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Time-Framing and Health Risks: An editorial

Patrick Browna, Bob Heymanb and Andy Alaszewskic

aDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,

The Netherlands, Institute for Research in Citizenship and Applied Human Sciences,

University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK and c Centre for Health Services

Research, University of Kent, UK

Short title: Time-Framing and Health Risks

Address for correspondence: Patrick Brown, Email: p.r.brown@uva.nl

This is the final accepted version of the article which is now published in

Health, Risk & Society. You may well be able to access the article (which

the publishers made free to access at this link:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13698575.2013.846303

Please cite as: Brown, P., Heyman, B. and Alaszewski, A. (2013) Time Framing and

Health Risks: An editorial. Health, Risk & Society 15(6): 479-88.

Abstract

This special issue is the last in a four-part series Health Care Through the ‘Lens of

Risk’ which focuses on risk categorisation, valuing, expecting and time-framing

respectively, and has been published in 2012-2013. The present editorial introduces

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the issue of time-framing in relation to an interview-based article, a guest editorial

and five articles reporting findings from empirical research.

The central argument of the editorial concerns the increasing abstractness of time

within modernity, which renders risk thinking possible and exists alongside shifting

subjectivities regarding time as futures are increasingly reflected upon. The meaning

given to contingent futures intensifies experiences of time in relation to the future,

and therefore the present. This argument is then problematised through reference to

empirical studies of more passive attitudes to risk, and where future considerations

are avoided altogether. Different ways in which past, present and future are related

to one another are also considered.

We will explore these themes before introducing the original research articles,

interview-based article and guest editorial in this issue. Each original article explores

time-framing within a different context including drinking alcohol away from

licensed premises, expecting a baby as an older first-time mother, living with an

advanced-stage cancer diagnosis, caring for a close-relative as a young person and

the journey towards a skin cancer diagnosis. Each of these contexts can be

considered ‘risky’, partially depending on the time-framing invoked. The common

theme linking these papers is the analysis of how futures are envisaged and how

different approaches to time-framing are fundamental to perceptions and

experiences of risk and uncertainty.

Keywords: Future; modernity; past; present; risk; time; uncertainty

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Introduction

In this editorial, we introduce and provide an overview of the fourth and final

collection of articles in a series of special issues on the theme Health Care Through

the ‘Lens of Risk’, published in Health, Risk & Society in 2012 and 2013. The series

focuses on health risk-thinking, with its starting point the Royal Society’s Risk

report (1992, p. 2) which defines risk as:

the probability that a particular adverse event occurs during a stated period of

time, or results from a particular challenge.

The report framed this definition as the grounding for quantitative risk assessment,

portrayed as ‘a powerful tool for investigation and reduction of risk’. The four special

issues each offer interpretivist critiques of different elements within the Royal

Society report definition, with events recast as categories, adversity as negative

value, probabilities as uncertain expectations and time periods as time-frames

(Heyman, Shaw, Alaszewski and Titterton, 2010, p. 21). As has been acknowledged

within earlier editorials in the series, in our deconstruction of ‘risk’ into these four

components we do not mean to suggest that any of these can or should be considered

independently of the others. As the authors of articles in this issue note – contrasting

their analyses with depictions of time as a universal and standardised continuum –

the ways in which people experience uncertainty involve varying modes of valuing or

discounting future-time, in relation to the likelihood of a particular category of event

taking place within such a frame.

Many influential social theoretical accounts of risk denote the pertinence of

technological developments to the emergence and expansion of risk thinking in

various societies. Giddens’s (1991) account privileges technologies pertaining to time

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measurement as especially fundamental to the very nature of modernity. The

capturing and standardisation of time through technology, epitomised through the

mechanical clock, leads to the separation and disembedding of time from its specific

spatial locations (Giddens 1991:16). For example the development of the English

railway network and associated railway timetables in the early 19th century required

the imposition of standard time, based on Greenwich Mean Time, across all of

England. Standardised measurement enables the comparison of time periods across

multiple contexts and of the likelihood of certain events occurring within these

specific quantities of time, therefore facilitating the generation of large sets of timed

observations upon which risk calculations and assessments are based. This

universalising tendency, capturing information and events in their relation to time

while these are also ‘lifted out’ of distinct local contexts, is fundamental to the

development of abstract systems of technical knowledge which define experiences of

modernity (Giddens 1991: 18). Moreover the gradual refinement and expansion of

such systems – further bracketing off time from space (Giddens 1991) – is integral to

the emergence of the more recent era of late-modernity.

