This dissertation research proposal is for support of a series of in-depth, structured interviews with key figures in the early professionalization of risk assessment. These oral histories will be a crucial basis for two chapters of Ellen Bales's dissertation on the founding of risk assessment as a formal, professional field in the United States between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. The award will permit Bales to interview ten central actors, substantiating the primary goal of the dissertation: to examine risk assessment's embattled status as a science, the broader social and cultural context that influenced its codification and its role as informant for policies concerning science and technology, with a particular focus on radiation protection.
The intellectual merit of this dissertation lies in its analysis of the historical roots of formal risk assessment, a professionalization account that is framed by a fresh look at two case studies of the risks posed by radon, a radiation threat in both the workplace and the home. Over the latter half of the 20th century, questions of risk, responsibility, and accountability developed and co-evolved in social, scientific, legal, and regulatory contexts, linking newly-prominent concerns about radiation to an increasingly urgent focus on developing methods for quantifying risks and communicating those findings. This examination provides a new understanding of multiple literal and figurative sites of decision-making and conflict: from the workplace to private property; from citizens as laborers to citizens at home; from the poor and disenfranchised to the middle-class homeowner; from individual decision-making to group politics; from health to debility; from informal to formal risk assessment.
The broader impact of this project extends beyond the history of 20th-century American science to include environmental history, labor history, Cold War history, history of public health and medicine, and STS. Furthermore, Bales's dissertation will inform current practitioners of risk assessment and risk communication, who can gain new insight through understanding their field's antecedents, historical context, and early organization. Finally, an analytical history of risk assessment has value to a wider public precisely because the problematic of risk, as it has been quantified and perceived and discussed both by experts and non-experts, is a major preoccupation in the United States today.
