CASS is delighted to welcome Jens Zinn to the centre after being awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship! This is an extremely prestigious award, named after the double Nobel Prize winning Polish-French scientist famed for her work on radioactivity. The fellowships support outstanding scholars at all stages of their careers, irrespective of nationality.

Jens has studied and taught at many universities in Germany, and in 2009 he was appointed Associate Professor and Reader in Sociology at The University of Melbourne. Jens has founded a number of international research networks on the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty (SoRU). The joint internet portal of these groups is open to everyone to contribute to current debates and ongoing activities. His research activities include a number of studies on people’s management of risk and uncertainty during the course of their life (e.g. youth transitions into the labour market; certainty constructions in reflexive modernity; British veteran’s management of risk and uncertainty). He led a collaborative research initiative ‘Risk, Social Inclusion and the Life Course – A Social Policy Perspective’ at the University of Melbourne and a research project ‘Decision Taking in Times of Uncertainty. Towards an efficient strategy to manage risk and uncertainty in climate change adaptation’ funded by the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research. Most recently he has worked with Daniel Mcdonald on a project examining the change of the risk semantic in the New York Times from an historical perspective combining corpus linguistics with sociology.

Here at CASS, Jens will be working with Professor Tony McEnery on a project which aims to advance our understanding of the forces that have driven the proliferation of risk discourses in the UK and Germany since World War Two. Working at the boundaries of risk sociology and corpus linguistics, this is a highly innovative enterprise, both theoretically and methodologically. It will examine the contribution made by main-stream risk theories to explaining the increasing use of the risk semantic in media coverage during the last 50 years, and it will develop an empirically grounded theory of the observable shift towards risk. Jens will utilise cutting-edge corpus-based research strategies to systematically reconstruct the changing use of the discourse-semantics of risk and will complement these with interviews of media experts to examine how these changes are linked to institutional and socio-cultural changes and historically significant events.

CASS would like to congratulate Jens on securing this highly esteemed fellowship, and we are very much looking forward to working with Jens on this exciting project!

Check back soon for more updates!