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The article provides information on the conference titled "Multidimensional Risks in the XXI Century" organized by the ISA/ESA network on Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty. It discusses the challenges posed by risk and uncertainty in the modern world, particularly in the context of megacities, and emphasizes the need for new analytical frameworks and ideas to understand and navigate these complexities.

The notion of 'organized irresponsibility', developed by Ulrich Beck in the eighties in relation to environmental risks, highlights the pervasiveness of decision-making processes in which it is no longer possible to identify an agent to whom cause and guilt can be attributed for the negative consequences of an action. This article claims that this concept remains analytically relevant for interpreting the transformations of responsibility in today's process of oscillation between de-politicization and hyperpoliticization. On one side, de-politicization represents decisions about the definition and management of global risks as technical, apolitical or even value-free, removing them - along with their corollary of responsibility - from the political arena. On the opposite side, the rhetoric and practices of hyper-politicization, based on the delegitimization of expert knowledge, reconfigure the decision-making space, revitalizing the role of the politician as a protagonist and opening the way to post-factual politics. The article argues, however, that coexistence of forms of post-factual politics and pressures towards the de-politicization of contentious issues produces what is only apparently a paradox. In both these processes, the responsibility for political decisions is significantly weakened and emptied of meaning, often making it impossible to assign recompense and blame, and opening the way to political action that is increasingly heedless of responsibility for consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media studies emphasise the increasing use of security frames in migration reporting around the world, but they rarely engage in systematic analysis of risk language. Studying the use of risk language in media discourse could advance our understanding of how migration has come to be perceived, staged and handled as a risk by discursively constructing links to possible future harm for the security of individuals and societies. Using a dictionary-based approach, this study examines how the word 'risk' and other close terms, such as 'danger' and 'threat', are used in the press coverage of migration in Germany and Italy in 2015–16. The findings show that different risk words not only coexist but often compete with each other to convey specific interpretations of the issue. By associating migration to specific topics of debate the media emphasise harmful consequences for the host societies and trigger an understanding of migration as a threat to security. These findings draw attention to the interaction between the construction and the control of risk, and to the performative power of language in mobilizing symbolic and material resources to address social issues. The study also confirms that systematic analysis of media texts can offer a more informed understanding of the relation between analytical and lay concepts of risk, even if variations across languages suggest some caution when using a comparative approach to study risk discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, terrorist attacks in European cities, together with the so-called 'refugee crisis', have (re)ignited a debate on whether there is an association between the two issues. Drawing on sociological approaches to risk and uncertainty, I claim that the discursive construction of causal linkages connecting refugees and migrants to terrorist activities is a fundamental passage in the process of social construction of migration as a threat. To identify the terrorism–migration linkages constructed in/through the media, this article examines the coverage of migration issues in two Italian and two German newspapers in 2015 and 2016, combining computer-assisted and qualitative content analysis. My findings reveal, firstly, how and in what circumstances the discourse on the terrorism threat is conflated with the discourse on migration. Then, the in-depth analysis of causal links in the coverage of four main terror attacks in Europe shows the predominance of a chain of causation linking terrorism to new migrants and refugees. Given the limited empirical research informing the debate over the migration–terrorism nexus, this study contributes to a better understanding of the process of social construction of migrants as threat objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 30 years, the relevance of risk for social actors and societies has been coupled with a growing academic debate extending across disciplines and practical fields. In the sociological literature, however, risk remains a concept with a disputed and overly comprehensive meaning. To overcome the conceptual stretching of risk, this article suggests a conceptualization which intends not only to better specify what risk is but also to distinguish it from what it is not. Building on the principal theories and on recent research, the authors propose integrating into the conceptualization of risk not only the element of agency, which allows us to distinguish between risk and danger, but also the intentionality of social actors in the production of risks, which introduces the distinction between risk and threat. While risks are attributable to positive human intention, so that potential harm is an unintended side effect in the production of benefits, threats are attributable to ill-intentioned actors, deliberately acting to cause damage to others. Illustrating their position with concrete examples, related to health, migration, terrorism and other domains, the authors argue that such a distinction may shed light on why threats are more likely than risks to gain public attention and to mobilize people and institutions to face them. The article suggests that a tripartite typology of dangers, risk and threats may be of relevance for sociological theory and research on risk and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]