Mid Sweden University

This paper maps a current trend in risk research, namely intersectional analysis of risk. In the last decades the concept of risk has spread into almost all kinds of societal domains. The original focus on technical and environmental risks has transferred to areas such as health, crime, regulation, social inequality, public and social policy, and global risk as well as the management of risks in everyday life and intimate relationships. Scientific advances and the global media have together created a long string of alarms about risks of different magnitude: from more recent the Covid 19 pandemic, to terrorist threats. The distribution and impact of these risks are not equal, instead they tend to follow and reinforce already existing structural inequalities. In the wake of this development we have seen a growing body of feminist and intersectional approaches in the study of risk. The two perspectives informs each other: On the one hand, the  intersectional perspective advance risk research by clarifying how new complexities in the reproduction of social inequalities brought about by globalization and the intersections between social class, gender, ethnicity, and other social categorisations, are connected to the production of risks. Risk research, on the other hand, inform intersectional analysis by clarifying the mechanisms in risk governance that are reproducing old inequalities (i.e., class and gender) and producing new inequalities.  Through a systematic literature review, this paper aims to map insights and viewpoints from scholars regarding intersectional analyses of risks associated with inequality on an individual, group or community level, including analyses of individual perception and behaviour, policy, mass media and discourses.