Back to normal. How people make sense of road accidents through guilt

Road crashes are among the most visible forms of violence in automobility. While they are integral to automobility, they also constitute a breach to people’s lifeworlds, bringing violence to the fore. Yet the ways in which people make sense of these remain underexplored from a sociological perspective. This article examines how notions of individualized responsibility structure everyday mobility practices and responses to road crashes. Our analysis is based on 25 move-along interviews with persons involved in crashes through various forms of mobility in Vienna, Austria, and situated within the national road safety policy discourse. We identify three moments in which responsibility operates: the anticipation of crashes during everyday movement, the immediate sense-making after a collision, and the subsequent normalization of violence through the attribution of individual mistakes. We show that the interplay of responsibility and guilt functions as a discursive order that channels attention towards individual mistakes, thereby obscuring the systemic violence inherent to automobility and contributing to the reproduction of its hegemony.