Risk, uncertainty and global health crises

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The 21st century has been marked by multiple and overlapping global crises, including the climate emergency, threats to food security, and several epidemic/pandemic outbreaks (e.g. Covid-19), among others. These crises have long-term, cumulative and synergistic effects on the amplification of vulnerability, interacting with other social, political and environmental shocks and disruptions. They shed light on the urgent need to prioritize actions that entail cooperation, creativity, responsibility, and transformation.

In this seminar, these crises are approached as the materialization of emerging systemic risks – in other words, as phenomena stemming from modernization, which are associated with potential/real threats to human health, nature, beliefs, social institutions, economics, and cultural practices.

Drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this seminar will reflect on global health crises through the analytical lens of risk and uncertainty. We will discuss how knowledge, real-life experiences, determinations of responsibility, political arenas, values, and power have constituted what is considered risk and how we deal with it. We will debate the extent to which risks, and the complex process of their assessment and management, contribute to defining social threats, reshaping institutional relations (between state, market, science, civil society), and (re)stablishing hierarchies and power relations.

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