What is Risk? Four Approaches to the Embodiment of Health Risk in Public Health

Abstract

Risk is a quotidian concept in public health, but there is little research on how ‘health risk’ is corporally experienced. In this article we apply sociological theories to analyse how a sample of 13 individuals made sense of embodied health risk. The data were collected through the adults sculpting, life-lining, and participating in interviews in Toronto, Canada in Autumn 2016. Through these activities we explored how participants related their embodied futures to their presents and pasts. Four approaches to how ‘health risk’ connects the body through time emerged from our analysis, focusing particularly on the interview data: the shit happens approach, the sequelae approach, the risk as heuristic approach, and the knowledge approach. These approaches elucidate how individuals make uncertain embodied futures stable through the different interpretations of the concept of risk. Our account of these four approaches builds on recent health risk research by providing individual, embodied accounts of risk that show how understandings of health risk connect individuals to broader systems. The four approaches have implications for considering pathways to achieving health justice, developing public health ethics, and understanding the role embodied risk plays in individual experiences of unequal health structures.