The Road to Ukraine and How the West Lost its Way with Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and social commentator. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

His most recent book is “The Road to Ukraine: How the West Lost its Way.”

Since the late 1990s, Frank has been widely cited about his views on why Western societies find it so difficult to engage with risk and uncertainty. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His book Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown (2007) explores the way in which the threat of terrorism has become amplified through the ascendancy of precautionary thinking. It develops the arguments contained in two previous books, Culture of Fear (2002) and Paranoid Parenting (2001). Both of these works investigate the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society.

Frank has also written extensively about issues to do with education and cultural life. His book, Wasted: Why Education Is Not Educating (2009) deals with the influence of the erosion of adult authority on schooling. On Tolerance (2011) offers a restatement of the importance of this concept for an open society. Authority: A Sociological History (2013) examines how the modern world has become far more comfortable with questioning authority than with affirming it.

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