Time-framing and health risks: editorial

This special issue is the last in a four-part series Health Care Through the ‘Lens of Risk’, which focuses on risk categorisation, valuing, expecting and time-framing, respectively, and has been published in 2012-2013. The present editorial introduces the issue of time-framing in relation to an interview-based article, a guest editorial and six articles reporting findings from empirical research. The central argument of the editorial concerns the increasing abstractness of time within modernity, which renders risk thinking possible and exists alongside shifting subjectivities regarding time, as futures are increasingly reflected upon. The meaning given to contingent futures intensifies experiences of time in relation to the future and, therefore, the present. This argument is then problematised through reference to empirical studies of more passive attitudes to risk and where future considerations are avoided altogether. Different ways in which past, present and future are related to one another are also considered. We explore these themes before introducing the original research articles, interview-based article and guest editorial in this issue. Each original article explores time-framing within a different context including drinking alcohol away from licensed premises, expecting a baby as an older first-time mother, living with an advanced-stage cancer diagnosis, caring for a close-relative as a young person, long-term self-hurting and the journey towards a skin cancer diagnosis. Each of these contexts can be considered ‘risky’, partially depending on the time-framing invoked. The common theme linking these papers is the analysis of how futures are envisaged and how different approaches to time-framing are fundamental to perceptions and experiences of risk and uncertainty.