Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, debates about migration, and the consequences of the pandemic show how quickly supposed certainties can vanish. Right-wing populist parties cunningly exploit this lack of orientation. Bielefeld University’s Center for Uncertainty Studies (CeUS) is researching how we deal with and navigate such ubiquitous uncertainty. Since it was founded in December 2022, it has been developing a new specialist area: interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary uncertainty research. The three founding directors of CeUS are now making an initial assessment of the center’s work to date.
‘We often see uncertainty in a very negative light. Frequently, the aim is to avoid, reduce, at least control, or even eliminate uncertainty,’ says historian Professor Dr Silke Schwandt, one of the three CeUS founding directors. The center takes a new approach: ‘We argue that uncertainty can be beneficial to society. We want to understand how social actors navigate through uncertainty—rather like explorers in unknown territory—and how their decision-making behaviour can initiate constructive changes in society.’

© Bielefeld University/M. Adamski
Uncertainty accelerates economic innovation
Economist Professor Dr Herbert Dawid, also a founding director, emphasizes the economic aspects: ‘In our studies, we have found that uncertainty can actually boost innovation and technical progress. One example of this is the energy transition, in which uncertainty about which technology will prevail in the future is spurring research efforts and technological progress in various areas,’ says Dawid.
How uncertainty stimulates finding solutions
Social researcher Professor Dr Andreas Zick notes that studies show increasing uncertainty in society. Zick is the third CeUS founding director. ‘Most surveys fail to answer the question as to how people react to perceived uncertainty,’ says Zick. ‘We are investigating which strategies people use in uncertain situations and how they make decisions. If we see uncertainty as a driver of innovation, we can explain how it motivates people to seek competent solutions themselves.’

© Bielefeld University/M. Adamski
Interdisciplinary conference seeks solutions
Since its foundation, CeUS has focused on networking researchers across disciplines to advance uncertainty research. ‘One discipline alone cannot solve the problems and challenges of uncertainty,’ says Silke Schwandt. In mid-2023, around 30 researchers from disciplines such as sociology, history, and economics came together at the university’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) to discuss the new field of research. CeUS organized the conference ‘Navigating Uncertainty: Preparing Society for the Future’ there. In their respective keynote speeches, Professor Dr Miriam Posner and Professor Dr Carlo Jaeger addressed the role of data in the humanities, and uncertainty in the Anthropocene.
Moreover, CeUS has developed its own event formats to engage researchers in dialogue—Uncertainty Lunches and Research Afternoons. ‘In the initial phase, we laid the foundations for interdisciplinary uncertainty research,’ summarizes Silke Schwandt. ‘The response from the academic community shows us that we are on the right track.’
The Uncertainty Talks series is not only for researchers, but also for the general public. The topics of the nine public lectures held so far range from the linguistic analysis of uncertainty to psychological theories on decision-making under uncertainty.
Okay, good evening everyone. My name is David. I’m one of the co-directors of the Center for Uncertainty Studies here, and also on behalf of the other two co-directors sitting here, Silkish and Andreas Sik, we are really excited and glad to have Ian Scons here today as a speaker.
As some of you might know, for some time we have been developing some research agenda around modes of navigating uncertainty, and we were having some talks. We were introducing this uncertainty talks, where this is one of them. At some point, we realized there is actually a new book called “Navigating Uncertainty,” which is really interesting. You could say coincidence, but of course, it’s not a coincidence, but it’s because it seems the topic is just something which is on the agenda.
Going through the book, we realized — I mean, you can find some copies of the book outside, by the way, and also let me say you can buy it. There is a discount of 20% on it, but I just learned you can also download it for free, which of course is highly recommended. It’s a really fascinating book, and it goes, as we will hear later, through all different fields and then dealing with the way uncertainty is navigated. Some of these ideas really scarily sound familiar to us because we had kind of similar ideas, but here it’s really extremely nicely presented and developed and so on. So it’s fantastic to have Ian Scons here.
