136-418 Risk, Environment and Modernity

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

None

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

The course explores the relationship between technological development, environmental risk, and modernity through a critical analysis of Ulrich Beck's concept of a risk society and thesis of reflexive modernisation. According to Beck, modernisation can be understood as a process of industrial innovation that has become autonomous. He describes a phase of development of modern society in which the social, political, environmental and individual risks created by the momentum of technological development increasingly elude the control of protective institutions of industrial societies and give rise to what he terms a risk society. Beck's thesis has elicited a range of critical responses. It has, for example, been suggested that Beck adopts an overly realist view of risk; that his location of knowledge production is problematic for the relationship between expert and lay discourses; and that his account of a risk society has implications for other themes important in theories of modernity such as environmentalism, individualism and the political. The course examines Beck's work and critical responses to it, and explores the value of this debate for our understanding of technological risk, the environment, and modernity.

Assessment

Written work not exceeding 6000 words.

Prescribed Texts

• Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications London, 1992.