If, conceptually speaking, the ‘ordinary’ directs us to the cyclical stability, habitual obviousness and unsurprising eventfulness of everyday life and if, similarly, the ‘extraordinary’ draws our attention to phenomena that sweep aside the normal with the force of unsettling uncertainty and affective excess, where do we find ourselves with the ‘ordinary extraordinary’? What might we sensibly ask a concept of the ‘ordinary extraordinary’ to discursively invoke and develop when thinking about the ‘risk society’ of late modernity in which edgework proliferates? In this Introduction we address these questions by looking at the relationship between the present and the future, and the role that improvisation, endurance and hope play in shaping this relationship in the different social fields presented in this volume.