Let me say just two words about this very impressive Vita. Ian is a professor, professorial fellow at the University of Sussex, affiliated with the Institute of Development Studies. He has worked on many areas, actually too many for me even to list all of them, but my understanding is a lot of the work and maybe your main work, at least initially in the career, was on pastoral development and doing a lot of field work also in African countries. I think this also influences a lot the perspective on how to deal with uncertainty. He has written many books, many papers, currently he holds an ERC Advanced Grant on topics related to this, is super highly cited, so I’m not going to go through all the details, but I highly recommend to look at many of these papers. I see some economists here. There’s actually a 2024 paper on uncertainty in economics, which maybe you want to check out.
Without further ado, I hand over to Ian and very much looking forward to your presentation, thank you.
Thank you very much for that kind introduction, and it’s wonderful to be here. I’ve never been to Bielefeld University or Bielefeld itself, so it’s great to be here and particularly in a center for uncertainty studies. I’ve been working away on thinking about uncertainty for many, many years, but I had no idea there was an actual center, so it’s wonderful to come and share some of the thoughts from this book with you.
In this presentation, I want to make a quite simple argument that if we put uncertainty at the center of our thinking and practice, this means in many ways a quite fundamental rethinking of society, economy, politics as we know it, and with this, ideas about sustainability and conflict and so on. As I’ll show, for a variety of reasons, we’re stuck in a rather linear, mechanistic, technocratic, and risk-based paradigm that fails too often to address the dynamic complexity of today’s turbulent world. This, I argue in the book, is problematic but actually also sometimes dangerous.
I want to draw on this book that came out in August with Polity Books with this title here, “Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World.” Helga Nowotney wrote in her book about uncertainty, “Such uncertainties are written in,” she said, “to the script of life,” and I thought that was a really nice encapsulation because uncertainty is everywhere with us in our being, in our thinking, in our practice. Bruno Latour equally argued, “The world is not a solid continent of facts somehow sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.”
So what if the world is dominated by uncertainty and complexity, not risk and stability? What if the modernist systems of formalized planning, of risk management, of control systems, and so on just don’t work? I’m going to argue that this is the case, but I’m also going to argue that not all is lost, that there are some people who have long grappled with uncertainty that we can all learn from and refashion the way we think about our societies, economies, and politics.
My reflections on navigating uncertainty are based in part on a sadly now recently completed ERC Advanced Grant, which was called “Pastoralism Uncertainty Resilience” and crucially, in the subtitle, “Global Lessons from the Margins.” Over six years, we explored, together with PhD students and others, how pastoralists, mobile extensive livestock keepers, have been navigating uncertainties in a whole range of different sites that you can see on this map: three continents, six countries. In the book, these experiences are very much drawn upon but also draw on other research by myself and other colleagues from small-scale farming in Zimbabwe, where I’ve worked for a very long time, from farmers and fishers in the Sunderbans Delta, and indeed control room engineers and technicians in California, bankers in London and New York, food consumers in Brazil and India, and frontline health workers in both the UK and southern Africa. So a very diverse array of people who you wouldn’t think should come together in one book, but I’ll try and explain why that’s the case.
The argument overall is that learning from those who must navigate uncertainties continuously, whether it’s climate, market, disease, conflicts, political conditions, and so on, can help us in confronting uncertainties. A core framework from the book comes from my colleague Andy Sterling, who is based at the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex, and this simple diagram was originally published in the 1990s. We developed it further within the context of the STEPS Center that Andy and I co-directed for a long time between 2006 and 2021 because uncertainty for us was very much central to thinking about the politics of sustainability, which is what the center was about. The framework, as you can see, explores two axes: knowledge about likelihoods of outcomes and knowledge about outcomes themselves. It therefore results in four dimensions of incertitude, crucially these dimensions are conditions of knowledge, not simply fixed of nature.
