Concept Of Vulnerability Research Articles

An Index-Based Approach to Assess Social Vulnerability for Hamburg, Germany

AbstractIn this study, we set out to develop a new social vulnerability index (SVI). In doing so, we suggest some conceptual improvements that can be made to existing methodical approaches to assessing social vulnerability. To make the entanglement of socio-spatial inequalities visible, we are conducting a small-scale study on heterogeneous urban development in the city of Hamburg, Germany. This kind of high-resolution analysis was not previously available, but is increasingly requested by political decision makers. We can thus show hot spots of social vulnerability (SV) in Hamburg, considering the effects of social welfare, education, and age. In doing so, we defined SV as a contextual concept that follows the recent shift in discourse in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) concepts of risk and vulnerability. Our SVI consists of two subcomponents: sensitivity and coping capacity. Populated areas of Hamburg were identified using satellite information and merged with the social data units of the city. Areas with high SVI are distributed over the entire city, notably in the district of Harburg and the Reiherstieg quarter in Wilhelmsburg near the Elbe, as well as in the densely populated inner city areas of Eimsbüttel and St. Pauli. As a map at a detailed scale, our SVI can be a useful tool to identify areas where the population is most vulnerable to climate-related hazards. We conclude that an enhanced understanding of urban social vulnerability is a prerequisite for urban risk management and urban resilience planning.

Spatiotemporal evolution and trend prediction of regional water-energy-food-ecology system vulnerability: a case study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China.

The vulnerability study of the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) system in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is of great significance for ensuring water, energy, food, and ecological security. In this study, the concept of vulnerability of WEFE systems is explained, and then its mechanism is analyzed. Based on the vulnerability concept of the WEFE system and combined with the pressure-state-response (PSR) framework and the exposure-sensitivity-adaptability (ESA) capacity model, this study constructs an evaluation index system for the vulnerability of the WEFE system. The cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis (CE-DEA) method, which considers both self-evaluation and peer evaluation efficiency, is used to calculate the vulnerability from 2005 to 2020. The spatiotemporal dynamic characteristics are explored using the hot spot analysis and spatial autocorrelation model. The results show that the overall vulnerability of the WEFE system in the YREB has fluctuated and increased during the study period, with a spatial pattern characterized by "high in the middle and low on both sides." Over time, the spatial evolution tends to be centralized and non-equilibrium, forming a relatively independent spatial pattern.

Droughts in forested ecoregions in cold and continental climates: A review of vulnerability concepts and factors in socio‐hydrological systems

AbstractIn a changing climate, drought risk and vulnerability assessments are becoming increasingly important. Following the global call for proactive drought risk management, drought vulnerability assessments are progressively taking their stage in the drought research community. As the manifestation of drought vulnerability is dependent on the social, ecological, and hydroclimatic context in which it occurs, identifying vulnerability factors relevant for specific climatological and ecological regions may improve the quality of vulnerability assessments. Meanwhile, a holistic overview of factors affecting vulnerability in polar and cold climates is currently lacking. These regions are home to large socio‐hydrological systems including urban areas, energy systems, agricultural practices, and the boreal forest. By conducting an interdisciplinary systematic literature review, the manifestation and conceptualization of drought vulnerability were identified for forested ecoregions in the Köppen–Geiger D and E climates. Vulnerability factors, as described by several scientific disciplines, were identified and combined into a conceptual framework for drought vulnerability in the study region. The results demonstrate the wide range of conceptualizations that exist for assessing drought vulnerability, and the thematic differences between sectors such as forestry, water supply, and agriculture. The conceptual framework presented herein adopts a novel approach, categorizing vulnerability factors by their location in a socio‐hydrological system, and their relation to blue or green water sources. This allowed for identification of systemic vulnerability patterns, providing new insights into regional differences in drought vulnerability and a base for stakeholders performing proactive drought risk assessments in the study region.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Methods Science of Water > Water Extremes Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Human Water > Water Governance

How and why to use ‘vulnerability’: an interdisciplinary analysis of disease risk, indeterminacy and normality

In recent years, ‘vulnerability’ has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science...

