VULNERABILITY: BODIES, VIOLENCE, POWER, AND CARE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES 

How can we approach vulnerability from the perspectives of social sciences and humanities? To what extent is vulnerability an individual issue? Or is it rather a social problem? The notion of vulnerability has been widely discussed within the philosophical traditions of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and later on in ethics, bioethics, and critical theory of the 20th century. Initially conceptualized by Heidegger, who understood human existence as «thrown» into the world (Geworfenheit, see Heidegger 1967, 179), vulnerability has become a concept that has branched out into different disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. 

 

Understood as a situated, contextual, and intersectional condition, vulnerability allows us to approach the multiple layers that inform life within a social structure. These states shape the real-life conditions of a person or group which becomes more exposed to injustice, violence, insecurity, precariousness, discrimination, or stigma. As Foucault expresses in The Micro-physics of Power, our experiences as subjects always depend on a complex exercise of power, immersed in power networks with their own historical development within which we suffer and exercise power (Foucault 1979, 99). 

 

Therefore, vulnerability must be understood from a systemic and interdependent standpoint (Malgieri 2023, 457). Engaging vulnerability in all its dimensions becomes an urgent issue nowadays, in the moment that Nancy Fraser defines as a comprehensive care crisis in which contemporary logics have jeopardized all the structures sustaining life (Fraser 2023). 

 

 

We will accept proposals from the following fields: 

  • Histories and genealogies of vulnerability 
  • Intersectional vulnerabilities 
  • Futures, utopias, dystopias, and vulnerability 
  • Critical Disability Studies 
  • Philosophy of violence 
  • Care theory 
  • Anthropology of the body and vulnerability 
  • Autoethnographies 
  • Epistemologies of the Oppressed 
  • Lived experience of vulnerability 
  • Vulnerability in gender, race, and class studies 
  • Political theory and systemic causes of vulnerability 
  • Spaces of violence and vulnerability 
  • Literature and illness 
  • Mental health and institutionalization 
  • Human geography 
  • Education and vulnerability 
  • Artistic manifestations of vulnerability 
  • Body, voice, and sounds of vulnerability 
  • Vulnerability and Memory Studies 

In addition to accepting academic papers, submissions in the format of artistic research presentations are highly encouraged. Please check the author’s guidelines on the requirements for all kinds of formats. 

Deadline for article submissions: April 24, 2025 
Publication date: June 2025