What are you uncertain about? If you can’t control or predict the future, how can you prepare for it? Uncertainty can be scary, but can it also be a source of hope or opportunity?
Over the next few weeks, we’re sharing seven comics in a new series entitled ‘Uncertain Worlds’. It explores stories about uncertainty in the worlds of pastoralism, economics and finance, pandemics, migration, humanitarian aid, insurance and knowledge networks. Many of the comics draw on lessons from pastoralists, whose ways of life can help to challenge our assumptions of how to respond to the unpredictable and unknown.
The comics have been created by the artist Daniel Locke in collaboration with the PASTRES team. Each comic is linked to a peer-reviewed academic article produced in collaboration with the PASTRES project.
Lessons from pastoralists: from control to care
In the first comic of the series, we explore contrasting responses to uncertainty based on control or care through the lived experiences of pastoralists from around the world.
Dominant approaches in the policy world are often about exerting control by plans, regulations and the ordering of the world through development interventions, imposed through the power of the state, science, political and business elites and development agencies.
An alternative is to take a more open, caring approach, navigating through and productively making use of variability and volatility. Pastoralists do this in a number of ways: they include mobility, the ways they herd, breed and train animals, using land strategically, and working within networks and moral economies.
Read the article
Scoones, I. (2023) Confronting Uncertainties in Pastoral Areas: Transforming Development from Control to Care, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 1-19, doi:10.3167/saas.2023.04132303
Exhibition: Uncertain Worlds
Large scale printed versions of the comics will be on show in October 2023 at an exhibition, Uncertain Worlds.
The exhibition will be in Brighton, UK from 25-29 October 2023. Opening hours are 11am – 5pm and entry is free.
Address:
Phoenix Art Space
10-14 Waterloo Place,
Brighton, BN2 9NB
(view map)
There will be a launch event on the evening of 24 October: email n.oxley@ids.ac.uk for details.
More about the series
For an overview and links to all the comics when they are published, visit the Uncertain Worlds page.
Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience - PASTRES 
Excellent!
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