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Well, thank you very much for the invitation and of course for the kind introduction.

I'm not going to have any PowerPoint presentation and that's for two reasons.

One is that I'm a sociologist and whenever there's a geographer in the room,

self-respecting sociologists should never make any PowerPoint.

The second reason is that to compensate for our difficulties in making very good PowerPoint,

we need a lot of pictures and these can only be carried in CDs.

To move about with CDs crossing the border from Switzerland to Germany is a very risky thing.

So when Fred Krueger kindly asked me whether I would like to attend this workshop,

I eagerly jumped at the suggestion by offering thoughts which I have since come to regret.

I said, yes, oh, yes, culture, yeah, I know stuff there that could be said about translation and so on.

And I regret it for two reasons.

One is because Fred Krueger thought they were deep enough for me to elaborate upon them

and present them here in a keynote and when I saw the list of participants,

I realized that I was going to meet my bibliography.

Second, because when I offered those thoughts, I was not really aware of the history of these workshops

and the kind of thinking you have been engaged in, at least since Bielefeld.

So I have the feeling that you have said everything there is to be said about the issue.

Perhaps the only reason to speak here is that everything that's been said about the issue has not been said by everyone.

So I'm going to take that opportunity to repeat that stuff.

Now, had I known this and in particular had I been aware of the discussion you had on culture

in an earlier workshop and the kinds of conclusions which you drew from those discussions,

I would have been more careful and I would have tried to rein in my enthusiasm.

Sometime about four or five weeks ago, I realized it was too late to withdraw,

not only because my name was already on the official program,

but also because I had myself warmed up to the idea and had started to think through all the issues

that I find so important about disasters and cultures.

So I'm pleased to have this opportunity to present these ideas to you

and I hope they can contribute towards a fruitful discussion of the issues which worry us.

From the way I will argue, you will notice that I have a slightly different take on disaster.

While it is true that I worked quite a lot on disasters,

especially doing research on floods and the civil war and the drought in Mozambique

and collaborating with Dieter Neubert at the University of Bayreuth in Germany

on floods in Frankfurt, Oder and on the Tennessee Valley

and engaging in lively and interesting conversation with Fred Krueger,

with Suru Samimi and Dattaf Moola-Mahn on vulnerability and resilience,

I've always sought to focus my attention on the sociological implications of these phenomena.

In other words, my main concern has not really been disasters as such,

but rather what they enable me to say about the constitution of social relations

and what meaning this may have for sociology and for the attempt to do sociology.

So this is the reason why I have always seen my work on these issues

as part of the broader field of risk sociology.

I co-edited a book with Elke Gehnen and Lars Klausen, two German sociologists,

and this book was supposed to be a general introduction into the sociology of disasters here in Germany,

but deep in my heart I've always felt that what I was doing was risk sociology,

that is the study of the role and place of contingency in society

and the concomitant search for, if you like, an algorithm that may enable us

to describe what makes society possible beyond the overbearing power of structures.

And from time to time I make inroads into the sociology of technology in search of this algorithm,

but my home base is the sociology of risk,