Yet this ‘emptying out’ of time through abstraction and standardisation exists

alongside growing possibilities and intensities of ‘lived time’ subjectivities (Giddens

1991:17). One important sense in which the intensification of time becomes manifest

is in relation to the envisaging of possible futures (Alaszewski and Burgess 2007;

Brown and de Graaf 2013). The development of technical knowledge which is

harnessed with the aim of making predictions encourages many people within late-

modernity to consider their futures and feel a weight of responsibility for these

(Luhmann 1988; Giddens 1991). The tendency towards such reflexivity becomes

more likely where lived-experiences and narratives across society are heterogeneous

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and where people have a stronger sense of complex contingencies arising from their

decisions (Giddens 1990). Rationalisation, in the sense of the application of technical

knowledge for the purposes of planning, thus involves a paradox by which time

becomes both more abstract and subjective. Certain forms of medical screening are

examples of such a rationalised intervention where patients are provided with risk

information which is generated through, and applied upon, the basis of an abstract

period of time – such as risk of aneurism within five years. Correspondingly, this

information manufactures new existential-subjective experiences of the present and

future for the patients involved (Hansson et al 2012).

The subjectivities of abstract future-time

As already discussed, time can be measured and quantified in certain obvious ways,

but can also become imbued with certain qualitative and value-related

characteristics. ‘Future-time’, defined by Brown and de Graaf (2013) in this issue as

‘a specific quantity and quality of time envisaged in the future’ is an especially clear

example of this, though a nostalgia for times gone by similarly refers to specific

quantities and qualities of time. What future-time and nostalgised time share in

common is the actor’s attention focused upon them. For it is this which gives these

time periods their qualities – that is to say their social meaning.

Schutz (1972: 68) describes the ways in which meaning is given to objects via both a

conscious focus upon them with regard to their specific ‘thinghood’, as well as the

way these objects are more or less consciously and loosely associated with other

entities. These two processes are steps towards meaning construction and the greater

the extent to which our consciousness is directed towards a specific future (or past or

present), the more meaningful it becomes for us, and the more socio-emotional

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resonance it has for us (Kierkegaard 1957). Hence, stroke survivors may place great

emphasis on a future-time of recovery, imbued with a meaning of ‘business-as-usual’

and many other interwoven considerations of self and others (Alaszewski et al 2006).

If, as some contend, late-modernity obliges us to consider the future – or the

multiple futures which we are increasingly aware of – more than was the case in

(pre)modernity, so does it follow that our attention given to these hypothetical

futures creates more intense forms of meaning and emotion (Kierkegaard 1957).

Affective responses may be especially heightened amidst uncertainty and beliefs that

our futures are contingent upon our actions and decision-making (see Wilkinson

2001 for a nuanced discussion of such arguments).

These different intensities of future-time are also reflected in the experiences of time

in the ‘present’, as addressed by Henri Bergson’s concept of durée (Schutz 1972) and

Giddens’s (1991) notions of ‘killed time’, ‘time-on’ and ‘fateful moments’. Durée, our

‘awareness of the actual or ongoing passage of… life’ (Schutz 1972: 36), becomes

more intense during fateful moments – when our ability to assume so much of our

daily life in a taken-for-granted manner is profoundly destabilised or even shattered

(Giddens 1991; Alaszewski et al 2006). These moments in time are of a profoundly

different character and quality to those of killed-time or usual everyday existence. Yet

though these moments exist in the here and now of our durée, the past and the future

are far from irrelevant. Indeed, it is an awareness of the future and its potential

outcomes which gives certain moments – such as childbirth – their fatefulness

(Scamell and Alaszewski 2012). Moreover we may only come to distinguish fateful

moments retrospectively (Schutz 1972). In this sense it may often be the relating of

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certain time periods to others which generates the more or less intense subjective

experiences of time in the present, past and future.

