Crude Exploration

Abstract

The 2016 film Deepwater Horizon offers a rare portrayal of industrial disaster. It is novel as there are few film-based treatments of this issue. The film enables the public to learn about the disaster, the lives lost, and the stories of survival, but it also provides the opportunity to examine how industrial disaster and, by extension, occupational health and safety may be publicly framed and understood. This article presents an analysis of Deepwater Horizon. Four primary industrial disaster frames are identified in the film: profit maximization, technology and technology failure, managerial conflict, and worker portrayals. Each frame offers advantages and limitations for enhancing public understandings of industrial disaster. Missing from the film is the regulatory environment of the oil drilling industry, whose omission serves to potentially reproduce messages that privilege individualistic, isolated, views of industrial disasters and prioritize immediate over distal causes.

Visualising Safety

“…Visual representations have been produced since the beginning of safety practice and research, but research on visualisation has been dispersed, and rather scarce so far. Some notable exceptions are the works in cognitive engineering stemming from the need to design computer interfaces [1], in human factors when developing a better understanding and design of safety warning signs [2], in social, political and historical perspectives of safety posters [3,4], in ethnographic studies based on sociomaterial sensitivities [e.g., 5,6], in graphic design when commenting engineering decisions that led to disasters [e.g., 7,8], in reflections on the graphic dimension of safety models [9][10][11], and in analysis of the safety narratives of movies [12][13][14]. We introduce these studies very briefly below.…”