Edinburgh Futures Institute, 5th June 2025
Workshop Report by Liz McFall
Earlier this summer, EFI’s Data Civics Observatory Director, Liz McFall and Financial Services and FinTech Sector Engagement Lead, Tobi Schneider, joined forces with Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen of Tampere University, Finland to host our first joint event welcoming researchers in the social studies of insurance to a two-day workshop at Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Thanks to generous funding from the Academy of Finland, Tampere University, Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Journal of Cultural Economy we got to hear from academics from Finland, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, the UK and the US.
Presentations explored the reach, and the limits, of insurance moves toward individualised, personalised and cyber protection as well as the controversies proliferating around multiple climate related insurability crises.
Keynote: Individualization of Risk
Greta Krippner, from the University of Michigan, closed the first day with her keynote lecture Race, gender, HIV/AIDS and the individualization of risk. She explored one of the most fundamental questions in the contemporary socio-politics of insurance – how has risk transformed from being understood as a property of groups to a property of individuals? Her meticulous accounting exposed the sometimes surprising intersections of civil rights, politics, regulation and commercial practice in insurance and prompted discussant Donald Mackenzie to remark that back in 2001, Greta had written one of the finest sentences in economic sociology:
“But every transaction, no matter how instantaneous, is social in the broader sense of the term: congealed into every market exchange is a history of struggle and contestation that has produced actors with certain understandings of themselves and the world that predispose them to exchange under a certain set of rules and not another.”
The Social Nature of Risk
In the polycentric geopolitical, environmental, economic and technological crises of the moment we are all living through, questions about the distribution and transfer of risk and responsibility and the rules that govern it are always social and ever more pressing. It is not that surprising then that they appeared, in some form, in all the papers presented. For researchers in interdisciplinary social studies, the challenge is always one of developing sufficient technical and contextual understanding of a dynamic and commercially sensitive field to inform socio-political analyses of the proliferating controversies in the management of new and rapidly accelerating risks. Risks are assessed differently in scholarship and social science but there is broad agreement on the most urgent. Across life and non-life sectors, data, cyber and climate are interacting in ways that will have a substantial impact on everyday life and products.
Climate Finance and the Limits of Insurability
This was made clear in the opening climate finance session with presentations from Robert Berksvig on the consequences of competing conceptualisations of equity versus risk management on climate justice in developing countries and in Beki McElvain’s evocative exploration of embedded risk – ‘Trying to reason with Hurricane Season’. Rebecca Elliot’s study of restoration and change in National Trust properties increasingly exposed to climate damage, opened up much broader questions of loss and restorability, recalling American poet-underwriter Wallace Steven’s remark that insurance’s appeal is to our instinct to ‘go on indefinitely like wax flowers on the mantlepiece’. What can ‘like for like’ mean in a world where catastrophic damage to people and property is becoming historically frequent?
Laurence Barry pondered parallel questions in her paper exploring how observed repetitions have begun to be replaced by virtual, computed scenarios in catastrophe modelling that still, inevitably, lack the capacity to account for the unknown future. Concern with how historical growth in the non-life sector can be explained despite increasing climate change signals was taken up in Sebastian Kohl’s paper co-authored with Mathias Römer.
Technological Frontiers: Personalization and Infrastructure
The second day’s discussions leant more into questions about technological, financial and sector frontiers. How data, behaviour and innovations have been rolled into new ‘personalised’ insurance or ‘insurtech’ products featured in a presentation by Albert Cevolini and Elena Esposito and another by Gert Meyers. Cevolini and Esposito offered a nuanced account of the actuarial, normative, and social implications of insurers’ moves towards policies featuring proactive behavioural tracking, monitoring and incentives. Meyers’ parallel paper on digital character contests offered a playfully Goffmanian exploration of how ‘black-boxed’ behavioural tracking technologies might (re)stage moralities invoked in the societal and individual distribution of responsibility and behaviour. Steve Bernadin took the question of insurance moralities in a different direction in his paper exploring the positioning of ‘givers’ and ‘takers’ in how local agents frame and channel ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customers’ insurance purchases. Our co-hosts Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Liz McFall and Tobi Schneider made up the remainder of the workshop. The last session focused on questions about insurance infrastructure, with Lehtonen’s discussion centred on the developing connections between insurance and cyber infrastructures and McFall’s dig into the paths taken from insurance premia to institutional investment in public and private infrastructure.
The Value of Cross-Sectoral Collaboration: Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Unique Role
One distinctive highlight for the group, many of whom have met frequently over the years, was Tobi Schneider’s sense-checking presence throughout the two days and his sector-focused presentation. Tobi’s contributions brought to the fore the challenges and the opportunities of interdisciplinary cross-sectoral collaboration. By offering a highly engaged professional lens, sector experts provide both the generalist perspectives and the contemporary knowledge of commercial practice that academics usually lack. Social scientists rarely have direct access to the sector. This is not necessarily for the want of trying; commercial organisations struggle to accommodate researchers whose questions, timelines and priorities are fundamentally different to their own. For interdisciplinary insurance studies, generalism often means examining the application of a specific empirical case to a more general theoretical debate, not providing a sense of the limits and frontiers as experienced across the sector.
The sector engagement role at EFI is unique. It’s not that unusual for practitioners to be invited to academic events, but to have regular access to someone whose specific role it is to advise and broker cross-sectoral collaborations is incredibly rare. This work is not easy. Social scientists are, by definition, attuned to exploring social and public issues, not commercial solutions. But knowledge exchange is necessary. Building a bridge where the exchange has value for both parties is what EFI is all about. The insurability crisis is not just commercial – it is geopolitical, environmental, economic, technological, human and social. There are no easy solutions, but to do things the way we always have, as academics, policymakers or practitioners, seems unlikely to help.
Workshop Participants:
Laurence Barry (Chaire Pari, Paris), Stève Bernardin (Paris), Robert Bergsvik (Wageningen/Edinburgh), Alberto Cevolini (Bologna/Reggio Emilia), Rebecca Elliott (LSE), Elena Esposito (Bielefeld/Bologna), Olli Hasu (Tampere), Sebastian Kohl (Berlin), GretaKrippner (Michigan), Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen (Tampere), Beki McElvain (Loughborough), Liz McFall (Edinburgh), Donald MacKenzie (Edinburgh), Gert Meyers (Tilburg), Tobi Schneider (EFI, Edinburgh), Maiju Tanninen (Leuven/Tampere), Tod Van Gunten (Edinburgh).
