Te-Anne Robles: Agency in uncertainty? An inquiry into the making, modelling, and muddling of systemic risk
IASH Work in Progress talk
Abstract:
Systemic risk has become prominent in academic and policy debates in the recent years, yet underneath all the calls for a broader view of what counts as systemic risk is a lingering vagueness about what it is we should be looking for. As the essential feature defining systemic risk is its entrenchment in a complex network of interdependent social, economic, and political processes, the difficulty of capturing systemic risk as a distinct concept is understandable. Yet this has not deterred the proliferation of systemic risk models, nor has it led to an unambiguous consolidation of technical authority amongst those who are conventionally seen as the dominant experts.
This talk will explore the implications of rising uncertainties in the technical construction of systemic risk. Using critical junctures in East Asian discourse on growth models and the notion of circulation in the global history of science as a point of interrogation, it will look at how uncertainties have redrawn the boundaries for participation in ‘global’ knowledge production and have widened (or constrained) the space for agency from emerging experts seeking to assert their own rationality.