Evaluating Science and Risk: Living With and Dying From Asbestos.

This article examines contrasting discourses and interpretations of risk and harm. In the Northern Cape, South Africa, widespread asbestos pollution and the risk of contracting asbestos-related disease (ARDs) gives rise to medical, scientific discourses about the probability of technical risks which coexist with local cultural perceptions of danger and exposure. In subjecting the concept of 'risk' to a social science perspective, the article reveals the multi-layered complexity of how scientists (and associated bureaucracy) and communities differently construct realities around asbestos pollution and its dangers, yet with both failing to identify the 'really serious' dangers, but nonetheless helping to make everyday life possible. Drawing on a knowledge-as-action approach, this article suggests that local cultural understandings and scientific approaches of asbestos issues interweave and support each other at times, but can also present contradictory and divergent interpretations of danger. The article further argues that understanding scientific knowledge is linked to activities and is skill-based. As demonstrated in the case of asbestos pollution and related diseases, when agencies and local communities take concerted action, a broadened understanding of risk is established which draws on both scientific understandings and community perspectives of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]