Read more
This book brings together scholars from across the social sciences and humanities to examine what it means to be vulnerable, to care and be cared for, within conditions of inequality, violence and crisis across the globe.
List of contents
- Bodies, Resistance, Despair
- 1: JUDITH BUTLER: Bodies that Still Matter
- 2: ROSALBA ICAZA: Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics
- 3: C. JASON THROOP: Meteorological Moods and Atmospheric Attunements
- Response: The Terror of Invulnerability
- Ambiguity, Affectivity, Violence
- 4: ERINN GILSON: The Problems and Potentials of Vulnerability
- 5: THOMAS GREGORY: Vulnerable Civilians: Coalition Checkpoints and the Perception of Hostile Intent
- 6: OMAR DEWACHI: Revealed in the Wound: Medical Care and the Ecologies of War in Post-Occupation Iraq
- Response: On the Condition of Being Open
- Narrative, Relationality, Disclosure
- 7: JACKIE LEACH SCULLY: The politics of care: from biomedical transformation to narrative vulnerability
- 8: JASON DANELY: "It rips you to bits!": Woundedness and Compassion in Carers' Narratives
- 9: ANN CAHILL: Disclosing an Experience of Sexual Assault: Ethics and the Role of the Confidant
- Response: Tenuous Moorings
- Dependence, Distribution, Waiting
- 10: LOTTE MEINERT: Vulnerability as Radically Social: Cash and Care for the Elderly in Uganda
- 11: LISA BARAITSER AND WILLIAM BROOK: Watchful Waiting: Temporalities of Crisis and Care in the UK: National Health Service
- Response: The Hopeless Hopeful Time of Caring
- Index
About the author
Victoria Browne is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Oxford Brookes University, specialising in feminist theory and philosophy. Her books include Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (Palgrave 2014), and she has published widely in journals such as Hypatia, Signs and Radical Philosophy. Currently, Victoria is working on a book exploring the politics and temporalities of pregnancy - a project supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She is also co-editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.
Jason Danely's books include Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan (2014) and Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (2013). Jason's work on aging and care in Japan has been published in anthropology journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Medicine Anthropology Theory, and Ethnos. He has conducted comparative research on unpaid caregivers of older family members in Japan and the UK and is currently working on older ex-offender resettlement in Japan supported by an SSRC Abe Fellowship.
Doerthe Rosenow is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Un-making Environmental Activism: Beyond Modern/Colonial Binaries in the GMO Controversy (Routledge 2017) and has published widely in the field of International Relations and related disciplines in journals such as Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. Her current research is on decolonial thought, settler colonialism and Indigenous writings. She is Associate Editor of the journal Security Dialogue.
Summary
Vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of existence, giving rise to the need for care in various forms. Yet we are not all vulnerable in the same way, and not all vulnerabilities are equally recognised or cared for. This transdisciplinary volume considers how vulnerability and care are shaped by relations of power within contemporary contexts of war, development, environmental degradation, sexual violence, aging populations and economic precarity.
It proposes that care for vulnerable populations or individuals is inseparable from other political processes of recognition, welfare, healthcare and security, whilst also exploring vulnerability as a shared, generative condition that makes caring possible. Ethnographic and narrative accounts of vulnerable life and caring relations in various geographical regions - including Japan, Uganda, Micronesia, Iraq, Mexico, the UK and the US - are interspersed with perspectives from philosophy, International Relations, social and cultural theory, and more, resulting in a compelling series of intellectual exchanges, creative frictions and provocative insights.
