In this ShortCut Professor Brian Wynne (Lancaster University) extends his introduction to Beck’s concept of Risk Society by developing the idea of reflexive modernisation.
While this film will be a bit more “difficult” for a-level students the ideas Wynne discusses can be made more-accessible by relating them to various contemporary real-world examples – these range from examples of environmentalist activism and protest, through the recent referendum on Britain’s EU membership (“Brexit”) to the Donald Trump presidential campaign in America.
More-specifically the film touches on a range of related ideas:
- organised irresponsibility
- human-generated risks
- institutional alienation
- sub-politics
- new forms of modernity