Risk, top-left-hand corner, is where the probabilities of both outcomes and their likelihoods are known or can be predicted. Uncertainty, though, is where likelihoods are unknown, but we might know more or less the potential outcomes. Ambiguities are where outcomes are contested, where, for example, questions of fairness, of justice, of distribution, who wins, who loses, whose values count, come to the fore. Finally, there’s ignorance, where we don’t know what we don’t know. Conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and indeed ignorance, not risk, are, I would submit, by far the most common situations we encounter, both in policy, in practice, and indeed in everyday life. They’re not amenable to simple risk management, the top-left-hand corner.
The problem is that most approaches that we use in policy and in many practices, which we’ll come to, close down to risk, closed down to that top-left-hand corner, hence these arrows. This is conditioned by politics, by power, by processes of justification and professionalization, and those are all employed by those in power and those who seek to exert control. This is what Michel Foucault, of course, called governmentalities.
Now, the examples on this slide are from pastoral development and drought responses, but you could choose any other area you like and you’d find a similar pattern: plans, models, insurance products, goals, targets, metrics, indicators, all seek somehow closure, pushing us often dangerously into these zones where knowledge and outcomes are assumed to be known or at least thought to be able to be estimated, predicted, and calculated.
In the chapters of the book, I look at how closing down to risk, that top-left-hand corner, and opening up to different forms of uncertainty occur across a number of themes, and I explore the implications for policy and practice in different domains, which you can see here. In each chapter, I look at very contrasting cases to try and draw out some of the principles and practices from all over the world. This is not just a story about poor people in marginalized places or rich people in privileged places. These are stories that are repeated again and again right across the spectrum of experience.
Now I can’t summarize all the arguments in full. You’ll have to read the book or download it or indeed buy it, you never know. But let me give you a very rapid tour of the flavor of each of the six thematic chapters, which we can discuss in more depth later.
First, there’s a chapter on finance and banking, and I look in particular at the 2007-08 financial crash and how particular models, notably the Black-Scholes-Merton equation and regulatory practices, the various Basel Accords, created through risk management and risk analysis, to some extent a false sense of security when in fact actually uncertainty and indeed ignorance prevailed. The then Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane commented back in 2009, very soon after the crash: “Processes of securitization resulted in the network becoming complex, dense, and opaque, with diversification generating heightened system-wide uncertainty.” The result, he explained, was the crash. The crisis was rooted in what he called “an exaggerated sense of knowledge and control.”
The fact that things weren’t quite as bad as they could have been (they were pretty bad) was often put down to how traders and others in the financial network were themselves able to navigate uncertainty. That’s been explored by many sociologists and anthropologists embedded in financial institutions in different parts of the world. They were able to, through a variety of practices, navigate compounding and cascading uncertainties in real time. It was, I argue in this chapter, the human touch, the socialized networks that existed amongst traders and financial financiers that were important for learning, adaptation, and response, not wholly successful for sure, but important nevertheless.
Then equally in the chapter, I shift to a very different set of experiences but also around markets, and intriguingly, they have very similar characteristics. They’re global, they’re highly connected, they have rapid transactions, they’re reliant on informal and tacit knowledge. These are livestock markets in the Horn of Africa, Western India, Southern Europe, and elsewhere, and I ask how did they retain reliability? Well, intriguingly, the answer is the same: a socially embedded network which can respond to uncertainties and steer away from ignorance. In some, understanding the social basis of markets and financial systems is absolutely crucial if we are to avoid the real dangers of closing down to risk and instead embrace uncertainties.
The next chapter looks at technologies and regulation, and the regulation of new technologies always throws up these questions of what is safe for whom. This chapter looks at a whole array of different technologies: artificial intelligence, driverless cars, energy systems, and so on, but it focuses in particular on that big debate at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s around genetically modified crops that rumbles on today, but back then I worked on it quite intensively in different parts of the world. It explores how attempts to close down to risk through a so-called science-based approach acted in many ways to exclude a whole variety of different public concerns centered on uncertainties about impacts on health, on biodiversity, wider questions of the control of the food system, and so on.
