SLSA 2025 "Risk" in Corvallis, OR
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.