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

本论文的研究计划是为了支持对风险评估早期专业化的关键人物进行一系列深入，结构化的访谈。这些口述历史将成为Ellen Bales关于风险评估在20世纪70年代末至90年代初在美国成为一个正式的专业领域的论文的两个章节的重要基础。该奖项将允许贝尔斯采访十位核心参与者，以证实论文的主要目标：检查风险评估作为一门科学的困境，影响其编纂的更广泛的社会和文化背景，以及它作为有关科学和技术政策的信息提供者的角色，特别关注辐射防护。这篇论文的知识价值在于它对正式风险评估的历史根源的分析，这是一个专业化的账户，通过对氡所构成的风险的两个案例研究的新视角来构建，氡是工作场所和家庭的辐射威胁。在20世纪后半叶，风险、责任和问责问题在社会、科学、法律和监管环境中发展和共同演变，将对辐射的新关注与日益迫切的关注联系起来，即开发量化风险和传播这些发现的方法。本考试提供了对决策和冲突的多个字面和比喻场所的新理解：从工作场所到私有财产；从作为劳动者的公民到在家的公民；从穷人和被剥夺公民权的人到中产阶级的房主；从个人决策到群体政治；从健康到衰弱；从非正式风险评估到正式风险评估。该项目的广泛影响超出了20世纪美国科学史，包括环境史、劳工史、冷战史、公共卫生和医学史以及STS。此外，贝尔斯的论文将为当前的风险评估和风险沟通从业者提供信息，他们可以通过了解他们所在领域的前因、历史背景和早期组织来获得新的见解。最后，风险评估的分析历史对更广泛的公众具有价值，正是因为风险问题，因为它已经被专家和非专家量化，感知和讨论，是当今美国的主要关注。

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.