Pressure Points: Risk - Stefan Leins / RIOT, MAS UTD

“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
clean scientific subject”
Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.

As the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.

Stefan Leins is Professor of Social Anthropology with a focus on economic anthropology. He conducts research on commodity trading, supply chains, financial markets, sustainable investing, and the social role of economic expertise. His book Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and was translated to multiple languages. He is currently working on a book on transnational commodity trading networks and the role of moral orders in financial capitalism. His research has been profiled several times in German-language newspapers (e.g. Bund, NZZ, Republik, Süddeutsche Zeitung,, TAZ,WOZ) and he has been a guest on various podcasts and video formats (e.g. Public Eye, SRF Eco, UNRISD). Leins is a member of the Board of the Centre for Development and Environment, as well as an external member of the council for sustainable investments of the Alternative Bank Switzerland. Since January 2026, Stefan Leins has been leading the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded research project Cultures of Speculation, a project that examines current developments in capitalism following the financial crisis and analyzes new speculative practices in labor markets, the technology sector, and in the field of cryptocurrencies.

RIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.