Engaging Vulnerability

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ENGAGING VULNERABILITY is a decade-long interdisciplinary research program at Uppsala University financed with the support of the Swedish Research Council.

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ENGAGING VULNERABILITY is a decade-long interdisciplinary research program at Uppsala University (UU) financed with the support of the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR) that challenges such received wisdom about vulnerability. The program’s purpose is to re-configure previous understandings of what vulnerability is and how it can be examined and theorized.

Vulnerability is a structuring feature of existence in the world today. Citizens in an increasing number nation-states find themselves caught in a “state of exception”; an Orwellian world in which the global “war on terror” without beginning or end justifies government surveillance of our email, phone conversations and our very movements in the name of protecting us. The environment and non-human animals are degraded and being decimated on a cataclysmic scale. Global migration and displacement are reconfiguring long-held understandings of citizenship, the state, and ethical engagement.

We are used to thinking that vulnerability is something bad. It is a position or a state that we associate with helplessness, silence, disempowerment, lack. Scholars should document vulnerability so that those most afflicted by it might transcend it. Activists and humanitarians should work to help vulnerable people, in order to help them leave their wretched state of vulnerability, resist, and become empowered.

Extending recent work in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences, the Engaging Vulnerability program will re-focus vulnerability not as a lamentable condition from which subjects should be defended, rescued or liberated. Instead, it will document and theorize as a productive position, condition, or state that does something.

Vulnerability makes demands: about accountability, responsibility, ethics, engagement. How does seeing vulnerability as productive change the focus of research, awareness and engagement?

Engaging Vulnerability links scholarship across disciplines in order to illuminate and clarify a complex of problems and questions involving what vulnerability means, how it is experienced and positioned, how it is manifested in everything from architecture to interactional practices, and, importantly, how it can be theorized in ways that don’t disavow it or just wish it away.