About the project

Narratives of Risk and Responsibility in Social Institutions is a five-year research project funded by the John Harvard Professorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2024-2029) and based in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. It provides a forum for exploring the impact of narratives of risk on the interaction between individuals and state institutions, and the prevalence of those narratives in contemporary culture.

The project, which is led by Professor Clair Wills, seeks to retrieve the history and the development of the concept of risk in the modern period, with a particular emphasis on how forms of accountability have been transformed in postwar legal and social policy and public discourse.

Research network

Network members are drawn from diverse disciplines including law, criminology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, as well as literary study. They share an interest in the narrative genres that legitimise forms of ‘responsibilisation’ – the placing of liability for harm on individuals acting out of rational choice. A particular aim is to chart how the risk one poses to oneself and others legitimises the use of force, physical restraint, surveillance, and government intervention, in a diverse set of processes of re-institutionalisation: rising interventions by the family courts, a soaring prison population, new methods of restraint and surveillance in secure mental health settings, and migrant detention centres.

Reading group

To investigate and prompt interdisciplinary discussion, the network will run a reading group on the history of the concept of risk, and will organise three events between February 2026 and February 2027. The first of these is Risky Character in Crime and Writing on Crime.