Greta Krippner

“Preferred: Race, Gender, AIDS and the Individualization of Risk”

In contemporary American society, risk is typically treated as a matter of one’s own personal calculus. Indeed, the notion that risk is appropriately understood in terms of each individual’s own personal decision-making is so familiar an idea in our society that it appears to almost not require explanation. However, closer inspection of the problem reveals an important historical irony, as at least since the nineteenth century risk has been understood to be an intrinsically collective affair. My project explores this conundrum, asking how risk was transformed in American society from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals.

In seeking to answer this question, I foreground the institution of private insurance as a site in which to excavate the individualization of risk. The institution of insurance is a critical location in which to explore the evolution of ideas about risk because insurance provides a set of tools by which risks are made calculable and managed in our society.

In my research, I follow the history of the individualization of risk over the course of the full twentieth century, examining key moments in the transformation of Americans’ thinking about risk and risk-bearing. Paradoxically, I find that the individualization of risk was an unintended result of movements for inclusion that sought to gain access to insurance for African Americans, women, and HIV+ individuals who had been previously excluded from markets for risk. Understanding the role of anti-discrimination movements in creating cultural frameworks that enshrined individual choice over risk behaviors gives new leverage on the deep historical roots, and paradoxical sources, of a defining feature of neoliberal capitalism.

Greta Krippner is an Associate Professor of Sociology.