Tag Archives: risk

What happens when the rights of urban citizens are reconfigured by the biopolitical imperative to protect life from threats? I examine such situations by focusing on how the emergence of risk as a technique of government shapes urban politics in Bogotá, Colombia. Investigating the frames of political engagement within which claims for recognition, inclusion, and entitlement are made, I argue that it is within the domain of biopolitical security that poor and vulnerable populations engage in relationships with the state.

Hannah Appel’s notion of “modularity” in her analysis of contemporary transnational oil operations exquisitely captures the work required to create the illusion that petroleum production is removed from and uncompromised by local entanglements. Her study belies the notion (peddled by the industry) that the extraction of crude oil is a technoscientific wonder detached from disruptive inequalities and tumultuous political conditions that too frequently haunt places where oil development occurs. In this commentary, I sketch two directions for further research inspired by Appel’s work that could extend the disentangling calculus of corporate profit, liability, and risk. One centers on the corporate form and the other on the financialization of risk.

I offer a counterpoint to the prevailing risk literature that focuses not on (mis)perceptions of danger but on the production and circulation of different forms of evidence and the environmental claims they promote. Rather than reproduce the epistemic dichotomies associated with risk discourse, I discuss attempts by waste-industry technicians, government inspectors, lawyers, area residents, and activists to generate persuasive accounts of a large, U.S. landfill and its porous boundaries. I argue that the differential influence of their various claims is best understood by examining what it means to know and care for a place.