By looking at policy responses and regulatory policy responses in particular in different countries, from the UK to the US to India, South Africa, and Brazil, we can see that a focus on regulatory policy cultures highlights how professional, institutional, and cultural perspectives get incorporated into how systems respond to uncertainty. There’s not just one form of response. So take, for example, the classic difference between the European Union and its precautionary principles against a more industry-led, legalistic approach focused on equivalence of products in the US. What we see though again and again, no matter what technology and what setting, is a simple risk-based science approach, so-called, is clearly inadequate along with the parallel and narrow legalistic approach for regulatory control. Instead, policy must make public involvement and deliberation about uncertainty central, whether that’s about upstream science or downstream implementation and policy decisions.
The next chapter looks at critical infrastructures and the role of reliability professionals. What are critical infrastructures? These are infrastructures that deliver important goods and services to society in the faces of high levels of variability: think water systems, electricity supply systems, or food-producing systems. The key question in such settings is how do the goods and services, whether that’s electricity or water or food, get delivered reliably, and who’s involved?
In this chapter, I look at the example, very contrasting again, of the electricity supply system in California, studied by colleagues Emory Roe and others based at Berkeley, and a pastoral system again in Northern Kenya that must respond continuously to droughts, diseases, floods, conflicts, and so on. What is interesting once again is that both operate in quite similar ways. Both rely heavily on what are called reliability professionals. These are people who can respond both to the immediate day-to-day challenges that variability gives rise to and have understandings of the wider system and intelligence about it. Tracking between these modes is essential, and it’s essentially how, as explained in the chapter, the lights are kept on in California and the herds kept alive, at least most of the time, in Kenya.
Such professionals in any complex infrastructure operate necessarily in networks, not alone. They link different people across the system. In both cases, their role is usually massively underappreciated, but to respond to uncertainty and avoid the dangers of ignorance and surprise, I conclude such professionals and their networks are vital and need to be central in our rethinking of the management of infrastructure.
Fourth, as we all now know, pandemics are an important source of uncertainty. They’re not going away. The experience of COVID-19 is on the back of a long run of different types of pandemic outbreaks, whether SARS, avian flu, Ebola. All are looked at in this chapter. How to respond and prepare for pandemics is obviously a massive top policy priority right now, but the problem is the standard response to this is to continue to rely on often quite simplistic epidemiological models based on prediction and management, which are then linked to a technological response. Nothing wrong with those, but they don’t necessarily combine, as I’ll mention in a minute, with what’s actually necessary to respond to uncertainty.
Of course, pandemics are uncertain, as we found out during the COVID-19 pandemic, and modeling was important. I look in this chapter at modeling experiences in the UK in particular, in a number of different public health schools, and how models were developed and the assumptions that were into them and so on. But then I move to where COVID-19 was being experienced on the front lines, both in the UK Midlands and in southern Zimbabwe, where I have worked extensively. The chapter highlights again this disconnect between attempts at prediction and calculative control, mistakenly as it happened, focusing initially on influenza models and data, at least in the UK, and the day-to-day interaction with disease and its implications. These implications are affected by class, ethnicity, location, livelihood, gender, age, context in other words. But it’s through these experiences that an argument is developed for a very different approach to pandemic preparedness and response, not ditching epidemiological models and technologies for sure, but less reliant on centralized control and on the models and tech interventions to guide that, and more on an appreciation of multiple knowledges and the direct lived experiences of those on the front lines and living day-to-day with the disease.
A similar argument is pursued in the next chapter, which looks at disasters. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on seem to just dominate the headlines these days, and there’s a huge industry on disaster risk reduction and response. The UN Sendai Framework encapsulates much of this, and it’s largely focused again on managing risk and improving prediction rather than navigating uncertainty. This chapter moves from these UN discussions and then looks at how people manage drought, in this case on the ground, and I focus on pastoralists in southern Ethiopia. What we find is that the externally imposed technological and financial systems, early warning systems, anticipatory action projects, risk management, de-risking through livestock insurance, for example, are just often not trusted and frequently fail to integrate with the local experiences of multiple intersecting uncertainties. Local responses to unfolding uncertainties, not necessarily understood by local people as a single crisis or a singular disaster, involve local capacities embedded in moral economies, in forms of collective solidarity, in social networks, in what one might call vernacular forms of resilience building.
