The Accident Beyond Risk. An Anthropology of Interruptions
L’accident au-delà du risque. Une anthropologie des interruptions
El accidente más allá del riesgo. Una antropología de las interrupciones
Revue « Terrain » n° 86
Abstract
This issue of Terrain proposes to explore forms of accidentality that lie outside industrial and insurance-based norms of the “risk society.” Through ethnographic, historical, or documentary inquiries, the aim is to approach the accident as a lens revealing social tensions, material imbalances, technical arrangements, or subterranean affects. Far from being a mere rupture, the accident here becomes a heuristic operator—a revelator of world orders.
Announcement
Argument
Accidents are often approached through their unpredictability, their management via insurance, or their statistical mitigation. In Western modernity, they fall within the paradigm of the “risk society” (Beck, 1986), where the prevailing logics are those of prevention, responsibility, and reparation. This framework has been the subject of critical readings, highlighting disparities in the risks people face (Perrow, 1999), the inherent uncertainty of technical systems (Vaughan, 2021), or the anxiety of progress laced with its own threat of destruction (Virilio, 2005). Yet this theoretical framework obscures a much more heterogeneous reality. In many contemporary contexts—rural, peripheral, semi-mechanized or informal—accidents are neither recorded nor insured, and are sometimes not even recognized as such (Lambert & Raveux, 2019; Richard et al., 2025). They take other forms: loss is assessed differently, death is framed through different cultural lenses, responsibility is established and distributed through other means, and compensation may involve alternative forms of solidarity, ritual, or justice (Klaeger, 2013). In such contexts, the accident is less an anomaly to be corrected than a structuring moment in social and territorial life.
Studying accidents beyond the framework of risk presents several methodological challenges. Because they escape bureaucratic and insurance logics, these accidents are often under-documented (Richard & Ortúzar, 2023). By definition, they are difficult to observe directly, perceptible only through traces—memorial, narrative, or material—which demands a diversification of sources and research strategies (Absi, 2005; Westman et al., 2020). This also implies shifting the vantage point toward less visible socio-technical realities. Factories, roads, and air traffic are domains where accidents are well-known and risk factors highly modeled (Aldrich, 1997; Yates & Murphy, 2019). But there is also a multiplicity of in-between contexts to which these frameworks poorly apply: households that double as workshops, storefronts, or roadside inns; border zones, remote or informal, that elude national statistics (Fassin & Defossez, 2024; Mitchell, 2012); semi-mechanized settings at the margins of formal maintenance circuits, where animal, natural, or human forces escape the insurance-based definition of machinery (Ballester & Richard, 2021; Jarrige, 2023); or else rogue transport systems—vehicles off-road, boats docking away from ports, aircraft landing beyond airports (Kuklina & Baikalov, 2024). In these settings, the very definition of the accident is up for debate, as are the regimes of visibility and legibility that delimit it.
This issue of Terrain proposes to explore forms of accidentality that lie outside industrial and insurance-based norms of the “risk society.” Through ethnographic, historical, or documentary inquiries, the aim is to approach the accident as a lens revealing social tensions, material imbalances, technical arrangements, or subterranean affects. Far from being a mere rupture, the accident here becomes a heuristic operator—a revelator of world orders.
Thematic Axes
- Modes of foresight. How do individuals or communities anticipate accidents in contexts where technical or insurance norms are absent, inadequate, or circumvented? Whether through routine gestures, embodied knowledge, transmitted stories, protective rituals or charged objects (amulets, talismans, signs), these practices shape local regimes of foresight. How do such practices endure—or even resist—pressures to model, standardize, or institutionalize expertise on risk? This axis invites contributions exploring these often discreet, infra-ordinary, or sensory anticipations, which engage with alternative relations to danger, time, and uncertainty.
- Repairing, compensating, living-with. What happens after the accident, when repair does not fall under the purview of insurance, formal law, or certified mechanics? This axis focuses on practices of care, compensation, or rearrangement mobilized in response to loss. These may include technical or medical interventions, economic adjustments, appeals to solidarity, or ritual forms of repair. Who takes responsibility for the accident, according to which obligations or affinities? How are blame, debt, or responsibility negotiated, and through what symbolic or material instruments? Exploring these practices means examining the accident as a window into local arrangements of justice, solidarity, and the continuity of life.
- Telling the accident, making a narrative. How can one recount an event that occurs suddenly, disrupts the order of things, and leaves often fragmentary traces? In many contexts, accidents do not give rise to official reports or immediate recognition. Instead, it is stories, memories, marked objects, injured bodies, or silences that become vectors of remembrance. This axis focuses on narrative forms—oral, written, visual, or ritual—that allow accidents to be made sense of. Who speaks, who remains silent, who is heard? What social, political, or therapeutic uses do these narratives allow for? Examining the narrativization of accidents also invites reflection on the relationships between memory, recognition, responsibility, and forgetting.
- Materialities of the accident. How does one access the accident when it persists only through scattered imprints, discreet residues, or silent marks on bodies and landscapes? This axis centers attention on the materialities of accidents: broken objects, damaged infrastructure, scarred bodies, makeshift shrines, or roadside cenotaphs. It seeks to explore how such traces render the accident visible and become inscribed in everyday landscapes. What do these materialities reveal about the ways in which a society processes violence, mourning, or memory? By focusing on objects, spatialities, and regimes of visibility, this approach offers a situated reading of accidents that is at once sensory, documentary, and political.
