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Introduction: Reconstructing Order through Rhetorics of Risk

Over the past several years, questions about risk have generated significant discussion both inside and outside the academy. Numerous conferences, books, and careers have focused on how to best assess, mitigate, manage, and communicate risk. This trend and the importance of the topic have not gone unnoticed by scholars in the field of science and technology studies (STS). Questions of risk provide the focal point for many of the classic STS studies, including Brian Wynne’s examination of laypersons as experts in the definition of risk and Sheila Jasanoff’s comparative studies of the role of expert advice in risk assessment. Unlike work done in other disciplines, these studies have sought not to determine the accuracy of risk assessments or the success of communicating risk to the public but rather to explain how ideas about risks are generated, propagated, and agreed on. These studies, among others, have revealed how particular ways of defining risks are social and political achievements with public consequences. In an effort to build on work that has begun to examine the definition of risk as a political outcome, Cornell University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies sponsored a workshop from April 20 to 22, 2001, titled, “Technologies of Uncertainty: Reconstructing Order through Rhetorics of Risk.” The workshop was designed to explore how constructions of risk are employed as a resource to sustain and transform social and political order. For instance: How does the definition of risk influence the production of new identities and reconfigure old ones? How is risk used as a tool to define,