Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life (The New Sociology)

Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life aims to chart the rise of the risk debate in social science for the purpose of exploring the impact of the topic of risk on the character and concerns of contemporary sociology. This involves an attempt to locate the topic of risk within a critical account of the culture, history and politics of contemporary sociology. I am concerned to equip students with a means to think critically about the political values, moral concerns and historical judgements that tend to feature in the sociological representation of everyday life in terms of risk. I shall focus analytical attention upon the difficulty of establishing whether social life is any more insecure and uncertain than at other times in human history. I shall be concerned to set western debates on the character of "risk society" in cross-cultural perspective, so that matters of health and safety are approached in terms of the vulnerabilities of a global humanity. I shall outline some of the ways in which the study of risk is transforming the ways sociologists account for prevailing cultural attitudes and social behaviours. While sociologists are working in various ways to alert us to the social construction of competing accounts of risk, I aim to dwell upon the ways in which the writing on risk constructs the task of sociology. Mitchell Dean writes: "[T]he signficance of risk does not lie with risk itself but with what risk gets attached to. Risk, to put it in Kantain terms, is a category of our understanding rather than intuition or sensibility." (Dean 1999: 131) I aim to account for the significance of risk as a "unit idea" (Nisbet 1966) of contemporary sociology. I aim to explore the bearing of "the risk debate" in social science upon the cultural terms and political conditions of our sociological understanding of the world.Iain Wilkinson is the author of 'Risk, Vulnerability and Everyday Life (The New Sociology)', published 2009 under ISBN 9780415370790 and ISBN 0415370795.