John Tulloch

'Life would be pretty dull without risk': Voluntary risk-taking and its pleasures

Most writing in the social sciences on risk-taking tends to represent it as the product of ignorance or irrationality. The modern subject tends to be portrayed in this writing as risk-aversive and fearful of risk, constantly seeking ways of avoiding it. While there has been an extensive literature on peoples perceptions of risk, little empirical research has attempted to investigate the meanings given to voluntary risk-taking: that is, risk-taking that is undertaken without coercion in the full acknowledgement that risks are being confronted. In this article we present findings from our qualitative research on a group of Australians risk knowledges and experiences, using in-depth interviews to explore the meanings given to risk and the discourses used to express ideas about risk. We focus here on what our interviewees had to say about their experiences of, and views about, voluntary risk-taking. We identify and discuss three dominant discourses in our interviewees accounts: those of self-improvement, emotional engagement and control. Our conclusion relates these discourses to wider discourses and notions about subjectivity and embodiment.

`Risk is Part of Your Life': Risk Epistemologies Among a Group of Australians

Much has been written by important sociocultural theorists about the role played by risk in late modern societies, and some, like Beck and Giddens, have ventured to contend that industrial society is turning into `risk society. Little empirical research has been conducted, however, that has sought to examine the speculations of grand theories about `risk society. This article discusses findings from an Australian interview-based study that sought to elicit the participants understandings of the notion of risk. Three major issues from the interviews are examined: the ways in which the participants defined `risk, the risks they nominated as most threatening to themselves and those they saw as threatening Australians in general. The findings reveal that the `risk society thesis was supported in some ways. Other findings, however, challenged this thesis, including the participants critique of governments role in protecting its citizens from risk, the ways in which many of them represented risk-taking as positive, their relative inattention to environmental risk and the role played by such factors as gender, age and sexual identity in structuring risk perceptions.

Consuming Risk, Consuming Science The case of GM foods

This article presents some findings from a study investigating notions of risk among Britons, with a focus on interviewees working as professionals in high technology (high-tech) or science industries. The discussion examines our interviewees’ responses to risks related to the consumption of genetically modified (GM) food. Our study sought to elicit personal experiences as part of an individual biography of risk which included specific concerns about food consumption as part of an ‘everyday’ set of risk perceptions. We found that many interviewees enjoyed adopting a ‘scientific knowledge’ identity in the interview, emphasizing seeking ‘fact’ about the risk associated with GM foods from a wide range of media ‘opinion’, and were confident about their own ability to control most risks. However, they also constructed a ‘two nations’ view of a knowledge-based economy, involving a disparity between ‘haves’ (themselves) and others, generally because of the faster, more demanding, no ‘job for life’ nature of the ‘flexible economy’. Consumption - including consumption of science - far from being a democratic equivalence of citizenship, was thus seen as the historical cause of ontological insecurity.

The Adolescent `Unfinished Body', Reflexivity and HIV/AIDS Risk

School-based sexuality education is a type of sexology directed at specific bodies: `unfinished adolescent bodies in the process of becoming sexual bodies. This article explores notions of the adolescent `unfinished body in the context of HIV/AIDS education for young people. Drawing on empirical research carried out in Australian secondary schools, we look at the concepts of the project of the self and reflexivity as they are articulated by young people in their evaluation of HIV/AIDS education. The open character of self identity and the reflexively monitored nature of the body were emphasized by the young people in their attempted construction of intimacy and sexuality. The discourses of openness and trust and the reliance on both `expert and `experiential knowledges were evident in the ways in which they dealt with the risk of HIV/AIDS. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these data for the theorizing of risk and reflexivity.

‘All red in the face’: students’ views on school-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education

School-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education is a fraught area, the site of struggles around moral values, knowledge, the nature of childhood and adolescence and pedagogy. The dominant discourses on HIV/AIDS and sexuality education in Australian secondary schools, as evident in policy documents, are currently predominantly libertarian and therapeutic, championing the need for ‘openness’ in the interests of the students emotional maturity and social responsibility and their good health. However, policy does not always translate readily into practice. This article draws upon a study involving focus group discussions with Australian senior high school students concerning their responses to the school-based HIV/AIDS and sexuality education programmes in which they have taken part and other sources of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The article focuses in detail upon the students valorizing of openness, trust and expertise in the face of the embarrassment, their perception of surveillance and their fears of lack of confidentiality that characterize their experience of HIV/AIDS and sexuality education. It is concluded that the nature of the teacher-adolescent relationship tends to work against the achievement of the objectives of such education.

