Article ID: CBB663888235

Fuzzy boundaries: Simulation and expertise in bushfire prediction (December 2020)

unapi

It is becoming apparent that changes in climatic and demographic distributions are increasing the frequency and social impact of many ‘natural hazards’, including wildfires (or ‘bushfires’ in Australia). Across many national contexts, the governmental agencies legally responsible for ‘managing’ such hazards been called upon to provide greater foresight into the potential consequences, occurrence and behaviour of these dynamic phenomena. These conditions, of growing occurrence and expectation, have given rise to new anticipatory regimes, tools, practitioners and expertise tasked with revealing near and distant fiery futures. Drawing on interviews with Fire Behaviour Analysts from across the fire-prone continent of Australia, this article examines how their expertise has emerged and become institutionalized, exploring how its embedding in bushfire management agencies reveals cultural boundaries and tensions. This article provides important insight into the human and nonhuman infrastructures enrolled in predicting and managing landscape fires, foregrounding the wider social and political implications of these infrastructures and how their ‘fuzzy boundaries’ are negotiated by practitioners. Such empirical studies of expertise in practice are also, we suggest, necessary to the continued refinement of existing critiques of expertise as an individual capacity, derived from science and serving established social orders.

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Authors & Contributors
Evans, Robert
Collins, Harry M.
Colleen Lanier-Christensen
Spackman, Christy C. W.
Greenhough, Beth
Luis Reyes-Galindo
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Expertise
Power (social sciences)
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Governance
Participation
Time Periods
21st century
Places
Japan
India
Great Britain
Savannah River
Himalayan Mountains (Nepal)
United States
Institutions
Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
European Commission
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