Post-tropical cyclone Fiona made landfall in Nova Scotia, Canada, in September 2022 with the force of a Category 2 hurricane. Using \'risk society\' as an analytical framework, and Thomas A. Birkland\'s \'focusing event\' concept, this paper seeks to understand how publics construct risk in the context of climate change and how institutions engage with those narratives. A qualitative content analysis of 439 newspaper articles from across Canada reveals that most media provide a superficial description of hazard impacts. When media are critical, they connect Fiona to climate change, other extreme events, social vulnerability, and systemic inequality. In response to Fiona and industry trends, insurance representatives indicate a withdraw from covering low-probability, high-consequence events owing to ambiguity in risk analysis and financial interests, complicating hazard relief. Political actors\' rhetoric is strong-delivering relief in unprecedented ways and offering new adaptive policy. However, a history of unfulfilled political promises to act on climate change elicits scepticism from media sources.

This conclusion revisits the COVID-19 pandemic from the broader perspective of a changing global world. It raises questions regarding the opportunities for global learning under conditions of global divisions and competition and includes learning from the Other, governing within a changing public sphere, and challenging national cultural practices. Moreover, it exemplifies how the society-nature-technology nexus has become crucial for understanding and reconstructing the dynamics of the coronavirus crisis such as the assemblages of geographical conditions, technological means and the governing of ignorance, the occurrence of hotspots as well as living under lockdown conditions. It finishes with some preliminary suggestions how reoccurring pandemics might contribute to long-term changes in human attitudes and behaviour towards the environment and a technologically shaped lifeworld.

Individuals in high-income countries increasingly express less scientific optimism than in lower-income societies. In this article, we utilize risk society theory to understand the complicated relationship between individual- and country-level factors, and optimism toward the role of science in society in \"reflexively modern\" societies. We use multilevel modeling with 16 high-income countries to determine the individual-level and country-level factors that shape scientific optimism. Next, we look at the individual characteristics that affect scientific optimism in each country individually. At the individual level, we find that older people, the more highly educated and higher earning, those farther to the Right on the political spectrum, and those with more materialist (rather than postmaterialist) attitudes have higher scientific optimism, while more religious people have lower optimism regarding science. At the country level, we make a corollary argument about materialism: societies that have higher measles immunization rates, generate more electricity from fossil fuels, and have a greater percentage of mobile phone subscriptions, have populaces that are more optimistic toward science.

As an important yardstick of social modernization, nuclear technology not only promotes the in-depth development of the national economy but also hangs a sword of Damocles in the field of the risk society. Against the background of the unrest of the nuclear leakage disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Japanese government has announced its unilateral decision to discharge nuclear sewage into the sea, undoubtedly putting at least the Pacific Rim countries at huge potential risks. In order to maximize risk reduction and focus on preventive construction in advance, Japan\'s measures to discharge accident nuclear sewage into the sea have a legitimate basis for the application of an environmental impact assessment system. At the same time, in the process of operation, there are numerous risk dilemmas, such as lack of safety treatment standards, long follow-up disposal cycle and negative domestic supervision system, which need to be broken through one by one. The effective application of the environmental impact assessment system in the Japanese nuclear accident not only helps to reduce the environmental crisis caused by accidental nuclear effluent discharge to the sea but also has a positive and far-reaching international demonstration significance, which helps to better build a foundation of international trust and preventive guarantee system in advance for the possible accidental nuclear effluent treatment in the future.

In modern society, law is one of the most important means of risk prevention and control. Under the challenge of ecological and environmental risks, China\'s legal governance experience provides important historical experience and theoretical samples for other countries. Faced with problems, such as the difficulty of eliminating risks, risk decisions themselves bring risks, and the huge social cost of risk response, the social system theory can provide novel and new ideas for the cognition and response of environmental risks. Combining the experience of judicial practice with social theory, especially Niklas Luhmann\'s doctrine of the risk/danger dichotomy, a clearer functional orientation can be given to judicial powers based on risk communication and risk attribution. By reviewing the ecological judicial practices in China, Germany, and other countries, the role of the legal system in stabilizing the normative expectations of the whole of society can be summarized, which will provide a reference for the risk response and legal governance of the global ecological environment.

