Your everyday hero: media representations of civic safety engagements

This article explores how civil society-based safety engagements are represented in Swedish news media, and how these representations are mediated through emotions. In a political climate where “increased safety” has become a dominant goal, we analyze how media narratives construct emotional regimes around safety and responsibility. Drawing on Stuart Halls work on representation and theories of emotions, we show how news media not only reflect but help (re)produce emotional and spatial geographies of (un)safety through personalized storytelling and emotive language. Focusing on personal portrayals of grassroots safety initiatives, such as women-led taxi services and local volunteer efforts, we demonstrate how emotions such as fear and frustration are articulated as morally productive and politically legitimate responses to unsafety. These narratives represent engagement as a matter of individual initiative and personal responsibility, often along gendered and racialized lines. Women are depicted as self-governing subjects whose emotional investments justify their civic actions, aligning with neoliberal ideals of responsibilized citizenship. Media participates in an emotional politics that valorizes agency and affective community while depoliticizing broader issues of inequality and exclusion. These representations risk obscuring the structural causes of unsafety by recasting safety as a matter of personal duty rather than collective or institutional responsibility. • Media representations of safety engagement reinforce norms around gender, racialization, and responsibility. • Emotive language is used to articulate views on safety, personalizing and emotionalizing civic engagement. • Personal portraits emphasize emotional responses to fear and unsafety, responding to personal experiences of danger. • Safety initiatives are represented as acts of personal sacrifice and collective action.