Risks, Catastrophes and Emancipation: Decolonizing Risk Sociology

Beck’s early provoking claim that the logic of risk breaks up modern class hierarchy ignited an extensive critical debate in sociology. However, an established tradition of risk studies moves away from the rhetoric of ‘democratic risks’ acknowledging that the risk society does not dissolve inequalities. Rather it intensifies and structures them along multiple cleavages at the intersection between social class, gender, race, generation, and other forms of categorization. The unequal distribution of bad and good across social groups and world regions during the pandemic provided only the latest evidence of this process, showing how new relations of power overlap and entangle with old patterns of domination and subalternity. Forms of 'coloniality of power' in the risk society are not only intelligible in the relation between the global North and the global South, the centre and the periphery, cutting across them and opening up new dynamics of exclusion and exploitation.

• How do colonial epistemologies manifest and reproduce themselves through theories and practices of risks production and management.

• How does risk change our knowledge production and distribution?
• How new trajectories of struggles emerge in civil society?
• How do apocalyptic imaginaries turn into active and cooperative action?
• How do old and new normative horizons entangle?