Current global crises and threats have revealed the growing implications of Ulrich Beck\'s theory of risk society. Rather than being a theory of risk, risk society theory is more a social theory of the new social world and modernity. Risk society theory encompasses a new social ontology of the social in the era of uncertainties and crises. Beck also proposes the cosmopolitan outlook and particularly methodological cosmopolitanism as the epistemology and methodology of the world risk society. Yet, a close examination of Beck\'s social theory reveals a contradiction between the two aspects. On the one hand, in the ontological dimension, we are faced with the primacy of the indeterminate and the empirical, but on the other hand, Beck\'s epistemological prescriptive eliminate the possibility of reaching them. The current article aims to address this incompatibility. In doing so, first, the main pillars of risk society theory, and then the cosmopolitan outlook and sociology are discussed. By criticizing Beck\'s epistemological apparatus as well as juxtaposing the theory of risk society and Pierre Bourdieu\'s theory of action and fields, in the final section, the article proposes a solution to complete the ontology of risk society and overcome some of its epistemological problems.

This contribution focuses on the dis/continuity of routines at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is conceived as a nexus of multiple, intertwined crises of action and interaction (ÖZS special issue 2016, 41/1). Instead of understanding crisis as an external facticity, i.e., external cause of change, we argue that actors negotiate crisis in sociomaterial processes within historically specific contexts. Taking up the debate in organizational studies on the conception and description of intentional change, this article adds a reflection on intentional routine changes in times of crises. In methodological terms, the article connects routine dynamics with the perspective of eventful sociology. Eventful sociology emphasizes that sociomaterial negotiations of routines can unfold to more far-reaching structural changes and therefore calls for a rigorous temporal description along paths. Based on the results of a process-oriented ethnographic study of Fridays for Future Vienna, the article identifies two conditional moments (normative-discursive and material-bodily) through which structure is made reflexive. Finally, the pursued understanding of reflexivity is embedded in the debate on the (world)risk society.

The global Covid-19 crisis reveals the very nature of the mobilized and interconnected risk society. Media discourse, everyday talk, science and arts process daunting questions such as Can we live a \"normal\" life, again?, What exactly will happen when the Corona pandemic becomes less dangerous? Can business, public and everyday life go back to how they used to be? These questions open up possibilities to rethink current forms of urban planning. In many ways this needs sophisticated methodologies for scenario building and modelling the possible paths for cities, collaboration, innovation, and creativity in finding appropriate solutions able to cope with pandemic situations. See Traditional and up to now functional divisions of labour and disciplinary boundaries between stakeholders need to be re-assessed. From 2014 to 2016 the authors conducted the explorative research project \'Mobilities Futures and the City\' aiming to investigate the potentials of combining the methodology of future workshops with art-based co-creation approaches in order to create storylines about the future of cities and mobilities. The methodological approach developed in the project was tested in two 5-day future workshops, in Denmark and Germany respectively. Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 situation, the article presents the methodological parts of the project since it has innovative potential with respect to urban planning and rethinking the relations of mobilities and the city. The paper documents results from the workshops and discusses them towards lessons learned for transdisciplinary approaches in urban mobility planning.

This article arises from the urgent need to reflect on the current situation resulting from the dramatic consequences of a crisis which appears to be epochal and which, as sociologists, questions us at first hand. This is to understand the socio-cultural, economic and technological processes that triggered it and to attempt to imagine future scenarios. At the dawn of the third millennium, it seems as if the juggernaut of modernity, with its dream of unlimited progress and cargo of unconditional trust in instrumental rationality, has abruptly slowed down. The pandemic challenges contemporary society to develop a different weltanschauung, alternative to the performative and conformist idea of social planification supported by the neoliberal paradigm. It compels us to finally acquire the consciousness that the complexity of knowledge and global interdependency require collective awareness, political participation, and shared responsibility.

In June 2015, proposed Ebola vaccine trials were suspended by the Ministry of Health of Ghana amid protests from members of parliament and the general public. Scholarship has often focused on the design, development, and administration of vaccines. Of equal importance are the social issues surrounding challenges with vaccine trials and their implementation. The purpose of this study was to analyze discourses in the media that led to the suspension of the 2015 Ebola vaccine trials in Ghana. I use a sociological lens drawing on moral panic and risk society theories. The study qualitatively analyzed discourses in 18 semi-structured interviews with media workers, selected online publications, and user comments about the Ebola vaccine trials. The findings show that discourses surrounding the Ebola vaccine trials drew on cultural, biomedical, historical, and even contextual knowledge and circumstances to concretize risk discourses and garner support for their positions. Historical, political, and cultural underpinnings have a strong influence on biomedical practices and how they are (not) accepted. This study highlights the complexity and challenges of undertaking much needed vaccine tests in societies where the notion of drug trials has underlying historical and sociological baggage that determine whether (or not) the trials proceed.