Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives

This book untangles the relationship between expert categorisations of risk and the on-the-ground experiences of untrained ‘ordinary’ people who may be routinely subjected to significant danger in a variety of extraordinary contexts. This book untangles the relationship between expert categorisations of risk and the on-the-ground experiences of untrained ‘ordinary’ people who may be routinely subjected to significant danger in a variety of extraordinary contexts. It considers political, ethical and moral dimensions of risk and calls for more targeted ethnographic research, designed to reveal how grass-roots risk dispositions and practice intersect with official discourses, individual agency and community resilience. Beata Świtek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Allen Abramson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at University College London, UK. Hannah Swee is a climate and capacity building specialist for the United Nations.