Literature and Interdisciplinary (Health) Risk Research

Abstract

Welcoming the opportunity offered by the editors of this special issue to think critically about interdisciplinarity, this article draws on my experiences as a literary and cultural studies scholar working on the subject of narrative and risk perception and risk management. In risk research, interdisciplinarity is generally necessary and the concept of risk has gained similar currency in different fields over the last three decades. Martinsen and Niederberger write in their editorial to the issue "Risikoforschung. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven und neue Paradigmen [Risk Research. Interdisciplinary Perspectives and New Paradigms]," published by the University of Duisburg Essen in 2018, that "risk has become a central category of societal self-observation, and it reveals processes of transformation across scientific disciplines in modern society shaped by a growing sense of contingency" (2018, 9; my transl.). The salient current examples of this are climate change, a phenomenon closely tied to collective and individual risk (see Smith 2014, 16; Hoydis 2020a, 96; Hoydis 2020b), and the Covid-19 pandemic, which took hold of the world in 2020 and which, like climate change, shows no signs of being under human control. While this kind of existential, global risk is not the main focus here, it underlines that the interdisciplinary study of risk – i.e. research into how it can be measured, how humans react to it, how it should be communicated in order to stipulate the 'right' behaviour, how it shapes strategies of government and human and nonhuman lives, how it is at the heart of the stories we tell – has expanded, or, more accurately, exploded recently. One might even debate whether "risk studies" has become a discipline in its own right. However, it does not meet the requirements of a discipline as identified by, for example, Eloise Buker, for these include: a common vocabulary and set of concepts, a shared narrative of identity and community, a shared set of questions that guide inquiry, a set of methods or strategies of interpretation which construct what counts as evidence (Buker 2003, 74-75). Disagreement about the latter, above all, makes risk research not a discipline but a field of interdisciplinary inquiry clustering around a boundary object. Drawing on Susan Leigh Star's (1989) definition of the term, I argue that both 'risk' and 'narrative' present boundary objects in the sense that they are employed differently in different disciplines. They are "plastic enough to be adaptable across multiple viewpoints," thus allowing for interpretive flexibility, yet maintaining a "continuity of identity" (Star 1989, 37). This facilitates debates and offers grounds for interdisciplinary cooperation in the first place, but also for misunderstandings over deceptive parallels and convergences, which might turn out to be vast, and in some cases irreconcilable, differences. For example, much as the literary and cultural studies