Visualizing risk: using participatory photography to explore individuals’ sense-making of risk

Abstract

Although the field of risk research is increasingly alert to new theoretical and empirical perspectives, it is still the case that few studies take a visual approach, despite its obvious worth in capturing people’s experiences of everyday life. This paper considers how a visual approach can be used to deepen our knowledge of sense-making of risk, particularly young people’s views on risk. It presents empirical findings from a study that uses participatory photography to capture what individuals define as serious risks in everyday life and how these risks are expressed (722 participants in Sweden, aged 5–33, mostly children or adolescents). The conclusion is that focusing on stories embedded in images independently contributes new knowledge about how the individual makes sense of risk in everyday life, and especially that visual methods of data collection and analysis illuminate how individual sense-making of risk is intertwined with other aspects of meaning-making in everyday life. In other words, it is time for a visual turn in risk research.

Keywords:

• sense-making of risk
• visual sociology
• participatory photography
• visual narrative analysis

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and the non-governmental organization Vetenskap & Allmänhet (Public and Science), the invaluable partners in the ‘Images of Risk’ study. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency funded the research in the shape of the author’s postdoctoral research project, ‘The individual’s driving force in preventing accidents and crises’. The views expressed in this paper are my personal views, and are not necessarily shared by the project’s institutional partners. I would like to express my great gratitude to the anonymous reviewer for numerous constructive comments and to Ian Davison for his comments on an earlier version of the article.