The basic arguments rehearsed here, that life within late-modernity is associated

with more abstract yet intense experiences of the future, should not be taken as self-

evident and require careful empirical examination. Ryan’s (2000) work in this

journal provides a useful schema for describing different ways in which the future is

confronted or ignored. Ryan investigated the risk approaches of people experiencing

severe mental health problems. He concluded that some actors actively considered

and planned for the future, others acknowledged potential futures but remained

passive due, amongst other factors, to a feeling of powerless to plan and control the

future, and yet others were considered to operate a ‘no risk’ strategy – disregarding

the future.

This latter mode of bracketing off the future, or at least certain possible or probable

futures, can function as a very effective means of avoiding anxiety – not least that

relating to death (Kierkegaard 1989). Douglas (1992) meanwhile argues that such a

response may represent a cultural choice; a deliberate decision to reject scientific

knowledge. In her study in Brittany of the ways in which individuals threatened by

HIV treated expert advice and knowledge she noted: ‘The most baffling thing about

the pattern is that a large number of the community at risk are impervious to

information; either they know unshakeably that they are immune, or recognizing

that death is normal they draw the conclusion that to live trying to avoid it is

abhorrent’ (Douglas, 1992, p. 111).

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Other more recent studies also emphasise the socio-cultural factors which shape such

different approaches to the future (for example Alaszewski et al 2006). Brown and

Vickerstaff (2011) found that experiences across the life course were fundamental in

shaping the attitudes of older people towards their retirement. Older people who had

experienced limited ability to control and plan for the future, or who had tried to

plan only for these arrangements to have been undermined, drew upon such

narratives in explaining their more passive attitude towards the future. In contrast,

those most proactively planning for their futures were, generally speaking, those

whose social experiences, especially within certain education and work related

contexts, had imbued them with an ‘Enlightenment’ habitus (a pattern of tendencies

and dispositions) for applying technical knowledge in order to realise their hopes for,

and thus attempts to ‘colonise’ (Giddens 1991:125), the future. Meanwhile, others

with a ‘no risk’ approach referred to their difficulty in coping day-to-day, financially

or health-wise, with the energy consumed by these ongoing preoccupations

precluding the luxury of considering the future in any significant detail. Here we see

a rather specific type of ‘no risk’ strategy, one more or less necessitated through

social context, which is rather different to another possible ‘no risk’ strategy where

the future is discounted in favour of enjoying the present. This latter approach was

favoured by some of the pregnant women interviewed by Heyman and Henriksen

(2001), who consciously chose not to worry about screening for Down’s syndrome in

favour of enjoying their pregnancy. Similarly, as recent articles in this journal

(Spencer 2013, Thing and Ottesen 2013) show, public health experts may become

frustrated that young people do not want to think about their own mortality, and

therefore to avoid drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes or cannabis in order to

protect their health in the future. Rather, they prefer to have fun and enjoy the

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present. As Thing and Ottesen (2013: 6) observed, the young Danish secondary

school students who participated in their study ‘did not see information about

possible future diseases or the probability of early death as relevant to them. They

were interested in the “here and now”’.

Wallman’s (2001) study of migrant sex workers in Europe, in a similar sense to Ryan

(2000), identified a range of strategies towards danger adopted by the women

participating in her research. Sex workers tended to respond to these dangers in ad-

hoc and pragmatic ways as the source of the threat was typically beyond their

understanding and control. From the point of view of the sex workers, these threats

were ‘virtual risks’ or ‘dangers whose magnitude…scientists do not know or cannot

agree about’ (p. 78). Only when sex workers accepted that there was relevant

knowledge and expertise did such dangers become manageable risks which could be

anticipated and planned for (pp. 78-82). Generally speaking though, they focused

their attentions on the present.

Different formats for relating past, present and future

‘Active’ approaches to risk, which more or less systematically apply knowledge from

the past as a means of planning for the future, are described by Alaszewski and

Burgess (2006) as the traditional risk approach by which large amounts of statistical

information are aggregated as a means of considering the likelihood of certain

outcomes in the future, in order to assist quality decision-making in the present.

