Doctoral Dissertation Research: Radon and the Evolution of Risk Assessment in Cold War America, 1945-1991

本论文的研究建议是为了支持对风险评估早期专业化的关键人物进行的一系列深入的、结构化的访谈。这些口述历史将是Ellen Bales论文中关于20世纪70年代末至90年代初风险评估作为一个正式的专业领域在美国建立的两章的重要基础。该奖项将允许贝尔斯采访十名核心参与者，证实了论文的主要目标：检查风险评估作为一门科学的困境地位，影响其编纂的更广泛的社会和文化背景，以及它作为与辐射防护有关的政策的信息者的角色。这篇论文的学术价值在于它分析了正式风险评估的历史根源，这是一种专业化的描述，通过重新审视两个关于工作场所和家庭中的辐射威胁的风险的案例研究来构建。在20世纪后半叶，风险、责任和问责问题在社会、科学、法律和监管背景下发展和共同演变，将对辐射的新的突出关切与日益紧迫的重点联系在一起，重点是开发量化风险的方法并传达这些发现。这一检验提供了对决策和冲突的多个字面和比喻场所的新理解：从工作场所到私人财产；从公民作为劳动者到家庭公民；从穷人和被剥夺公民权的人到中产阶级房主；从个人决策到群体政治；从健康到虚弱；从非正式到正式的风险评估。这个项目的更广泛影响超越了20世纪美国科学史，包括环境史、劳动史、冷战史、公共卫生和医学史，以及STS。此外，贝尔斯的论文将向当前的从业者提供风险评估和风险沟通的信息，他们可以通过了解他们所在领域的先例、历史背景和早期组织来获得新的见解。最后，风险评估的分析性历史对更广泛的公众具有价值，正是因为风险的问题--专家和非专家都已将其量化、感知和讨论--是当今美国的一个主要关注点。

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.