Risk is a quotidian concept in public health, but there is little research on how ‘health risk’ is corporally experienced. In this article we apply sociological theories to analyse how a sample of 13 individuals made sense of embodied health risk. The data were collected through the adults sculpting, life-lining, and participating in interviews in Toronto, Canada in Autumn 2016. Through these activities we explored how participants related their embodied futures to their presents and pasts. Four approaches to how ‘health risk’ connects the body through time emerged from our analysis, focusing particularly on the interview data: the shit happens approach, the sequelae approach, the risk as heuristic approach, and the knowledge approach. These approaches elucidate how individuals make uncertain embodied futures stable through the different interpretations of the concept of risk. Our account of these four approaches builds on recent health risk research by providing individual, embodied accounts of risk that show how understandings of health risk connect individuals to broader systems. The four approaches have implications for considering pathways to achieving health justice, developing public health ethics, and understanding the role embodied risk plays in individual experiences of unequal health structures.

风险是公共卫生中的一个日常概念，但很少有关于“健康风险”如何在身体上经历的研究。在本文中，我们应用社会学理论来分析 13 个人的样本如何理解具体健康风险。2016 年秋季，通过在加拿大多伦多的成人雕塑、生命线和参与访谈收集数据。通过这些活动，我们探索了参与者如何将他们的具体未来与他们的现在和过去联系起来。我们的分析提出了四种关于“健康风险”如何通过时间将身体联系起来的方法，特别关注访谈数据：狗屎发生方法、后遗症方法、风险作为启发式方法和知识方法。这些方法阐明了个人如何通过对风险概念的不同解释使不确定的具身期货稳定。我们对这四种方法的说明建立在最近的健康风险研究的基础上，通过提供个人的、具体的风险说明，展示对健康风险的理解如何将个人与更广泛的系统联系起来。这四种方法对考虑实现健康正义的途径、发展公共卫生伦理和理解具体风险在不平等卫生结构的个人经历中所起的作用都有影响。