Public Perceptions of Resilience and Vulnerability Concepts for Adaptation

Resilience is everywhere in plans, policy, and academic literature on risk reduction and adaptation, and a common refrain of elected officials and disaster victims alike. Geographers have contributed much to the critical understanding of the theoretical foundations and implications of this now ubiquitous concept, and have made some initial steps in studying how local practitioners and other experts interpret and apply resilience in risk reduction and adaptation measures. But there is limited empirical research, however, on what the people living in communities exposed to hazards think about resilience. This study aims to address this gap by conducting in-person, researcher-administered surveys (n = 400) with members of the public using coastal and lakefront environmental amenities in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. Survey results include three main findings: (1) the majority of participants prefer the framing of “increasing resilience” over “reducing vulnerability”; (2) the conceptualization of resilience as creative transformation is greatly favored over conceptualizations of resilience as resistance or recovery; and (3) resilience is seen as uneven in both study cities. The study reveals insights that can help inform and align resilience theory and practice in cities.

Spatial multidimensional vulnerability assessment index in urban area- A case study Selangor, Malaysia

Rapid urbanization has increased the risks to and vulnerabilities of urban systems, society, and organizations. In recent years, urban areas have been exposed to multiple hazards such as floods, landslides, storms, and rising sea levels. To reduce exposed elements' risk of and vulnerability to natural hazards, the first requirement is a better understanding of the vulnerable elements as stated in Sendai Framework. Different concepts and approaches can be employed in vulnerability assessment, depending on the scope and context of the study. In this study, the vulnerability concept was based on six dimensions (social, economic, physical, institutional, environmental, and cultural) adapted from the Method for the Improvement of Vulnerability (MOVE) framework. This approach was applied to three industrial urban districts in Selangor, Malaysia: Sepang, Kuala Langat, and Hulu Langat. These are located in the Langat River catchment and consist of 17 mukim (subdistricts). A spatial vulnerability assessment was conducted to determine the areas of very high vulnerability in this study area. A map was subsequently produced that shows the areas classified into five vulnerability categories (very low, low, medium, high, and very high vulnerability). The findings from all the areas studied identified 5.7% in the very high class, 8.9% in the high class, 33.3% in the medium class, 21.6% in the low class, and 30.5% in the very low class. The multidimensional vulnerability assessment used scientific proof to provide information for better understanding to the government, disaster agencies, and local governments so that policy making, and local disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies can improve.

Vulnerability, Care Ethics and the Protection of Socioeconomic Rights via Article 3 ECHR

Abstract Vulnerability analysis serves a distinct purpose within adjudication of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights ('ECHR'), in that it has been used by the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’ or ‘the Court’) to lower the threshold for a finding of ill-treatment from which positive obligations relating to socioeconomic rights have arisen. However, the group-based notion of vulnerability invoked by the Court is extremely limited, producing minimal protection from deprivation whilst equally paternalizing and essentializing the populations it deems vulnerable. In light of these failings, this article proposes a new element to be incorporated within the Court’s vulnerability analysis which can deliver greater protection of socioeconomic rights via Article 3: the political theory of care. By highlighting care’s potential to transform the concepts of vulnerability and state responsibility whilst empowering the care-receiver, it argues that care can overcome the limitations of the Court’s current approach as a means of targeting destitution.

Rethinking advanced motherhood: a new ethical narrative

The aim of the study is to rethink the ethics of advanced motherhood. In the literature, delayed childbearing is usually discussed in the context of reproductive justice, and in relationship to ethical issues associated with the use and risk of assisted reproductive technologies. We aim to go beyond these more “traditional” ways in which reproductive ethics is framed by revisiting ethics itself through the lens of the figure of the so-called “older” mother. For this purpose, we start by exploring some of the deep seated socio-cultural discourses in the context of procreation: ageism, ableism and the widespread bias towards geneticism and pronatalism. Afterwards, we provide a critical overview of the key arguments against or in support of advanced motherhood. We then briefly discuss how entrenchment by both sides has produced an impasse in the debate on the ethics of advanced motherhood and proceed by arguing that it is fundamental to bring about a change in this narrative. For this purpose, we will revisit the feminist usage of the concept of vulnerability which will allow us both to criticize culturally prescribed norms about motherhood and to address the painful reality of age-related fertility decline. In the last section, we argue that instead of defining “older” motherhood as an ethical problem, we should problematize the fact that female reproductive ageing is an understudied and ill-sourced topic. We believe that allocating resources to research to better understand female reproductive ageing is not only ethically permissible, but might even be ethically desirable.

