Obeada, Irina and Cronin, James and Piacentini, Maria (2025) One Person's Edge, Another's Plateau? Edgework and Lifecourse Diversity. In: BSA Annual Conference 2025: Social Transformations, 2025-04-23 - 2025-06-25, University of Manchester.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Risk remains an abiding and critical concern for sociological inquiry. Nevertheless, several voices have emerged to challenge an overreliance on ‘youthful white spaces’ as the most appropriate domain for locating and understanding voluntary risk-taking activities. In this theoretical paper we draw upon the life course perspective to reimagine and revaluate Lyng’s (1990) concept of edgework by situating it within changing and diverse life circumstances. Instead of positioning edgework as an elective response by sensation-seeking individualists to the alienation and ennui of late modernity, we provide a more granular account of its embeddedness in developmental pathways. We challenge ontological assumptions that risk-taking functions universally as a purposeful identity investment or act of escapism, demonstrating instead how edgework and its voluntaristic character vary according to shifting aggregations of biographical, structural, social and temporal conditions, including the realities of ageing. We outline how the boundaries between ‘edges’ and life stages are porous, meaning edgework must be understood as sensitive to changing roles, statuses, and imperatives that are often unplanned or unmanageable. Higher background levels of risk in a person’s life soften their experience of edges, making the volitional character of risk-taking more ambiguous and its sensations plateau out. We also consider life transitions and turning points where individuals find themselves interjecting in the risk- taking of others, producing ‘surrogate’ forms of edgework. Overall, we complicate earlier generations of edgework theory, untethering the concept from elective identity-making and sensation-seeking, encouraging instead greater sensitivity to situational and structural exigencies, opportunities, and social embeddedness.