Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspectives

by Edited by Deborah Lupton

• ISBN13: 9780521645546
• ISBN10: 0521645549
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book presents a variety of exciting new perspectives on the perception of risk and the strategies that people adopt to cope with it. Using the framework of recent social and cultural theory, it reflects the fact that risk has become integral to contemporary understandings of selfhood, the body and social relations, and is central to the work of writers such as Douglas, Beck, Giddens and the Foucauldian theorists. The contributors are all leading scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies and cultural anthropology. Combining empirical analyses with metatheoretical critiques, they tackle an unusually diverse range of topics including drug use, risk in the workplace, fear of crime and the media, risk and pregnant embodiment, the social construction of danger in childhood, anxieties about national identity, the governmental uses of risk and the relationship between risk phenomena and social order.

Author Biography

Deborah Lupton is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy and Director of the Centre for Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	vii
Introduction: risk and sociocultural theory	1	(11)
Deborah Lupton
Postmodern reflections on `risk', `hazards' and life choices	12	(22)
Nick Fox
Fear of crime and the media: sociocultural theories of risk	34	(25)
John Tulloch
Risk and the ontology of pregnant embodiment	59	(27)
Deborah Lupton
Risk anxiety and the social construction of childhood	86	(22)
Stevi Jackson
Sue Scott
Constructing an endangered nation: risk, race and rationality in Australia's native title debate	108	(23)
Eva Mackey
Risk, calculable and incalculable	131	(29)
Mitchell Dean
Ordering risks	160	(26)
Stephen Crook
Index	186