Alaszewski and Burgess (2006) then go on to describe other more recent tendencies

within policy-making which reconfigure or warp this distinctly rationalising way of

relating past, present and future. The growing political trend towards organising

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official inquiries into events considered as crises is described by these authors as an

emotional revisiting of past events in order to provide a cathartic experience for

those who have suffered, as well as a form of justice through the allocation of blame

to the ‘guilty’. So while the clock cannot be turned back, the reliving of these events

and the attempt to learn from what happened is nevertheless a politically expedient

way of going back in time. Alaszewski and Burgess (2006) point out the danger that

certain past decisions, as viewed from the present with hindsight, are problematised

in a way that is out of keeping with what was known at the time.

Further problems are associated with the learning of lessons from a single highly

atypical case which are then applied to entire public services in a disproportionate

manner. For example, in England local clinicians initially managed and allocated In

Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment. However in 1993, following IVF treatment in a

local hospital, a woman gave birth to sextuplets. Initially the media represented this

as a medical miracle, but as details of the family’s background became more widely

known, the case became a scandal. The minster responded to the media coverage

with a review that restricted both the availability and location of IVF treatment and

placed it under the control of local health authorities (Alaszewski and Brown, 2012,

226).

Warner (2006), in describing the effects of inquiry reports goes on to consider the

impact of these pasts on activities in the present, which come to be driven by a fear of

the future. The unease felt by those working in organisations, not least health and

social care professionals, that they could themselves become the subject of a future

inquiry creates a particular kind of defensive practice which undermines effective

care provision in the present. The ‘well-known “tombstone” pattern in which risk

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regulation functions as a monument to public emotions about past tragedies’ (Hood

et al, 2001: 110) can thus come to bear decisively and destructively upon current

practice.

The most problematic reconfiguration of relations between past, present and future

for Alaszewski and Burgess (2006) is that typified as the ‘precautionary approach’, by

which the possibility of certain events occurring in the future, no matter how remote

and rarely seen in the past, has recently started to influence policy-making. This

tendency can partly be seen as recognition of pervasive uncertainty and the limited

utility of the past for understanding and predicting the future (Aven 2013). The

‘infinite scale of the possible’ means, however, that the creation of and focus upon

specific possibilities becomes a potent political tool (Heyman 2012: 607-8),

energised by concern about reputational risk to decision-makers if they are

retrospectively seen to have neglected the possible (Rothstein 2006). Accordingly,

possible but highly improbable futures come to colonise decision-making in the

present.

The future and past as inherent drivers of time experienced in the

present

A key theme within the two preceding sections has been the extent to which the past,

present and future are complexly interwoven with each other. So while analyses of

time may try to unpick these relations, it would seem misguided to begin to examine

experiences of any one of these time phases in a vacuum. The insidious way in which

the future can be seen as permeating our experiences of the past and present is

captured usefully by Jorge Luis Borges 1 (1998:99) in his work The Immortal:

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There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of

mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is

divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal... Viewed

in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no

spiritual or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite

time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the

Odyssey should not be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single

immortal man is all men.

Death, or rather knowledge of this future certainty, vitally shapes the ways in which

we live, giving meaning to our actions and identities to our bodies. Giddens

(1991:48), similarly, refers to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in emphasising the

challenge of living as a ‘being who not only lives and dies, but is aware of the horizon

of its own mortality’. The existential problem of what it means to live the good life

within limited time, a finite future, is central to the human condition (Kierkegaard

1989; Giddens 1991) and it is the possibility of regret – which would not exist in

unlimited time (Borges 1998) – which is so integral to and defining of social

experiences of risk and uncertainty (Luhmann 1988). It is time, as an abstract

continuum, which renders past regrets undoable, and maintains the unknowableness

of the futures. Meanwhile it is difficult to overstate the extent to which the subjective

experiences which emerge out of these pasts and futures play a key role in shaping

lived-experiences of the present.

Schutz (1972: 12, 36) argued that a much more meticulously elaborated

understanding of ‘internal time consciousness’, building on initial work in this area

by Bergson and Husserl, is a necessity for the advancement of the social sciences as a

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whole. Arguably, given the centrality of futures to our objects of analysis, social

scientific analyses of risk and uncertainty are especially in need of more research in

such time-oriented directions. One example, given by Schutz (1972:67), of where

greater sensitivity to actors’ experiences within lived time is instructive is in relation

to analyses of the nature, format and structuration of decision-making. Rather than

seeing a decision between two options X and Y as being made at a specific junction

point O, Schutz draws upon Bergson in suggesting that:

the real way in which choice occurs is the following: The Ego imaginatively

runs through a series of psychic states in each of which it expands, grows

richer and changes... until ‘the free act detaches itself from it like an overripe

fruit’ (Schutz 1972:66).

