On Un/Certainty

We live in uncertain times. But what does this uncertainty actually mean to our ability to act?

In an era where politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke "uncertain times" to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and philosopher Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention: she exposes how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that actually organize our world.

Lennard combines rigorous philosophical analysis with frontline reporting, personal reflection, and urgent political intervention. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through this philosophical lens: What the crisis in our constant talk of 'crisis' actually means. How entrenched assumptions about gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. How the treatment of borders as a site of imagined security requiring violent maintenance threatens our collective flourishing. Looking to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, alongside other thinkers rarely put in conversation together, Lennard addresses the nature of certainty itself, identity and ideology, to show that much of this uncertainty is calculated and used to undermine our ability to act.

On Un/Certainty transforms philosophical insight into political action, offering readers not just analysis but hope—and the conceptual tools to make that hope concrete.