No. 54 (2025): Vulnerability: bodies, violence and care from the perspective of Social Sciences and Humanities
Articles

Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces

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  • Elizabeth Marino,
  • AJ Faas
Elizabeth Marino
Oregon State University- Cascades. Oregon. United States
AJ Faas
San Jose State University. California. United States

Published 2025-06-17

Keywords

  • disaster,
  • otherwise,
  • postcolonial,
  • vulnerability

Copyright (c) 2025 Elizabeth Marino , AJ Faas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Marino, E., & Faas, . A. (2025). Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces. Revista Sarance, 54, 52-80. https://doi.org/10.51306/ioasarance.054.04

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Abstract

Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 50 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the “vulnerable” acts to discursively nullify the everywherevisible “resilience,” toughness, and genius that exist in communities that are habitually exposed to risk and hazards. We argue that constructing vulnerability as a characteristic of subaltern peoples and marginalized places is truncated at best and can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material—at worst. To identify the “vulnerable” is, we contend, necessarily a process of otherizing and essentializing. We see and are concerned to further encourage an emergent form of disaster anthropology that is particularly oriented toward understanding and theorizing the
institutions, systems, and individuals that structure risk, and in the process to focus attention away from “the vulnerable.” To our surprise, this has emerged in recent anthropological writings in very particular ways. We find the orientation away from vulnerable populations among our colleagues who write at the intersections of disaster institutions and local communities. Here, we recognize vulnerability conceived not merely as historical inequity that produces negative outcomes, but as nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.

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