Remoteness and Connection on a Congolese Humanitarian Radio Network

ABSTRACT: In northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, local and international non-governmental organizations have, for the last decade, built a network of two-way radios to connect rural communities in order to better protect them from armed groups active in the region. This article moves along this radio network to explore the concepts of remoteness and connection. Rural residents and humanitarians alike describe the region as “enclaved,” drawing on Congolese experiences and conceptions of isolation and vulnerability to appeal for greater connection. The connection oЛered by radios, however, is fragile and contingent, relying on alignments, negotiations, and compromises. The article describes these negotiations at the village level (among NGOs and various local actors) and between NGOs and the state, demonstrating that connection is a negotiated and ongoing process.

Liberal Educational Implications of Korean Women’s Science Fiction in the 2010s : Focusing on Cheon Seonran’s <I>A Thousand Blue</I>

The emergence of women's science fiction in the 2010s is notable for its narrative achievements in imagining various possibilities of the ‘posthuman’ in the new reality brought about by the development of science and technology. Research on women’s science fiction has also been conducted in the context of the posthuman, with two main research trends: technofeminism, which affirms the union between women and science, and critical posthumanist research on ableism. However, these studies lack a perspective on animality that encompasses humans and nonhumans. The discussion of science fiction inevitably confronts the disregard for life and instrumentalist exploitation, which can be seen as increasing with the development of science and technology. Therefore, the issues of human and non-human minorities, vulnerability, and animality are the ultimate challenges of a posthuman society and are central to the discussion of science fiction. If posthumanism dreams of a ‘better’ post-human world, it should focus on ‘animals, including humans’. Therefore, in order to generate categories of thought for discussion topics that can be utilized in liberal arts education, this paper adds the animal axis to the existing discussion and discusses the correlation between the three concepts of minorities, vulnerability, and animality in Cheon Seonran’s science fiction novel <i>A Thousand Blue</i>. As we have seen, the educational implications of the novel are that it connects humans and animals through disability and points out the problems of the technological society that will come in the near future as an extension of today, pointing out that the posthuman society should be designed from the lowest position. In addition, the novel’s significance lies in the fact that it creates a point of debate, rather than simply sealing the issue by establishing a desirable human-animal relationship. The novel shows that by adding a species axis to the posthumanist discussion, we can start to think about how to redesign society.

Beyond risk: vulnerability of patients using medications, from the perspective of healthcare professional

Introduction: The concepts of risk and vulnerability have been discussed in the healthcare field and represent different approaches in the process of care, with an important amount of interventions that included drug prescriptions and treatments. Objectives: To analyzethe healthcare professionals’ perceptions of the concepts of risk and vulnerability and their influence on Medication Use Process. Methods: Data were collected in an academictertiary hospital, from a focus group conducted with healthcare professionals who are active in diverse settings of care. The meeting was recorded, audio statements weretranscribed and coded, and the content was organized and analyzed using content analysis. Results: Three physicians, 2 nurses and 2 pharmacists participated in the study. The findings suggest that there is a continuum between both concepts, with vulnerability preceding risk: each individual has its own range of vulnerability prior to the drug administration, being risk inherent to the drug utilization process. Conclusions: According to the research subjects, reducing vulnerability can potentially prevent additional drug therapy problems development: the patient has to be the focus of the medication use process, not only the drug and its risk.

Two faces of vulnerability: Distinguishing susceptibility to harm and system resilience in climate adaptation

AbstractIn the climate adaptation literature, we can distinguish two seemingly distinct frameworks for the concept of vulnerability. We might think of vulnerability in terms of susceptibility to harm. Some discussions of vulnerability accordingly focus on the risk posed to well‐being. Alternatively, we might think of vulnerability in terms of a system's responsiveness to adverse conditions, often spelled out in terms of resilience. This article highlights and distinguishes these frameworks through a brief survey of climate adaptation literature. Understanding the relationship between these two frameworks is vital not only for conceptual clarity, but also for developing adaptation strategies that respond to the different sorts of vulnerabilities posed by climate change. Mitigating the vulnerability of an individual at risk of harm might well complicate efforts at mitigating the vulnerabilities of systems in which that individual is embedded. Humans are clearly at risk of harm from a changing climate, and changing climate challenges the resilience of systems on which humans depend. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of the vulnerabilities that arise from the dissociation of people from their environments. Dissociation, whether through the migration of people or through changes to environmental background conditions not only makes clear the dual nature of vulnerabilities, but also serves as a lens through which we might consider the prospects for integrating a more cohesive account of vulnerability into successful climate adaptation strategies.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation

When confessing sin feels good

AbstractThis paper draws on a qualitative study of how young people engaged in two youth ministries in the Church of Norway reflect on sin and shame in relation to their existential dilemmas . The authors analyze this practice through the lens of Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance, arguing that there is consonance between how young people in the study express shame and the Lutheran understanding of sin as being curved in on oneself. Both sin and shame prevent the subject from being open to the world, thus constituting resistance to resonance. Yet, the practice of confessing sin may be a remedy to this closing in on oneself, as confession affords a resonant space, countering feelings of existential inadequacy caused by both sin and shame.Bringing the concept of vulnerability into the discussion, the paper further argues that confessing sin may prove healing and liberating also for experiences of shame as long as it does not violate the subject's ability to speak with her own voice or involve harmful god‐images or harmful power dynamics.

Extraction of Phrase-based Concepts in Vulnerability Descriptions through Unsupervised Labeling

Software vulnerabilities, once disclosed, can be documented in vulnerability databases, which have great potential to advance vulnerability analysis and security research. People describe the key characteristics of software vulnerabilities in natural language mixed with domain-specific names and concepts. This textual nature poses a significant challenge for the automatic analysis of vulnerability knowledge embedded in text. Automatic extraction of key vulnerability aspects is highly desirable but demands significant effort to manually label data for model training. In this article, we propose unsupervised methods to label and extract important vulnerability concepts in textual vulnerability descriptions (TVDs). We focus on six types of phrase-based vulnerability concepts (vulnerability type, vulnerable component, root cause, attacker type, impact, and attack vector) as they are much more difficult to label and extract than name- or number-based entities (i.e., vendor, product, and version). Our approach is based on a key observation that the same-type of phrases, no matter how they differ in sentence structures and phrase expressions, usually share syntactically similar paths in the sentence parsing trees. Specifically, we present a source-target neural architecture that learns the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging to identify a token’s functional role within TVDs, where the source neural model is trained to capture common features found in the TVD corpus, and the target model is trained to identify linguistically malformed words specific to the security domain. Our evaluation confirms that the proposed tagger outperforms (4.45%–5.98%) the taggers designed on natural language notions and identifies a broad set of TVDs and natural language contents. Then, based on the key observations, we propose two path representations (absolute paths and relative paths) and use an auto-encoder to encode such syntactic similarities. To address the discrete nature of our paths, we enhance the traditional Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) with Gumble-Max trick for categorical data distribution and thus create a Categorical VAE (CaVAE). In the latent space of absolute and relative paths, we further apply unsupervised clustering techniques to generate clusters of the same-type of concepts. Our evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our CaVAE, which achieves a small (85.85) log-likelihood for encoding path representations and the accuracy (83%–89%) of vulnerability concepts in the resulting clusters. The resulting clusters accurately label six types of vulnerability concepts from a TVD corpus in an unsupervised way. Furthermore, these labeled vulnerability concepts can be mapped back to the corresponding phrases in the original TVDs, which produce labels of six types of vulnerability concepts. The resulting labeled TVDs can be used to train concept extraction models for other TVD corpora. In this work, we present two concept extraction methods (concept classification and sequence labeling model) to demonstrate the utility of the unsupervisedly labeled concepts. Our study shows that models trained with our unsupervisedly labeled vulnerability concepts outperform (3.9%–5.14%) those trained with the two manually labeled TVD datasets from previous work due to the consistent boundary and typing by our unsupervised labeling method.

Reconsidering Deception in Social Robotics: The Role of Human Vulnerability (Student Abstract)

The literature on deception in human-robot interaction (henceforth HRI) could be divided between: (i) those who consider it essential to maximise users' end utility and robotic performance; (ii) those who consider it unethical, because it is potentially dangerous for individuals' psychological integrity. However, it has now been proven that humans are naturally prone to anthropomorphism and emotional attachment to inanimate objects. Consequently, despite ethical concerns, the argument for the total elimination of deception could reveal to be a pointless exercise. Rather, it is suggested here to conceive deception in HRI as a dynamic to be modulated and graded, in order to both promote innovation and protect fundamental human rights. To this end, the concept of vulnerability could serve as an objective balancing criterion.

Vulnerability in Biomedical Research: A Historical Reflection and Practical Implications for HIV Cure-Related Research.

