider beach erosion. Unto itself, beach erosion is a natural consequence of sediment transport by water or wind, when more sand is carried away from a place than delivered to it. (And by the rule of “no free lunch,” if one place is eroding, then another place must be accreting.) Erosion becomes a hazard when it begins to impinge upon something that someone, or some institution, values as an asset: a road, a house, a pavilion of public toilets. Hazard is not inherent in a beach. But inherent in a piece of beachfront property – expressly because it is regarded as “property” – is the risk that erosion might carve it away.

People, by comparison, are mind-bogglingly complex. Thus, contemplating risk not just in terms of human life (population) but also lived experience in a risky context puts in sharp relief how blinkered the bloodless definition of risk really is.

This podcast is an effort to explore the extraordinary diversity of risk and its manifestations – in environmental, social, financial, economic, cultural, and health contexts, and the liminal spaces in which those contexts blur.

In these episodes, I speak with people who are investigating risk in different ways – in different fields and topics and settings, through different research methods, and from different theoretical and conceptual and empirical perspectives.

Accompanying each episode are a few links to relevant supporting material.

Furthermore, this project is taking shape as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to play out. These interviews take place via Skype, warts and all – you can hear patchy Internet connections; you can hear the erms and uhms (mostly mine) of thinking aloud; you can hear sirens and trucks reversing and the household sounds that come with not recording in a studio.

If you’re wondering, I have no operating budget for this project – but I do have the collegial goodwill of Southampton’s School of Geography & Environmental Science. I am indebted to everyone who has agreed to talk with me about the ideas that keep them busy – and I thank them for their valuable time. These recordings have been exceptionally fun to make.

Finally, I encourage you to do something else while you listen to these episodes. Go for a walk, do the dishes, fold laundry, repot plants, polish shoes, peel potatoes, draw elaborate doodles on scrap paper. Listen in headphones or crank it from your floor speakers or play it at modest volume from the little radio in the kitchen.

I’d be glad to know your thoughts (on topics other than vocal fry or my ad hoc production quality), and to hear your suggestions for people to interview and subjects to discuss in future episodes. But troll me no trolls.

Thank you for listening.

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Episodes