Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Risk in the Making: Narrative, Problematic Integration, and the Social Construction of Risk Laura D. Russell 1 & Austin S. Babrow 2 1 Department of Communication, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023, USA 2 School of Communication Studies, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA Narrative plays a prominent role in interpretations and explanations of social reality, particularly in our efforts to understand uncertainties in time, such as social constructions of risk. This article synthesizes narrative and problematic integration theory as a way to illuminate the construction of risk. We argue that the very existence of risks in our lives is constituted and signified through storied explanations, expectations, and evaluations of potentially significant but uncertain experiences through time. We illustrate these ideas with an analysis of news reporting on several contemporary risks and offer alternative understandings to complete the argument that, as social constructions, risks can be understood and lived in multiple ways. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01386.x Public discourses in the first decade of the 21st century have been saturated with stories about a host of ongoing conflicts that threaten to spill over national and regional borders, environmental threats of global proportion, transnational economic meltdown on a scale unseen for 80 years, annually recurring specters of pandemics, talk of extreme and peak oil, and more. Collectively, these concerns bear strong testimony to Beck’s (1992) assertion that we live in a ‘‘risk society,’’ where the collective consciousness reflects human concern with the future and the mysteries that lie ahead. Public and private views of risk are dynamically shaped into understandings of experience. Conceptions of risk pervade social experience through discourses that construct our sense of both the temporal contingencies of life and the values at stake, or what Kenneth Gergen (2000, passim) referred to as ‘‘the real and the good.’’ Writings by anthropologists (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) and sociologists (e.g., Beck, 1992; Luhmann, 2002; Strydom, 2002) studying the social construction of risk have provided powerful and far-reaching insights into risks as communicative con- structions. Nonetheless, given the pervasiveness and complexity of risk discourse— the many types of risk, the multiform media involved, the variety of voices and claims, Corresponding author: Laura D. Russell; e-mail: lauradawnr@gmail.com Communication Theory 21 (2011) 239–260  2011 International Communication Association 239