Learning about Risk

The special issue "Learning about Risk" draws on the launch conference of the ESRC "Social Contexts and Responses to Risk" network (SCARR) held at 28th – 29th January 2005 in Canterbury. The SCARR network is an interdisciplinary network on risk which examines perceptions of and responses to risk in a range of areas, including sexual behaviour and partnering choices, the mass media, faith and ethnicity, pensions and financial planning, industrial pollution, crime, transport, energy policy and environmental hazards. The network's launch conference reflected the interdisciplinary character of risk research including a range of different methods and approaches to risk, directed at diverse objects of interest. The idea of the special issue is to link together this diversity and interdisciplinarity in risk research, and to encourage perspectives that look beyond the boundaries of single disciplines and methodological approaches. The papers in this publication demonstrate the value of insights from different disciplinary backgrounds in this area and point to the opportunities and challenges in the work that remains to be done in drawing these several perspectives more closely together.