Risk, the mass media and personal biography: Revisiting Beck's knowledge, media and information society'

Ulrich Beck’s formulation of the ‘risk society’ stresses the central importance of the media, yet is surprisingly reticent about analysing it. This article begins with Beck’s positioning of the media within risk modernity, and argues that in two major dimensions – the different media narrativizations of risk and expertise, and the mutability and mobility of people’s risk identities in their everyday experience – his analysis is significantly lacking. In the Australian research on which this article is based, the authors draw on long interviews as a methodological device, and the ‘border crossings’ contained in risk biographies as a central concept, in examining people’s construction and reconstruction of risk. Rather then Beck’s somewhat universalizing notion of ‘blind citoyens’ facing the catastrophic democracy of environmental risk, we find here a public which draws on a number of circuits of communication in facing a wide range of risks via very specific biographical and social histories. The article examines these situated logics and temporally articulated biographies of everyday life via case studies.

Border Crossings: Narratives of Movement, 'Home' and Risk

Despite the extensive sociological literature commenting on the ‘risk society’, surprisingly little empirical research has explored the ways in which notions, narratives and knowledges concerning risks are developed, understood and embedded in personal risk biographies. In particular, this is true of some of the most vulnerable people in the risk society: those who have migrated for reasons of personal, religious, economic, material or ideological persecution. This article addresses risk perceptions of immigrants to Australia, using data from a larger project on Australians’ perceptions and negotiation of risk. The emphasis of the research is on dimensions of risk biography that highlight matters of multiple identity and subjectivities. Drawing on three such risk biographies, we pose and begin to answer a number of specific questions: How have people come to construct their knowledges on risks? Which risks do people find most threatening or important? Whom do people see as causing or having responsibility over risk? How do people posit solutions for dealing with risk? In doing so we critique Becks notion of the ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘democratised’ notion of risk within ‘risk modernity’.

Approaching theatre audiences: Active school students and commoditised high culture

This article is part of a wider ranging research programme examining theatre audience research via an analysis of “Chekhov: In Criticism, Performance and Reading”, which was funded by the Australian Research Council and included theatre production and audience research in the USA, Britain and Australia. In this article he examines school students as audiences for “canonical” theatre (Chekhov and Shakespeare), drawing on new cultural approaches to reception studies, high culture and issues of “expert” knowledge.

Tales of Outrage and the Everyday: Fear of Crime and Bodies at Risk

A couple of years ago, in the small community of Snowtown in South Australia, police announced the discovery in a disused bank vault of a number of bodies decomposing in drums of acid. The find created great media and public interest, particularly as further bodies were located, in what was rapidly labelled Australia’s worst serial killing. Yet, despite the rather ghoulish fascination, the response to the case evinced none of the wave of emotion, indignation and demand for public action that accompanied the massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania, some years earlier. It appears not all bodies are equal, nor do their deaths generate the same level of fear and anxiety about the risk of violent crime. These two multiple killings present contrasting moral tales, each disclosing the frames through which the media and the public interpret and react to violence. The chapter uses the concept of outrage to explore how bodies, and in particular female bodies, are constructed as sites of risk and to suggest how such representations can be challenged.

Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Literature

It is now two decades since Lucien Goldmann published his monumental Le Dieu Cache, believing that this was but the first of a series of empirical studies which would put the sociology of literature on a sound basis. Since then, it is true, a few courses (even the odd lectureship) have been established in the sociology of literature, the rare book written which relies heavily on Goldmanns theories, such as Laurenson and Swingewoods introductory text,1 the occasional article published which tentatively applies his methods, but there has beerl virtually no extension nor even testing of his theories via major case studies. In fact the most recent contributions avowedly ignore the remarkably unworked potential of Goldmanns theories. In an article depressingly entitled Can there be a sociology of literature ?, Ivan RuS2 reduces this potential to no more than the portmanteau use of the concept of alienation and, thus reduced, sweeps Goldmann and the Marxists aside for a very limited and ill-defined sociology of literature indeed, somehow related to linguistic deprivation in mass society. Forster and Kenneford are equally tentative in their alternative approach derived from Parsons, but expressly reject as significant sociology a concern for art as individual action. They are particularly severe with the world view approach of Goldmann. Theoretically vague and over-general, as they see it, it is difEcult to see what contribution is made by work of of this sort. Whatever contribution to intellectual life is made, it is not sociological theory which benefits.3 All this seems unnecessarily pessimistic, as well as restricting. Since not only literary critics of the stature of Raymond Williams,4 but also sociologists working in other fields of theory5 value the potential of Goldmanns work, it is surely premature for sociologists of literature to forget him. There is little doubt that the world view approach has itself been unnecessarily reductionist, particularly in its neglect of artistic conventions (and often, with Goldmann, arbitrary in application as well6). This is an argument of course for greater sophistication, whereas a feature of recent articles has been a narrowing down of options, and a characteristic silence on theories from outside sociology proper (such as those from linguistics and semiotics), as well as on complementary approaches from within the discipline, such as Elizabeth