But again, this is not an argument for letting go of expertise in technology and assuming that local people can manage on their own. Too often they can’t and disasters overwhelm local capacities to navigate uncertainties, sometimes resulting in negative coping strategies and maladaptation. But instead of imposing solutions, working with what people already do, supporting existing networks, and augmenting possibilities is a much more viable way forward, I argue, suggesting a very different approach to disaster preparedness and response.
These themes are then echoed in the final thematic chapter on climate change, perhaps the biggest challenge facing us all. We know that climate change is happening for sure, but it’s uncertain how the impacts will play out, to what extent, where, affecting whom. Again, I look at the way models and how they act to mutually construct a particular global policy response often ignore the particularities of the challenges on the ground. Once again, this chapter moves from the big global processes, the IPCC, the COPs, to where modelers are trying to develop scenarios and understand climate uncertainties and risks in the UK Met Office and the collaborative approaches to global circulation modeling that are ongoing, and moving from those to the front lines of climate change, in this case the Sunderbans of India and Bangladesh and the dryland farming areas of Zimbabwe. It’s here in these settings where responses to climate change have to contend with uncertainties. They cannot just live with the risks that are predicted through the models. Even the downscaled models, better as they are these days, are no use day-to-day for these people. Zimbabwean farmers, Indian Delta dwellers, know full well climate change is happening, but they need to adapt and survive and respond in ways that have to run with a flow of uncertain lives and livelihoods.
Following Sheila Jasanoff, who’s based at Harvard, an STS scholar, the chapter asks how, at the level of community, policy space, and time, will scientists’ impersonal knowledge of the climate be synchronized with the mundane rhythms of lived lives and the specificities of human experience? A global consensus on the meaning and urgency of climate change cannot arise on the basis of expert consensus alone, a theme that’s relevant to all the chapters indeed. To tackle climate change effectively, there needs to be much greater commitment to what Sheila calls co-construction, where modelers and local people interact, developing both mitigation and adaptation options, simultaneously challenging and reconstructing knowledge and social political orders at the same time.
So brief overview of each of those chapters. Very brief. You’ll have to delve into them in the book to get more of the case material and more of the nuance, but I’ve tried to give a very brief overview of some of the case study material you’re purposely chosen from very diverse settings and very diverse themes because, as you can see, across all of these themes and across all these settings, the argument is made that a conventional risk-based paradigm or control-based paradigm, if you like, is insufficient and that we need to move increasingly to one centered on uncertainty or care, as I term it.
Now, I won’t go into all the details of this table, but you can see some of the contrasts in the whole array of different policy domains, whether we’re talking about public administration, legal frameworks, wider governance, resource management, and so on and so forth. What I’ve indicated also is that we see from across these chapters there are many different people, whether they’re electricity supply engineers in California, pastoralists in Kenya, Ethiopia or China, people managing disease on the front lines in Zimbabwe and the UK, small-scale farmers and fishers in India and southern Africa, and many more, all of whom are, to greater and lesser extents, navigating uncertainty. Now the conditions through which uncertainties arise are deeply affected by contrasting histories. I’m not saying everyone’s experiences the same, far from it. Experiences of colonialism, of policy cultures, and so on all affect the way uncertainties can be managed, and indeed different people have different vulnerabilities and their ability to manage uncertainty is affected by their wealth, their positionality, their connections, and so on. But despite all of this and despite these very different contexts, quite similar challenges are faced. In each case, we observe a contrast between closing down to risk, often through calculative modeling approaches, the top-left-hand corner, as against an opening up to uncertainty through much more open forms of modeling, flexible learning approaches, adaptation in the everyday. I argue in the book that it’s actually a universal challenge even if there are very particular experiences and need to be quite particular solutions.