The concept of vulnerability in bioethics was first referenced in 1979, when the Belmont Report highlighted the need for special consideration of certain populations in the application of its general principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice in research with human participants. Since then, a body of literature has emerged regarding the content, status, and scope, as well as ethical and practical implications of vulnerability in biomedical research. The social history of HIV treatment development has at various points reflected and actively influenced bioethics' debate on vulnerability. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, people with AIDS activist groups drafted landmark patient empowerment manifestos like The Denver Principles, fighting to have greater involvement in the design and oversight of clinical trials related to HIV treatment, and in doing so, pushed against research ethics protocols created with the intention of protecting vulnerable populations. The determination of appropriate benefit/risk profiles in clinical trials was no longer limited to the purview of clinicians and scientists, but began to include the perspectives of people with HIV (PWH) and affected communities. In contemporary HIV cure-related research, where participants often risk health for no personal clinical benefit, the community's voiced motivations and objectives for participation continue to challenge population-based accounts of vulnerability. While the development of a framework for discussion and the establishment of clear regulatory requirements are necessary to support the practical and ethical conduct of research, they risk distraction from the fundamental value of voluntary participation and potentially overlook the unique history and perspectives of PWH in their participation in the quest toward an HIV cure.

How Vulnerable are the Self-Employed? Evidence from Ugandan Small-Scale Entrepreneurs

Due to small firm sizes and inter-linkages between household and business finances, small-scale entrepreneurs in developing countries are inherently vulnerable to temporary and permanent income shortfalls, and hence household poverty. While the International Labour Organisation (ILO) generally defines self-employment without employees as vulnerable employment, little empirical research has been done on the extent to which the self-employed are indeed vulnerable. This paper makes two main contributions: first, it operationalises the concept of vulnerability in the context of self-employment in developing countries by defining vulnerability as the risk of having business income below a living wage threshold. Secondly, it investigates the extent and correlates of vulnerability. Using a six-year balanced entrepreneur panel dataset from Kampala, Uganda, it is shown that the self-employed are heterogeneous with respect to vulnerability and observed earnings: 58–74% of the samples are classified as vulnerable in a given year and mostly earn incomes below the living wage threshold. Vulnerable entrepreneurs are shown to be significantly different from non-vulnerable entrepreneurs in several dimensions, including those that do not directly predict income.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide: Who are the vulnerable?

One of the common domains in health care in which the concept of vulnerability is used is end-of-life care, including euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS). Since different uses and implications of the notion have been recognised in the literature on EAS, this paper aims to analyse them and reflect on who is the most vulnerable in the context of EAS. A prior exploratory review of the literature has served as a starting point for the discussion. We concluded that vulnerability is a complex, multi-perspective and multi-layered concept, which implies the vulnerability of different stakeholders involved in EAS practices and vulnerability in different aspects of being human (i.e., physical, mental, moral, social and spiritual). A comprehensive understanding of the notion of vulnerability, which balances as well as complements the concept of autonomy, seems to be an indispensable element of the discourse on EAS.

Identifying different frames of resilience–vulnerability nexus in disaster study

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to investigate how vulnerability and resilience have been constructed in the disaster literature to unpack the resilience–vulnerability nexus. This study identifies four different frames of the resilience–vulnerability nexus in the disaster literature: opposite, overlap, separate, and inclusion. It points out that the concepts of disaster resilience and vulnerability share some conceptual underpinnings but have incompatible conceptualizations in their emerging phases, states, diving mechanisms, relationships with hazards, and modes of depiction. Accordingly, we suggest that it is theoretically possible to reframe disaster vulnerability and resilience as gradable antonyms, at least in the dimension of capacity or loss potential. We note how there has been little theoretical work addressing the resilience–vulnerability nexus within the field of disaster research. The arguments presented in this article thus have the potential to aid disaster researchers and disaster risk reduction (DRR) practitioners who might be confused regarding the relationship between resilience and vulnerability. This study may also be conducive to bridging the gap between academic study and DRR practice by facilitating dialog between the disaster vulnerability and resilience research communities.

The Vulnerable Workforce: A Call for Research

In this commentary, we argue that the work experiences of vulnerable workers merit scholarly attention. We elaborate on the concept of vulnerability in light of the person and context interaction. Additionally, we offer compelling reasons to highlight the significance of research on vulnerable workers in the realm of management research. Finally, we outline some of the challenges researchers face when studying this special population and suggest practical solutions to overcome methodological and logistical challenges towards developing and conducting research on the vulnerable workforce.