Seeing risk, trust or other related ‘decisions’ amidst uncertainty in such a light, as

unfolding processes involving an envisaging of future-time as an ongoing experience

in the present, is integral to accurate analyses of such social phenomena. A sensitivity

to the different formats and frames of time involved contributes much towards a

more nuanced and detailed analysis of agency in relation to social structure (Schutz

1972:66).

The papers in this special issue

Promising new ways of considering and theorising lived experience and ontologies in

relation to time are emerging within risk research (van Loon 2013; Pierides and

Woodman 2012), partly drawing upon a post-Actor Network Theory corpus (for

example Harman 2011). In this issue, the guest editorial of Tom Horlick-Jones

(2013) is informed by the interactionist and ethno-methodological tendencies which

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are distinctive of his work. In reviewing a range of important risk research texts,

especially those oriented towards organisational contexts, he makes a ‘plea for

modesty’ within risk-management. This modesty is necessary given the

unknowability of the future alongside the limitations and short-comings of the

Enlightenment project.

The tendency for risk-managers to gradually assume away the possibilities for failure

that lurk within the future leads to a risky risk-management whereby the potential

for disasters, such as those involving nuclear power or global finance, grow over

time. Following Vaughan (1996: 394) and her emphasis upon the ‘taken for granted

aspects of organizational life that created a way of seeing that was simultaneously a

way of not seeing’, Horlick-Jones draws our attention to the various forms of

interpenetration between present and future as an important starting point for

analysing effective and problematic approaches to risk and uncertainty.

The final of our four interview-based articles (Heyman and Brown 2013) compiles

the views of Tom Horlick-Jones, Paul Slovic and Andy Alaszewski on various issues

relating to social-scientific risk research. Though responding to a broader range of

questions which go beyond specific considerations of time-framing, the common

theme running across these three experts’ responses is an interest in the collective

processes which lead to risk being defined in particular ways by different groups of

actors. These definitions are embedded within certain more or less explicit interests

and a particular definition may then become powerful in the way it facilitates and

precludes ways of thinking about and addressing possible futures.

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Linkages between futures and definitions are apparent within the first of the original

research articles in this issue. Foster (2013) analyses qualitative data collected

through focus groups which were conducted in the North East of England around the

theme of drinking away from licensed premises. Whether drinking at home (as was

typical in the experiences of adults) or drinking in public settings such as parks (as

was more commonly referred to by the younger focus group participants), a recurring

finding was participants’ focus upon shorter time-frames and therefore upon

particular risks related to such time-frames (injury or vomiting, for example). The

absence of longer-term time-frames corresponded to a frequent neglect of related

potentialities such as health consequences. Meanwhile other methods of bounding or

framing time – through a drinker’s age, the time of day when consuming alcohol, or

the time between drinks – were all used as reference points when categorising

‘normal’ drinking and distinguishing this from more risky practices.

Age was also a prime consideration within the study of Locke and Budds (2013) into

perceptions of fertility of women who had given birth to their first child aged 35 or

older. The likelihood of conceiving – or perhaps more specifically the risk of not

being able to conceive – alongside health related risks posed towards unborn

children, impacted significantly on the timing of pregnancies. Some of the women

described making decisions to conceive at times which were seen as non-ideal in

respect to broader contextual features such as romantic relationships and workplace

demands. Female bodies can thus be seen as being controlled through multiple and

often incompatible risk-related discourses of career achievement and knowledge

constructed around fertility and foetal health. The demands that emerge from these

discourses, rooted importantly around time, can leave women in precarious

positions.

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Tensions between multiple possible futures and related expectations can thus lead to

vulnerability. The participants in the study described by Brown and de Graaf (2013) ,

each diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer, experienced high levels of vulnerability

through their compromised futures following diagnosis. These contrasted sharply

with previous assumptions about life expectancy and a related ‘bracketing away’ of

death. Brown and de Graaf analyse the different ways in which these patients

construed future-time. Different quantities and qualities of time were constructed

within patients’ expectations, drawing on risk information from interactions with

clinicians as well as invoking hopes in possible alternative outcomes. Due to the very

nature of hope, whereby high levels of future uncertainty are acknowledged, tensions

were apparent between the multiple futures and time-frames considered. Some of

the participants were seemingly better able to live with these tensions than others,

due to the influence of past and current social contexts and related habitus.