So what does this mean for a wider politics of uncertainty? The politics of risk, as we’ve seen, are centered on what we’ve repeatedly said: calculative, technocratic, control-based responses where we assume we can predict, we can model, we can manage. Such politics, interestingly, are quite similar both under state-directed, top-down, deduced forms of politics and under neoliberalism, where it’s focused on individualized, marketized responses. Both those types of politics, if you like, often exclude social relations, forms of solidarity, forms of collective response in a decentralized way. So a critique of going from risk to uncertainty suggests a different type of politics that goes beyond that conventional state versus market analysis to one that suggests an alternative politics that are much more distributed, much more decentralized, and much more deliberative in its form.
A politics of uncertainty is all about this, all about socially embedded network learning, flexibility, adaptation, innovation. What is the politics that can foster that? It’s often centered on what people have called a politics of care and a politics of conviviality, which can potentially be more open, more democratic, more inclusive, more collective, and then offering multiple pathways for the future rather than a singular vision of one.
Now, of course, all of this has similarities to earlier arguments. I don’t have to say it to an audience in Germany that there were many German sociologists in the 1980s talking about risk, Ulrich Beck, Niklas Luhmann, and others who all argued for a new politics in the face of systemic risks arising in late industrial societies. They termed it risk, but in fact, they were largely talking about what I call uncertainty and ignorance. It echoes the arguments of American pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey or Richard Rorty, who argue that we must grasp what works through practical reasoning, creating what is useful, tangible, with imagination, courage, virtue, and so on. These are not new arguments, but I think over the last few decades, a recognition of uncertainty has emerged, and the fact that there’s a Center for Uncertainty Study is one reflection of this, and this has emerged from a deeper understanding of what the uncertainty paradigm entails and it comes from a range of disciplines and across very different experiences.
In contrast to some of the rather glib uses of terms like polycrisis, a discourse that I think has become overused and quickly appropriated, this wider body of work focuses particularly on the politics of knowledge emerging from intersecting uncertainties. Like uncertainty, crises are always constructed; they’re not out there, as it were, in nature. All this has in turn, I think, fostered an important reimagining, still emergent, of a narrow modernist vision of economic progress, sustainability, development more generally, based on risk, fixity, stability, optimality, control, and it moves us increasingly towards a new paradigm of uncertainty with new relationships with accredited expertise, a new politics of responsibility, accountability, and democracy, as I’ve talked about already.
Why is this? Why do we need to argue for this shift to escape the risk paradigm? The practice of development and economic development more broadly, and indeed so much so-called sustainable development and more broadly economic policy, humanitarian disaster response, organizational systems, and so much more that I’ve already mentioned are, I think, still trapped in a risk paradigm with this dominant vision of modernity constructed through a paradigm of control, whether from a statist perspective or a neoliberal perspective. The problem is it really doesn’t work.
The challenge then, I think, is to break free, to reimagine, to decolonize, if you will, and rethink radically. As I’ve said already, the good news is that there are lots of contemporary experiences to draw from, and I’ve tried to collate some of these in the chapters of the book. We can seek inspiration from other cultures, other settings, and from just looking beyond the formal to the informal. But we can also look into the past, into other periods where there have been other forms of thinking that can help us get out of this modernist trap that I think we’re stuck in. This is a recasting of what Hannah Arendt long ago called “letting go of the banister,” releasing us from the confines of current thinking and practice.
Where can we seek some inspiration? I’ve already mentioned the variety of different people who appear in the book who live with and indeed from uncertainty. Yes, these are pastoralists and small-scale farmers, Delta dwellers, fishers, swidden cultivators, and so on, but there are also frontline health workers, control room engineers, disaster relief agency personnel on the ground, and many, many more, all grappling with and navigating uncertainty in different ways.
