Major works on risk (forthcoming)

Professor Adam Burgess is publishing Major Works on Risk for Sage in 2016, a 4 volume collection of key articles on risk, from the 1960s to today.

Journal of the risk research commemorative issue (forthcoming)

Professor Burgess is co-editing a special commemorative issue of the Journal of Risk Research on Ulrich Beck, with Professor Gabe Mythen from the University of Liverpool. Many leading scholars on the work of Beck are contributing toward the special issue.

Dr Joy Zhang is contributing an essay on cosmopolitanism for this commemorative issue.

Beyond the risk paradigm in mental health (forthcoming)

Dr Jo Warner is one of four co-editors (two from the UK, one from the US and one from Australia) of an international co-edited volume entitled ‘Beyond the Risk Paradigm in Mental Health’. The book is one of a series of three books for Palgrave Macmillan due for publication in 2015/early 2016 which will explore the shared theme of ‘beyond the risk paradigm’. The other two volumes focus on criminal justice and child protection respectively. The series of books is the result of an international collaboration on risk, which represents an attempt to challenge the dominant discourses on risk in the human services that revolve around blame and risk-averse practice. The group meet in Prato Italy every two years.

Routledge handbook of risk studies, April 2016

Published in April 2016, edited by Adam Burgess, Jens Zinn and Alberto Alemanno.

This is the first Handbook of Risk Studies. An ambitious project it comprises over 50 chapters, written by scholars from many different disciplinary backgrounds, such as law, history, environmental hazards, and social science. There isn’t yet a clearly defined ‘risk studies’. This handbook intends to set this out, through a process of drawing together the wide range of risk-related research in different fields. In the process, we hope the book will begin to challenge some of the conventional divides in risk research: between disciplines, between American and European approaches, between the more objective and subjective and between social and natural science. Across all these approaches we’re suggesting a sense of risk not as a simple ‘thing’ that can be indisputably calculated, but a modern way of making sense of, and responding to, uncertainty that is subject to social influence and decision-making. We can roughly locate risk studies as an enterprise that began in late 1960s America with work by Starr, Douglas and others. The range of risk research and professional risk assessment and management has expanded enormously and evolved since that time, of course – not least in how (public) risk perception is no longer dismissed. The handbook maps out this range of research, including newly emerging areas and fields that have conventionally been separated, such as regulation.

Special issue health, risk and society on risk and parenting culture (2010)

This special issue was one output from an ESCR-funded seminar series, Changing Parenting Culture. It comprises articles based on papers given as part of the series which commonly assess how risks to child health and wellbeing are presented from pre-conception, through pregnancy and in early childhood. The articles indicate how accounts of risk often rely more on moralised precepts about what it means to be a good parent, especially a good mother, rather than balanced assessments of the health effects of parenting practices such as bottle feeding.