‘Who’s (Still) Laughing in the Face of Danger?’ Encountering Extreme Weather in Rural Scotland

Citation

Connon I (2023) ‘Who’s (Still) Laughing in the Face of Danger?’ Encountering Extreme Weather in Rural Scotland. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2023: Transitions, Toronto, Canada, 15.11.2023-19.11.2023.

Abstract
This paper examines diversity in encountering un/safety the Scottish rural extreme weather context, highlighting the complexity of the relationship between safety and risk. Drawing on relational theory, it explores how narratives of people from rural Scotland affected by extreme weather reveal how perceptions of and responses to un/safety and risk can be understood as situational processes involving people and particularities of place. Furthermore, examining differences in affective responses to extreme weather amongst long-term local residents and more recent migrants shows how differences in responses are rooted in divergences in cultural norms that shape and are shaped by the intersections of people and places, and which thus mediate encounters with extreme weather, perceptions of being and feeling safe, and responses to risk. In the case of long-term residents, gender-specific norms can be seen to influence encounters with weather, which reveals important insights that also help explain why more recent encounters with worsening extreme weather were more likely to have been associated with loss and alienation than encounters with extreme weather in the past. The paper concludes that perceptions of un/safety in the extreme weather context do not merely result from engagement with weather-related risks, but reflect broader affectual responses to and negotiations with risk, which emerge from multiple relational entanglements with weather, landscape, people, institutions, and memories, embedded upon and shaped by specific cultural norms, and which exceed one-dimensional binary definitions of safety and unsafety and simple conceptual linear relationships between safety and risk commonly used in official policy and practice.