Changing Vulnerability - On Fatbergs, Fentanyl, Ethnography, and Other Troublesome Things

This volume explores a diverse array of cultural contexts to understand how vulnerabilities were involved in survival, domination, representation, relationality, agency, and humanity.

Viewed as a prospect to be grasped rather than as a limit to be overcome, vulnerability has emerged as a key concept—a framework for thinking about a myriad of phenomena—in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and bioethics. In Changing Vulnerability, contributors focus on objects; sense and representation; relationships that enable, inhibit, and exploit agency; humanity and human faculty; nonsense; colonial domination; and engagement with the biosphere. These different facets of vulnerability variously co-occur, clash, highlight, obscure, enable, or disable contingent on their social and historical context.