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

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.