Marc Elie reflects on the evolution of his research on tragic events in twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union—from researching Gulag ex-detainees to analyzing the history of disaster and risk management.
Gijs Mom illustrates how risk can be thrilling and playful, challenging Ulrich Beck’s fear-centered view.
Heike Egner critiques both the pessimism and idealism in Ulrich Beck’s risk theory, highlighting the limits of global cooperation and the role of science in amplifying risk.
Cheryl Lousley critiques Beck’s abstract vision of global risk and cosmopolitanism for overlooking power dynamics essential to environmental justice.
Agnes Kneitz questions the global applicability of Beck’s risk theory, emphasizing culturally rooted perceptions and the limits of a Western framework.
Diana Mincyte analyzes how post-socialist risk discourses in Eastern Europe deflected attention from systemic upheaval, legitimizing capitalism while obscuring structural causes.
Gordon Winder’s “Market Solutions?” explores neoliberal market solutions to risk within the context of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society and his personal conversation with the latter.
In her personal essay “Compressed Cosmopolitanization,” Stefania Gallini’s recounts her feelings of dissonance of joining a reading group focused on risk and Ulrich Beck’s work in safe Munich, while coming from the megalopolis of Bogotá, where risk is a daily reality.
Historian Uwe Lübken examines how the perception of natural hazards and catastrophes shifts from being historically seen as “Acts of God” to now being viewed as side effects of modernization and a social responsibility.
In “Historicizing Risk,” historian Lawrence Culver explores Ulrich Beck’s theories on the nature of risk on a temporal scale, and asks how awareness and perceptions of risk changed from the “first” modernity to now, and how that relates to the global issue of climate change.
