The third revised edition of my book Risk, first published in 1999, and second edition published in 2013, is now out. The book has been extensively revised and expanded to take account of the risks that have emerged over the past decade.

A link to the book on Routledge’s website is here and the Google Books preview is here.

Below is the Preface I wrote for the third edition.

In the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century, risk was a key word in both public forums and academic research. The word ‘risk’ was used across social domains and institutions. The sociocultural and political aspects of risk and identifying the reasons for this intensification on risk identification, communication and management were a major preoccupation in the social sciences. The release in 1992 of the English translation of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society:…

This book has now been published. It is available from the Polity website here. A video of me giving a talk about the book is here.

Here is the list of contents:

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter, explaining the main themes and issues discussed in the book:

The Internet of Animals is the first book to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to consider how digital technologies are contributing to human-animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It builds on and extends a growing interest in social and cultural inquiry in: i) the digitization and datafication of humans and…

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, social media platforms have become well-known for both disseminating misinformation and conspiracy theories as well as acting as valuable information sources concerning the novel coronavirus and governments’ efforts to manage and contain COVID. Facebook in particular – the world’s most popular social media site – has been singled out as a key platform for naysayers such as anti-vaccination exponents and ‘sovereign citizens’ to express their resentment at containment measures such as lockdowns, quarantine and self-isolation regulations, vaccination mandates and face-covering rules.

What rationales and beliefs underpin these arguments? How and to what extent are they contested or debated on Facebook? What rhetorical strategies are employed by commentators to attempt to persuade others that their views/facts are correct?

To explore these questions, I chose a case study of a short video (2 minutes 5 seconds long) shared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Facebook on…

Last April, my co-authored book The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociomaterial Analysis was published (written with Clare Southerton, Marianne Clark and Ash Watson when we were all part of the Vitalities Lab that I lead at UNSW Sydney). We feature several images of face masks in the books: a few of which we had taken ourselves.

As the title of the book suggests, and as part of my interest in COVID cultures and everyday life, I am quite fascinated about how face masks have become part of more-than-human worlds across the globe since the advent of the COVID-19 crisis. I’ve continued to notice how face masks have become ‘wilded’ through being thoughtlessly discarded (or sometimes deliberately placed) in public places and on other objects, assembling with other dimensions of things, place and space.

Here’s a catalogue of some of these images I’ve taken so far. These masks are…