What does “risk” really mean—who defines it, and who benefits from the way it’s narrated into institutions?

In this episode of Reading the World | قراءة العالم, Ali Alhajji speaks with Joshua Harrison, Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure (UC Santa Cruz), about the relationship between risk, insurance, and ecological design—and why the idea of an uninsurable future reveals more than a market problem. It reveals a crisis of imagination, governance, and accountability.

Starting with the insurance industry’s growing inability to price climate volatility, the conversation reframes insurance as critical infrastructure: a system that quietly shapes where people can live, what futures remain investable, and whose losses are deemed acceptable. From there, the discussion turns toward prevention rather than reaction, and asks what it would mean to redesign our institutions around stewardship.

We then move into ecological and cultural “reading scenes”: how design changes what becomes visible, how fire can be understood as a tool of land care rather than only catastrophe, and how Indigenous knowledge complicates dominant frameworks of expertise. The episode closes with Two-Eyed Seeing as a way of thinking across knowledge systems—while staying attentive to power, translation, and responsibility.

In this conversation:

• How institutions narrate risk—and what those narratives erase
• Insurance as a front line of climate governance
• Why prevention is the missing logic in modern risk systems
• Stewardship, “good fire,” and ecological design as forms of reading
• Two-Eyed Seeing and the ethics of knowledge-sharing across systems

Reading the World | قراءة العالم is a bilingual podcast (English/Arabic) that takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without shortcuts.

Keywords: risk, insurance, ecological design, institutional narratives, climate change, Indigenous knowledge, governance, prevention, stewardship, ecological crisis

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Reading the World | قراءة العالم
A bilingual podcast (English and Arabic) exploring world literature, culture, and higher education as ways of understanding how meaning is produced, circulated, and contested.

Each episode takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without oversimplification.

Follow the podcast to continue the conversation.

في هذه الحلقة من «قراءة العالم»، نطرح سؤالًا واحدًا بهدوء ومن دون اختصارات: ماذا يكشف لنا نموذج الباحث غير المؤسسي عن إنتاج المعرفة خارج الجامعة؟ وكيف تتغير مفاهيم السلطة والشرعية والخبرة عندما يُنجَز العمل الفكري الجاد بعيدًا عن الأطر الأكاديمية الرسمية؟

ضيفنا هو الدكتور شيلدون غريفز، مؤلف كتاب «دليل الباحث غير المؤسسي»، الذي يتحدث عن عوائق الوصول إلى المعرفة، وجدران الدفع التي تحاصر البحث، وعن بدائل الصرامة العلمية خارج المؤسسة: المجتمعات المعرفية، القراءة البطيئة، والتحقق، وبناء شبكات تعلّم تُصحّح وتُراجع بدل أن تكتفي بالتصفيق.

نناقش أيضًا لماذا لا تكفي “الاستقلالية” وحدها، وكيف يمكن للبحث المستقل أن يكون ممارسة اجتماعية تُنتج معرفة قابلة للمساءلة، لا مجرد تجربة فردية معزولة.

ملاحظة مهمة: التسجيل الأصلي لهذه الحلقة تم باللغة الإنجليزية. وهذه النسخة العربية هي دبلجة خاصة أُنتجت خصيصًا لمستمعي العربية، مع الحفاظ على مضمون الحوار وروحه.

استمعوا… واقرأوا ببطء… وأصغوا بعناية… ولا تنخدعوا بالطريق المختصر.

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Reading the World | قراءة العالم
A bilingual podcast (English and Arabic) exploring world literature, culture, and higher education as ways of understanding how meaning is produced, circulated, and contested.

Each episode takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without oversimplification.

Follow the podcast to continue the conversation.

In this episode of Reading the World | قراءة العالم, Ali Alhajji sits down with Dr. Sheldon Greaves to treat the “guerrilla scholar” as a figure of knowledge production—a way of thinking about what counts as knowledge, who gets to authorize it, and what changes when serious intellectual work happens outside formal academic structures.

We begin with a thesis-level prompt—define “guerrilla scholar” in one sentence—and then follow the question where it leads: legitimacy, rigor without institutional supervision, reading as a method of judgment (not just information), and the practical infrastructures that make independent learning possible.

On-record note: This conversation was recorded in both audio and video; the episode is released primarily as audio, with short video clips occasionally shared.

In this conversation, we explore:

• What the term “guerrilla scholar” is actually naming in how knowledge is organized and legitimized
• What makes intellectual work “count” outside universities—and who gets to decide
• What replaces peer review: feedback, rigor, correction, and the social life of legitimacy
• Reading as method: slow reading, interpretation, and why the core issue is judgment
• Community as infrastructure (without romanticizing isolation)
• Limits and tradeoffs: sustainability, credibility barriers, mentorship gaps, and the risk of romanticizing precarity
• A closing question designed to unsettle one assumption about learning and knowledge

Guest

Dr. Sheldon Greaves is the author of The Guerrilla Scholar’s Handbook. He earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley while living and working in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, developing an approach to intellectual life shaped by constraints, independence, and a long career doing serious work outside academia.

Reading the World | قراءة العالم — one question at a time.

Send us a text

Reading the World | قراءة العالم
A bilingual podcast (English and Arabic) exploring world literature, culture, and higher education as ways of understanding how meaning is produced, circulated, and contested.

Each episode takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without oversimplification.

Follow the podcast to continue the conversation.