Description
Book SynopsisOn Vulnerability maps out an array of perspectives for critically examining the nature of vulnerability, its unequal patterning across different social groups, alongside the everyday social processes that render us vulnerable interactions, identity and group dynamics.
Each chapter equips the reader with a particular sensitising framework for navigating and questioning what it means to be vulnerable or how people cope amid vulnerability. From deviance, stigma and the spoiling or fracturing of identity, to perspectives such as intersectionality, risk, emotions and the vulnerable body, the book traces the theoretical roots of these different analytical lenses, before applying these through illuminating examples and case studies.
Drawing on scholarship across more interpretative, analytic and critical traditions, the chapters combine into a multi-dimensional toolkit which will enable the study of the cultural meanings of vulnerability, the political-economic
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Vulnerability as deviance and stigma
2. When ‘normal’ people become vulnerable
3. The intersectionality of vulnerability
4. Understanding vulnerability through the lens of risk
5. Trust, hope, magic and the paradox of vulnerability
6. The vulnerable body
7. Vulnerability to suffering
8. Ethical concerns in researching vulnerability, as inseparable from methodological and analytical considerations
Conclusions: Three types of knowledge around vulnerability