Making Visible
We encourage proposals that combine text and image, or that engage with experimental, narrative, critical, or fragmentary modes of writing. This issue seeks to convey the material, temporal, and emotional density of accidents, while upholding ethical standards in research and respecting the dignity of those affected.
Formats
The journal publishes full-length articles (45,000 characters including spaces) as well as shorter formats of around 20,000 characters, such as portfolios, thematic spotlights, annotated documents, interviews, stories, graphic essays, etc. Guidelines for authors can be found [here], and examples of different formats are available [here].
Timeline
Proposals, including a title and a 300-word abstract, should be submitted,
by october 1, 2025.
Final articles are due by january 16, 2026, to the editorial team at Terrain: terrain.redaction[at]gmail.com.
Please note the tight turnaround between proposal submission and full article delivery.
Evaluation process
After an initial review by the Editorial Board, the texts submitted are peer-reviewed in a double-blind process: two internal reviewers and one external reviewer. Authors and reviewers remain anonymous. Authors receive a reply within two months, for publication within six months of acceptance. Rejected articles are neither retained nor returned. Instructions for authors can be consulted by following this link.
The composition of the journal's editorial board and editorial policies can be found on the OpenEdition Jounals website: https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/2661
We receive submissions in French and English. Texts will be translated into French for print publication and into both languages (original language and French) on OpenEdition Journals.
Terrain Blog – in connection with the issue
The journal's blog, Carnets de Terrain, also publishes short pieces (approx. 2,000 words) for an informed but non-specialist audience. Blog posts may include multimedia content. More details can be found in the [author guidelines]. Proposals should take the form of a 300-word abstract and be submitted by january 16, 2026, to the following editors for the “around the issues” section: cduterme[a]unistra.fr and cecile.guillaume-pey[a]ehess.fr
Bibliography
ABSI PASCALE, 2005. Los ministros del diablo: el trabajo y sus representaciones en las minas de Potosí, La paz, PIEB, IRD, IFEA, Embajada de Francia en Bolivia.
ALDRICH MARK, 1997. Safety first: technology labor et business in the building of American work safety: 1870-1939, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
BALLESTER BENJAMIN & NICOLAS RICHARD (dir.), 2021. Cargar y descargar en el desierto de Atacama, Paris, Ediciones SI-SNPC/Éditions IHEAL-CREDA, en ligne : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheal.9706
BECK ULRICH, 1986. Risikogesellschaft: auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Francfort, Suhrkamp.
FASSIN DIDIER & ANNE-CÉCILE DEFOSSEZ, 2024. L’exil, toujours recommencé : chronique de la frontière, Paris, Seuil.
JARRIGE FRANÇOIS, 2023. La ronde des bêtes : le moteur animal et la fabrique de la modernité, Paris, La Découverte.
KLAEGER GABRIEL, 2013. « Dwelling on the road: routines, rituals and roadblocks in southern ghana », Africa, vol. 83, no 3, p. 446‑469. En ligne : https://doi.org/10.1353/afr.2013.0038
KUKLINA VERONIKA & NIKITA BAIKALOV 2024. « Informal transportation and social embedding of the railroad: the case of okurki on the Baikal-Amur Mainline », Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 65, no 3, p. 320‑345.
LAMBERT GUY & OLIVIER RAVEUX, 2019. « Pannes et accidents (xixe-xxie siècle). Au cœur de l’économie, des techniques et de la société », Artefact, techniques histoire et sciences humaines, no 11.
MITCHELL DON, 2012. They saved the crops: labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in Bracero-era California (1e éd.), Athens (GA), University of Georgia Press.
PERROW CHARLES, 1999. Normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies, Princton (NJ), Princeton University Press.
RICHARD NICOLAS & DIEGO ORTÚZAR, (2023). « La penúltima curva de Paposo. Agentividad técnica, social e histórica de una infraestructura vial », Punto sur, vol. 9, p. 28‑47. En ligne : https://doi.org/10.34096/ps.n9.12715
RICHARD NICOLAS, DIEGO VILLAR & ALBERTO PRECI, 2025. La velocidad en los mundos lentos. Accidentes, máquinas y sociedades, Venise, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari.
VAUGHAN DIANE, 2021. Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
VIRILIO PAUL, 2005. L’accident originel/Paul Virilio, Paris, Galilée. Paris.
WESTMAN CLINTON, TARA L. JOLY & LIZA GROSS, 2020. Extracting home in the oil sands: settler colonialism and environmental change in subarctic Canada (1e éd.), Londres, Routledge.
YATES JOANNE & CRAIG N. MURPHY, 2019. Engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins university press.
Attached files
Keywords
- accident, mémoire, anthropologie des techniques, infrastructures informelles, justice vernaculaire
Contact(s)
- Diego Ortúzar
courriel : diego [dot] ortuzar [dot] r [at] gmail [dot] com - Rédaction Revue Terrain
courriel : terrain [dot] redaction [at] gmail [dot] com
Reference Urls
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« The Accident Beyond Risk. An Anthropology of Interruptions », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, August 08, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/14gtq
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