New Strains

Key issues
  • Extend and reshape attention of risk management from prevalent singular and delimited threat pictures and framings to complex threat landscapes formed by new threats and hidden, dynamic and emergent vulnerabilities.
  • Address thematic landscapes for piloting and empirical investigations (oil in high north, pandemics and cyber infrastructures)
  • Conduct comparative analyses between Norway and USA (on cyber-physical infrastructures).
  • Develop knowledge and methods in order to engage users and stakeholders in imagining the implications of the new strains. Where is the practical limit between pragmatic awareness and paralyses? A theoretical foundation as well as an empirical strategy are developed and piloted.
  • A coherent approach to safety and security by accommodating contemporary resilience thinking on "new strains" premises.
  • Adaptation of stress-test as a method to investigate how society can accommodate new strains and vulnerabilities, to understand how stressors and disturbances may propagate through complex threat landscapes, and how different actors may respond in a concerted and resilient manner.
  • Direct the stress-test towards ourselves (as researchers) by asking demanding questions: How are current risk assessment methods and approaches able to address the new strains of society? Can current methods and approaches ever hope to accommodate the new strains? Where are the frontiers and limits of our methods?

Published September 12, 2016