Second, we can also seek inspiration from our own disciplines and the histories of our own disciplines and the interactions between them, because there’s plenty of thinking out there that goes beyond a narrow Newtonian-Cartesian view that tends to obscure uncertainty. Economics, as an example, the paper that we wrote was mentioned before, but you could take any discipline you like. Economics is so influential in framing policy and has dominated development studies, the field that I work in, for so long that there are actually many, many strands out there that challenge that narrow neoclassical view, where so-called blackboard proofs and mathematical models of a particular sort and what Milton Friedman long ago called a positive economics dominate.
As we argue in that paper, which was published in World Development and was illustrated in this rather fabulous comic by a colleague of ours based in Brighton, the ideas of Frank Knight, Friedrich von Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Alfred Shackle, Joan Robinson, and the great Albert Hirschman, amongst many others, all coming from very different standpoints, of course, they all make the case for taking uncertainty, uncertain knowledges really seriously. There are new approaches in the fields of ecological economics, complexity economics, feminist economics, post-Keynesian economics; you can list them, there’s a whole variety of heterodox strands. There are approaches such as decision-making under deep uncertainty that show practically how economic planning need not be constrained by the standard narrow approach. Yet we tend to revert, and certainly in our teaching and training, we tend to revert to the standard risk-based approach. The arrows going to the top-left-hand corner are as powerful in universities as they are powerful in the policy domain.
So in whatever discipline you choose, and I know there are a lot of disciplines represented in this room, we must ask: how do current frameworks address uncertainty? Do they close down towards risk or do they open up towards uncertainties? Are there traditions out there that might help us in recasting the way narrow disciplinary perspectives might be reimagined?
The third source of inspiration is to think perhaps more broadly about how we understand change and how we understand complexity and change, and this is influenced by underlying philosophical assumptions about how we see the world. Now, of course, the linear stages, evolutionary view is very popular in the West. In my field, Walt Rostow from the 1960s and ideas of linear development and modernization and so on dominated the field. I could give many other examples, but there was a nice book written back in the 1990s called “Doctrines of Development” that didn’t take that as the standard approach and looked back at other sources of thinking around development back to the 19th century. Auguste Comte, for example, highlighted how change should be thought of as much more cyclical, regenerative, divergent paths being created, and this is, of course, reflected in literatures of the time, 18th, 19th century literature in Europe and North America, themes of crisis, of hazard, of fortune, of speculation, of risk central to the novels of Mary Shelley, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubert, and many others. Rethinking our philosophical standpoints in ways that can embrace uncertainty requires us to cast our gaze more broadly, think about other philosophical traditions, draw on arts and culture and literatures, not necessarily from Europe and North America, but more broadly, in ways that can help us rethink.
Finally, beyond this sort of Western intellectual canon that we’ve been talking about so far, we can see that there are very diverse religious and cultural views that suggest that uncertainty is rather central to the way life and being exist, and it’s reflected in religion, in literature, in poetry, in art, things that talk about impermanence, about renewal, about plurality, whether this is Buddhism, Hinduism, diverse African religions, and of course, a variety of Christian scriptures and beliefs.
To conclude, the book argues it’s possible to release ourselves from the confines and strictures of a narrow risk-based vision to transform ourselves from the risk-based paradigm to the uncertainty paradigm, from control to care. As the world grapples with unprecedented turbulence and diverse uncertainties, it’s important to seek out these diverse inspirations I talked about, actively resurface, reclaim these ideas if pathways to sustainable and successful and flourishing futures are to be generated.
Rebecca Solnit, an author I really love, argued in an essay earlier this year, and this is a quote from her, not me, that rather than following the cheerleaders of despair, a more hopeful vision can be offered and uncertainty provides a route into that. What motivates us, she says, to act is a sense of possibility within uncertainty, that the outcome is not yet fully determined, that our actions may matter in shaping it. If we can recognize that we don’t know what will happen, that the future does not yet exist but is being made in the present, then we can be moved to participate in making that future.
