Studying COVID-19 in light of critical approaches to risk and uncertainty: research pathways, conceptual tools, and some magic from Mary Douglas

Abstract

This editorial is a response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and underlines the valuable role that critical social science approaches to risk and uncertainty can play in helping us understand how risk is being understood and mitigated. Drawing on Heyman’s approach to understanding risk as a configuration of probabilistic knowledge, time-framing, categories and values, I explore COVID-19 risk in relation to each of these features while also emphasising how different features stabilise one another. I suggest lines of inquiry into each of these features and their interrelatedness. I then move to present some important insights from the work of Mary Douglas which are especially germane to studying the risk of COVID-19 and, again, I raise possibilities for future research. Emphasising the centrality of ritual to Douglas’s theory, I develop these considerations to encourage an exploration of magic and magical thinking, alongside rational approaches to COVID-19 risk.