Visual Expressions of Embodied Risk: Body Maps as a Means of Reflecting and Understanding the Meaning of Health Risk in Research and Teching

With increasing opportunities of early detection of risk in biomedicine, the communication of statistical likelihood of disease has gained importance. Risk communication is committed to the support of risk literacy, assumed to be a prerequisite for making informed decisions to minimise one’s risk. Graphical representations play a crucial role in this context; among others, stylised human silhouettes are employed to visualise likelihoods, for ex- ample to indicate the number of persons out of one hundred who will or will not get the disease. While this may sup- port risk literacy in terms of more easily ‘grasping’ abstract statistics, still a risk likelihood is difficult to comprehend in terms of its meaning for one’s individual life. So what if this principle is inverted and the stylised human silhouette is used instead to visualise the individual and collective meaning attributed to a certain – actual or envisioned – disease risk? In the context of a study on health literacy among persons with an increased disease risk, we employed body maps in research and in teaching. In the research project, we conducted narrative interviews with 20 persons who had been informed about having an increased risk for familial breast and ovarian cancer or psychosis. Towards the end of each interview, we invited our informants to do a body mapping exercise, using a stylised human silhou- ette on a sheet of paper and asking them to sketch their risk. In teaching, we invited medical students attending an ethics seminar to do a body mapping exercise in small groups based on a case example, using a stylised human silhouette on a flip chart sheet.