So this is the radical, hopeful rethinking that I try and lay out in the book that I think is required for us to navigate uncertainty. That’s the end of the talk. Do read the book.
CeUS networks between research alliances
‘Our approach of seeing uncertainty as something productive and systematically investigating the effects of different ways of dealing with uncertainty has attracted and inspired a large number of researchers in a short space of time,’ reports co-founding director Herbert Dawid. More than 50 researchers and a dozen research projects are now associated with CeUS. For example, the new International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS-ModA) is researching uncertainty in the context of global change. The researchers are exploring the geological era shaped by humans and analysing how humans and the environment interact in complex and often unpredictable ways. The mathematically oriented Collaborative Research Centre 1283 ‘Taming uncertainty and profiting from randomness and low regularity in analysis, stochastics and their applications’ is also associated with CeUS. And in the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 318 ‘Constructing Explainability’, researchers are working on making the often complex functioning of AI systems more comprehensible.
Other examples of projects linked with CeUS:
- PREDICT: assesses the impact of algorithms on social uncertainty, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
- WaterFutures: examines future urban water supply under consideration of uncertainties such as climate change, funded by the ERC.
- Research Training Group CUDE (RTG 2865): analyses coping with uncertainty in dynamic economies, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
- EPOC research network: researches economic policy in uncertain environments, EU-funded as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network.
Discussion papers explore forms of uncertainty
The CeUS Working Papers contribute to the expansion of uncertainty research. Historian Professor Dr Michael Piotrowski from the University of Lausanne, for example, argues in his discussion paper that uncertainty is unavoidable in digital historical research. He distinguishes between gaps in knowledge about the past and ambiguities in the interpretation of historical data. Piotrowski advocates utilizing both types of uncertainty as an opportunity in computer-based approaches.
Another discussion paper focuses on the distortion of information in the digital age. Bielefeld business mathematician Professor Dr Manuel Förster presents a model and shows how disinformation and fact checks influence the balance of media consumption. A surprising discovery: moderate consumers often use media with opposing biases. Förster shows that competition can reduce disinformation, but also create echo chambers for extreme views. ‘Our research uncovers the complex dynamics of the information age,’ says Andreas Zick from the CeUS board of directors. ‘This helps us understand how to cope with uncertainty in the digital world.’
So for us, the narrative is actually everything that makes sense out of the world. More precisely, that means that everything that gives an interpretation to data or facts that you have can be seen as a narrative. So if you think about a real estate agent who tries to sell you a house at a very high price, he might make good arguments for it. There is maybe a nice neighborhood, it has been recently renovated, and he can pick out the kind of details that he wants to use to stress why the house is worth that high price. But of course, there might be strategic reasoning behind the real estate agent picking exactly those pieces and not others. So you have a sense that maybe it’s not as good as the agent tries to sell it to you.
When issues are complex, then narratives help people to understand how the world functions. To make sense of how they should act. That’s an important function of narratives, of course. They help people to understand things.
What you can clearly see is when people are aware that narratives might be applied strategically, then of course it is more difficult to influence them with false narratives. While when they are not aware and are kind of naive in a sense, then it is much easier to influence their behavior.
In our study, we want to figure out the extent to which people are aware of the strategic use of uncertainty and what impact this awareness has on the potential influence of narratives on people. How do we do this? In a first step, we currently derive hypotheses for people’s behavior when they are aware that they are supplied strategically and when they are not aware. And then in a second step, we want to then test these hypotheses empirically.
The next steps are basically to figure out to which extent people are actually aware. And then try to come up with solutions on how to improve awareness.
CeUS plans to expand international network
In the future, CeUS plans to consolidate its role as a vibrant hub for academic exchange in uncertainty research. Co-founding director Silke Schwandt emphasizes: ‘We want to develop ideas for new interdisciplinary projects so that we can explore the many ways in which uncertainty influences academia and society.’ The CeUS Young Scholar Network is also intended to contribute to making Bielefeld’s uncertainty research more visible on the international stage by bringing together researchers from all over the world.