CORÉRISC
The Collective for Research on Epistemologies and Ontologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC) is a new research team focused on how the idea of embodied risk provides access to alternative ways of knowing and being in the world in dialogue with intersectional queer and feminist theory. Today, interdisciplinary cultural theory is wrestling with three critical senses of risk. The first considers knowledge and experience of risk, the lived, embodied risks that differentially inform human and nonhuman lives: structures of violence, slow death, marginalized identities, and more.
Attending to the risks of “bad objects,” our work looks to push beyond conventional understandings. Across critical theory today, thinkers are proposing that concepts like the “ghosts and monsters” of a “damaged planet” (Tsing et al 2017) are not simply diagnoses of negative conditions, but reframings of our ontologies and epistemologies relevant to an entangled world of affective relations. Indeed, Haraway (2016), asking us to “stay with the trouble”, has proposed renaming ‘the anthropocene’ to the ‘Chthulecene’, a name that directly connects risk, horror and potentiality in an intersectional feminist reworking of HP Lovecraft. Haraway’s speculative and playful citation of horror is no accident, but models how we can rethink the question of embodied risk today.
