In their article, William R. Sheate and J. Ivan Scrase argue that for a risk-oriented framing to succeed, new assumptions about causation and a new ethical outlook are now needed.
Using a case of mad cow disease in the United States, this paper argues, statements of risk are ultimately social products that come to us by way of translation.
Powerless Science? looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.
The essay focuses on the scientific approaches emerging from WW II that attempted to identify key risks to food security and to highlight how wartime experiences informed notions of food security within international organizations for many decades to come.
Die Hamburger Sturmflut von 1962 is an in-depth historical study of the 1962 storm flood that devastated Hamburg and Germany. It compares the flood to others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while reflecting on the sociocultural and technological contexts of the time.
Fredriksson et al. discuss the relationship between flood risk management and collective memory.
This presentation by Manfred Stähli and Marcel Hürlimann for the 2016 CCES Competence Center Environment and Sustainability conference entitled “Natural Hazards and Risks in Alpine Environments - From Science to Early Warning Systems” highlights the challenges and goals of weather forecasting related to climate-related disasters and emergency responses.
In this episode from the New Books Network podcast, Gonzalo Lizarralde is interviewed on his recent book, Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed.
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 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.
