What isSafe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk

Nick Stevenson

doi:10.5153/sro.1105

Abstract

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.

Highlights

The idea of ‘progress’ is both normative and tied up with the economic, political and cultural development of modernity
The important question is how to develop a politics of citizenship that neither retreats into a celebration of consumption nor moralistic reaction
The imaginative possibilities provided by cultural citizenship in respect of risk would have to compete with the lure of both privatised escape attempts and fundamentalist forms of certitude

Summary

Introduction

The idea of ‘progress’ is both normative and tied up with the economic, political and cultural development of modernity. Beck describes the risk society as a social crisis demonstrating little concern with the way different populations, cultures and political movements might reinterpret and interrupt dominant conceptions of ‘the natural’. The film Safe was chosen as it seeks to address many of the complex issues related to science, risk and citizenship that I sought to discuss in the previous section.

Results

Conclusion