Charting a politics of hope through representation

Editor’s summary: Phillip Wadick comments ‘I have been forced to insert my body into the frame as I contemplate what facilitates safe bodies’. His various representational forms support a position towards workplace health and safety research that offers alternatives to dominant structuralist and positivist paradigms that tend to objectify and commodify the body. His ‘wanderings and wonderings’ occur in a field where workers’ are so sceptical of the about ‘visibility politics’ around safety they expose themselves to bodily risks. The disjunction between the ‘theoretical and impersonal bodies’ of dominant technical and medical discourses of workplace safety and the human encounters and social interactions affecting ’individual and personal bodies’ led him to disrupt ‘old certainties’ and fixed oppositions in favour of poststructuralist thinking and alternative forms of representing knowledge. Hope emerged where workers ‘found energy for change in the space between the arbitrary and unhelpful oppositions’.