Multiple futures and time-frames are again vividly apparent within the article of

Heyman and Heyman (2013) which explores the narratives of young carers as well as

professionals working with them. Contrasting time-frames and attributions became

apparent in analysis of the qualitative interview data. More official understandings of

the futures of young-carers, grounded in conceptions of youth as a critical phase

which defines long-term adult futures, problematised the loss of ‘normal transitions’

and understood this as problematic for long-term outcomes – especially regarding

employment. These attributions of risk, involving a particular relationship between a

youthful-present and adult-future, stood in contrast to those perceived by the young

carers themselves, where long-term futures were less likely to be considered. Where

longer-term possible outcomes were envisaged, the young carers saw their futures as

much less constrained by the lack of a normal present.

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The salience of different lengths of time-frames and the way these bear on the

considerations of different risks was furthermore a key finding within the study of

West and colleagues (2013). Considering time-frames invoked by those reflecting on

long-term experiences of self-hurting, short-term time frames were found to

encourage a focus on the more direct and palpable effects of their self-hurting, which

also included pleasure. Meanwhile, longer-term assessments attended to changing

frequencies of the behaviour over the lifecourse, with a certain ambivalence emerging

between regret in some contexts alongside a recognition of self-hurting as an

important coping mechanism within contexts of extreme vulnerability and emotions.

The need to move away from a ‘one-time frame fits all’ approach is emphasised as an

important clinical recommendation of this research.

Finally, the article by Topping and colleagues (2013) provides an insightful

interrogation of the development of time-frames regarding risks related to skin

cancer, as variously interpreted from data emerging within this clinical field.

Exploring patients’ journeys towards a diagnosis of cutaneous malignant melanoma,

different forms of responsibilised (non-)urgency were apparent based on patients’

understandings of health promotion information and their interactions with family

doctors. Vital to experiences of time and exigency within this context are different

sources of information linking types of skin, form and extent of melanoma, and

speed of treatment access to risk of death. Yet these data and their appropriation

within health promotion messages, medical understandings and media coverage tend

to overlook a range of uncertainties, the impact of increased detection and early

treatment on longitudinal trend data, and ways in which this data is modelled into

the future. Thus, understandings about risk and time with respect to melanoma are

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organised around knowledge uncertainties which are themselves systematically

ignored.

Conclusion

This special issue is concerned with the role of time and time-framing within

experiences and perceptions of risk and uncertainty. While the time component of

risk may often be regarded straightforwardly as existing between two points on a

standardised continuum, the earlier sections of this editorial, alongside the special

issue articles briefly outlined, each acknowledge various complexities, multiplicities

and subjectivities intrinsic to experiences and conceptions of time. Intrinsic to social

action amidst uncertainty are various formats for relating pasts, presents and

futures. Future-time involves the envisaging of specific quantities and qualities of

time which are still to be experienced, with the subjectivities related to such

expectations also impacting on lived-experiences within the present. Time, in its

framing and as intrinsic to social experiences, is thus constructed within specific

contexts. It is this emergence of time within local lifeworlds which forms a vital

mechanism by which experiences of vulnerability amidst uncertainty – and related

attributions of risk – are shaped and oriented by the social.

The articles in this special issue all explore various such relationships between social

contexts, conceptions of time (not least future-time) and experiences and perceptions

of risk. Understandings of drinking, child-bearing, living with an advanced-cancer

diagnosis, caring as a young person or accessing treatment for skin cancer are each

vitally shaped by, and themselves help define, certain time-frames within which

vulnerability is considered and experienced. An acknowledgement of these different

experiences of vulnerability amidst socially constructed time, alongside the different

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ways in which experiences of pasts, presents and futures are related to one another,

is fundamental to effective social-science analyses of risk and uncertainty.

Notes

1 This application of Borges’s work is drawn from an essay entitled ‘Risk and the

paradox of life’ by a University of Amsterdam MSc student in 2011, Jenny Schings.

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