“Modes of Uncertainty gives an impressive view of powerful and original scholarship, precise research, and strong linkages between theorizing and analyzing data, addressing the question of how humans in a variety of settings are dealing in concrete ways with unknown but highly important near futures that are directly linked to, but not controlled by, their actions.”

Reiner Keller, author of Doing Discourse Research

“Modes of Uncertainty provides an acute, bracing, and necessary exploration of key contemporary theoretical debates—and assumptions—around risk, insecurity, and uncertainty. Combining a crisp and clarifying analytical framing with a set of textured and revelatory case studies ranging across multiple domains, this volume is—in no uncertain terms—an invaluable contribution.”

Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Modes of Uncertainty is devoted to addressing a distinctive mode of practical wisdom that has become increasingly integral to the visions and pursuits animating our prevailing institutional orders. Its guiding presumption is that the future is unpredictable, a matter of unforeseen and unforeseeable twists and turns. Its strategies rest not on denying or seeking to dispel our according ignorance of what is to come, but instead to cope with and manage it. The contributors investigate its manifestations from one concrete case to the next. Their results demonstrate with sparkling analytical clarity what anthropology has to teach us about our contemporaneity.”

James Faubion, Rice University