Perspectives

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.

Julia Adeney Thomas explores three types of narrative that are emerging as people try to get to grips with the Anthropocene and their potential for steering our future course.

Jan Zalasiewicz presents the mounting evidence of the Anthropocene as a proposed geological epoch and points to the possible trajectories of planet Earth.

Joshua L. Reid concludes that the history of Pacific whaling has undergone a scholarly renaissance.

Billie Lythberg and Wayne Ngata explore what it means to be whale people in the modern whaling period.

Jonathan Clapperton details the importance of whaling to Puget Sound Coast Salish people (Puget Salish) along the Pacific Northwest Coast.

Adam Paterson and Chris Wilson consider Ngarrindjeri contributions to Southern Australia’s nineteenth-century whaling industry.