Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion

“This truly intellectually stimulating volume delivers a timely and theoretically ambitious engagement with the notion of vulnerability, care, political, economic as well as social conditions of exclusion. It certainly hits the nail of contemporary debates in social philosophy and critical social sciences – including feminist and de-colonial­ – on the head, as it tackles current and future debates on social and racial inequality, systematic poverty and the role individualization of vulnerability plays in diluting the states’ public health responsibilities.”
—      Dr Ulrike Vieten, Queen's University Belfast, Co-Editor in Chief of The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology.
This volume offers novel and provocative insights into vulnerability and exclusion, two concepts crucial for the understanding of contemporary political agency. In twelve critical essays, the contributors explore the dense theoretical content, complex histories and conceptual intersection of vulnerability and exclusion. A rich array of topics are covered as the volume searches for the ways that vulnerable and excluded groups relate to each other, where the boundary between the excluded and the included arises, and what the stakes of ‘invulnerability’ might be.

Drawing on the works of Hegel (via Judith Butler), Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt to situate the project in a solid historical context, the volume likewise tackles pressing and contemporary issues such as the state of human capital under neoliberalism, the flawed nature of democracy itself, and the vulnerability inherent in extreme precarity, extreme violence, and interdependence. The contributions come from philosophers with a range of backgrounds in social philosophy and critical social sciences, who use related conceptual tools to tackle the political challenges of the 21st century. Together, they present a ground-breakingoverview of the main challenges which social exclusion presents to contemporary global societies.