Economic Sociology Seminars

Greta Krippner, University of Michigan

Preferred:  Race, Gender, HIV/AIDS and the Individualization of Risk

This talk traces the history of the individualization of risk in American society, asking how risk was transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals. While it is conventional to locate this development either in the “personal responsibility revolution” orchestrated by neoliberal policy entrepreneurs beginning in the 1980s or in the rise of digital technologies in more recent decades, I argue here that the individualization of risk is better understood as the cumulative result of movements for inclusion that sought to gain access to markets for risk for those who had been excluded from them on the basis of race, gender, and HIV status over the course of the twentieth century. I elaborate on this argument using the late-twentieth century case of feminist activists’ mobilization against insurers’ risk classification practices to explain how anti-discrimination movements seeded the individualization of risk. I conclude by putting this paradoxical finding in conversation with a broader literature on “left neoliberalism,” asking whether it is possible to recover the emancipatory possibilities of anti-discrimination movements from their entanglement with neoliberal trajectories.

Kylie Jiwon Kwang, Northwestern, Kellog School of Management

 TBA

Armando Lara-Milan, University of California, Berkeley

TBA

Chengwei Liu, ESMT Berlin

TBA

Charles Crabtree, Dartmouth

TBA