Jens O. Zinn - The UK at Risk: A Corpus Approach to Historical Social Change 1785--2009

Palgraves Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty series publishes monographs, edited volumes and Palgrave Pivots that capture and analyse how societies, organisations, groups and individuals experience and confront uncertain futures. An array of approaches for mitigating vulnerability to undesired futures has emerged within social contexts around the world and across history, with risk being seen as an especially salient technique to have emerged within, while also characterising, processes of modernisation. These approaches have attracted the critical attention of scholars across a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines including sociology, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, economics, linguistics, philosophy and political science. This series will provide a multidisciplinary home to consolidate this dynamic and growing academic field, bringing together and representing the state of the art on various topics within the broader domain of critical studies of risk and uncertainty. It aims to provide cutting edge theoretical and empirical, as well as established and emerging methodological contributions. The series welcomes projects on risk, trust, hope, intuition, emotions and faith. Moreover, the series is sensitive to the broader political, structural and socio-cultural conditions in which particular approaches to complexity and uncertainty become legitimated ahead of others. Explorations of the institutionalisation of approaches to uncertainty within regulatory and other governmental regimes is also of interest.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15840

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This publication is based on research conducted at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) centres Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University (July 2016December 2018) as part of a Marie Skodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship Understanding the discourse-semantic shift towards risk in the UK and Germany (UnRI) (Grant Number 701836, H2020-MSCA-IF-2015). I am grateful for the funding I received from the ESRC which enabled me to move from Australia to Europe and to develop my skills in corpus research. I would also like to thank Tony McEnery, Patrick Brown, Tom Baker and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Julia Cook, Liz Dean and Anna Anderson for their constructive suggestions to further improve the manuscript in content and style. It is always a pleasure to work with such inspiring colleagues.