Seminar 7
Date: March 31, 2014
Time: 1pm – 2:15pm
Venue: Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University
Speaker: Catherine Wong, PhD Candidate, School of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University
Paper title: Risks in the Making: When People, Technologies and Environments Collide in the Case Nuclear Power in India
Paper abstract:
In the expert world, risk is perceived as an object that exists out there, waiting to the discovered, measured and managed. Whereas, in the non-expert world, risk is perceived as that which threatens the people, things and values we hold most dear. These two perspectives on risk can be associated with realist and constructivist approaches to studying risk as a technological, social and political phenomenon. There are however, two mains limitations with these approaches. Firstly, far more attention is given to the ways in which people and technologies act on environments to create situations of risk, than to instances where environments cause people to make technological choices that are risky and irrational. Secondly, these perspectives on risk tend to reinforce the polarisation between experts and laymen in debates about acceptable risk and risk governance. The public is locked in constant strive against corporations and governments who use expert knowledge to legitimise risky technological choices where social consent is weak or lacking. Risk, therefore is considered the cause for conflict instead of cooperation.
This thesis seeks to address these limitations by reconceptualising the problem of risk using an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach. With the risk controversy around nuclear power in India as a case study, this thesis finds that risk is better understood as a temporal material-semiotic entity that is held together by material, ideational, human and non-human entities. Understanding why the nuclear establishment of India accepts the risks of nuclear power, thus, requires an understanding of how people, technologies and environments are connected across time and space. How the nuclear establishment manages risk (or not) is not merely an outcome of rational risk-benefit trade-offs and organisational safety culture. It is the result of interactions between the safety infrastructure and ontological security, which has the propensity to transform built-in safety into built-in risks. The clash of risk perceptions between the public and the nuclear establishment are real and legitimate, but also performed, obscuring the voices of moderation in both camps where goals and interests converge. The risk controversy around nuclear power has given rise to shared discourses of “development”, “security” and “sustainability” that cut across all spectrums of the nuclear debate, thus opening new spaces for cooperation in spite of conflict. By taking nothing for granted, the ANT approach to risk liberates all actors from deterministic assumptions of power and agency, widens the scope for cooperation, and provides new insights to the processes that make and un-make risk.