This month geographers Pierpaolo Mudu and Elise Beck put out a call for papers for the next annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers. Their session will focus on the "social geography" of risk. Social–or human–geography is devoted to identifying cultural, political, and economic patterns that play out on the physical landscape.
While I am intrigued by the almost unfathomable risks outlined in the call for papers and the thought of all those number-crunching social scientists who have only six months to plumb the depths of these topics, I was even more intrigued by the mention of what is apparently a new emerging academic field. It’s called risk studies–something like American studies, only for quant types who want to get to know the lay of the land.
