ABSTRACT

This collection presents new work in risk media studies from critical humanities perspectives. Defining, historicizing, and consolidating current scholarship, the volume seeks to shape an emerging field, signposting its generative insights while examining its implicit assumptions.

When and under what conditions does risk emerge? How is risk mediated? Who are the targets of risk media? Who manages risk? Who lives with it? Who are most in danger? Such questions—the what, how, who, when, and why of risk media—inform the scope of this volume. With roots in critical media studies and science and technology studies, it hopes to inspire new questions, perspectives, frameworks, and analytical tools not only for risk, media, and communication studies, but also for social and cultural theories.

Editors Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar bring together contributors who elucidate and interrogate risk media’s varied histories and futures. This book is meant for students and scholars of media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and the interdisciplinary humanities, looking either to deepen their engagement with risk media or to broaden their knowledge of this emerging field.

chapter 1|24 pages

Media and Risk

An Introduction

part I|79 pages

Historical Perspectives

chapter 2|19 pages

Has Risk a History?

chapter 3|33 pages

Risk

The Origin of the Word in Medieval Commerce and Poetry

chapter 5|13 pages

Hazardous Individualism

part II|58 pages

Expertise

chapter 6|11 pages

Risk Media in Medicine

The Rise of the Metaclinical Health App Ecosystem

chapter 7|12 pages

The Algorithm Dispositif

Risk and Automation in the Age of #datapolitik

chapter 8|18 pages

The Perils of Migration

Countervailing Mediations of Risk at the EU’s Maritime Frontier

chapter 9|15 pages

Mediating Expertise

Uncertain Risks of Electromagnetic Pollution

part III|53 pages

Times

chapter 11|14 pages

“Is There a Ghost in the Computer?”

A Spectrology of Uncanny Risks 1

chapter 12|16 pages

New Media at Risk

Or When the Future Ain’t What it Used To Be

chapter 13|9 pages

Into the Beyond

A Conversation with Michael Madsen

part IV|58 pages

Scale

chapter 15|27 pages

Risk, Law, and Media

A Case of Climate Change

chapter 16|16 pages

Media/Meteōra

part V|70 pages

Virtuality

chapter 17|16 pages

Red Dot Sight

chapter 18|10 pages

The Safety

chapter 20|13 pages

Floating Architectures

Fantasies of Safety in Oceanic Riskscapes

part VI|43 pages

Affect

chapter 22|15 pages

Social Media and the Social Question

Speculations on Risk Media Society

chapter 23|15 pages

Your Brain on Screens

Neuronal Risk and Media Addiction

chapter 24|11 pages

Risk’s Fraught Mediascape

part VII|61 pages

Legitimacy

chapter 25|20 pages

“One Little Seed Blowing in the Wind”

Risk Media in Trans-species Biogovernance

chapter 27|13 pages

Cruising Risk, Surviving Desire

chapter 28|12 pages

Skin Out of the Game

Virtual Gambling in Novel Spaces

part VIII|62 pages

Disciplinary Modulations

chapter 29|15 pages

Risk as Aesthetic Virtue

chapter 30|4 pages

Notes on Dissent and Risk

chapter 32|8 pages

“A Path So Twisted”

Staying Off the Straight and Narrow

chapter 33|18 pages

The Risk of Tolerance

Feminist Killjoys, the Creative Humanities, and the Belligerent University