Discourses Of Vulnerability Research Articles

Subsistence societies, globalisation, climate change and genocide: discourses of vulnerability and resilience

Anthropogenic climate change poses the possibility of total human extinction. Subsistence societies, however, have been threatened with extinction ­primarily as a consequence of systemic development ­ for a very long time. Recent genocide scholarship, more particularly in relation to indigenous peoples, has engaged with some of these issues, even while terminologies such as ethnocide, cultural genocide, and indigenocide may suggest a restricted field of vision. Here, we argue that the very nature of a neoliberal globalisation and concomitant nation-state building makes all subsistence societies vulnerable to what amounts to structural genocide. But how does climate change exacerbate or complicate this bleak picture? The political economy of ‘business as usual’ in its dialectical relationship with the biosphere (expressed in the rising concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions) poses an acceleration of subsistence society vulnerability with catastrophic potential for extreme violence. But another scenario also presents itself. The very ongoing, seemingly impossible existence of non-marketised societies in direct relationship with nature, poses the possibility of their resilience in the face of climate change rather than those operating according to standard globalised norms. In conclusion, we propose that the crisis of anthropogenic climate change directly challenges not only assumptions about the ‘inevitable’ trajectory of globalisation with its supposed cast of survivors and victims but more precisely the purposefulness of ‘techno-rational’ epistemologies as set against those which might help humanity recover the possibility of a ‘moral economy’.

Street children, human trafficking and human security in Nigeria:competing discourses of vulnerability and danger

This paper examines the lived experience of street children and other stakeholders’ perceptions in three urban cities (Lagos, Kaduna and Port Harcourt) in Nigeria. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the perspectives of five major stakeholders: Government Agencies, Civil Society Organizations, the Community, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and street children themselves. The findings revealed that street children are perceived to be perpetrators as well as victims of crime. They are exploited, abused and used as drug mules, pressed into commercial sex, and manipulated or bribed into the fire-bombings and violence in Nigeria. While some stakeholders urge increased protection of child rights, others canvassed for “eradication” of the street children. There is therefore the need for more pragmatic steps by the Nigerian government and civil society to address the conditions faced by street children in order to address the security problems and the fundamental human rights of the children.

Fear and alienation: narratives of crime and race in post-apartheid South Africa

This article focuses on interpretations and representations of violent crime in fiction, non-fiction and media to explore racialised discourses of fear and vulnerability in contemporary South Africa. It is less concerned with statistics and “facts” related to crime than with the role of race in impressions of and attitudes towards criminal violence. And, whereas gender, class and nationality all mediate the ways in which crime is experienced and perceived by residents of South Africa, for a considerable portion of the white population race remains the predominant factor when it comes to fear of violent crime. Perhaps the most significant difference in black narratives is that black South Africans do not conceptualise violent crime in terms of a racial assault. For a country struggling to overcome its corrosive racial history, crime discourses that emphasise blacks as perpetrators and whites as victims both reflect and shape the ongoing reconciliation process.

YOUTH, CRISIS, AND THE POLITICAL LIFE OF GLOBAL HINDUISM

The idea of ‘youth’ has emerged as a particularly central, and contested, issue within the shifting cultural politics of diasporic Hinduism. Familiar and longstanding questions about immigration and cultural/religious transmission are transforming into newly articulated political concerns and discourses. This discussion examines some of the ways in which the idea of youth has been invoked and mobilized by different diasporic public Hindu voices, especially in the American context. I examine, for instance, how ‘youth’ has come to preoccupy the protracted debates over academic representations of Hinduism, the public advocacy of newer organizations such as the Hindu American Foundation, as well as American Hindu endorsements of the post-9/11 war on terror. Hindu youth figures centrally here, often wrapped up with intensifying discourses of threat and vulnerability, with the fate and nature of youth emerging as key concerns in the politics of culture, identity, security, and representation.

Interventions for resilience in educational settings: challenging policy discourses of risk and vulnerability

‘Resilience’ has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social constructionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspectives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’, they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build resilience amongst ‘vulnerable’ groups and individuals. Instead, we argue that critical sociologists need to resist responses that offer more sophisticated behavioural interventions and generate new forms of governance and subjectivity.

The Immigration State of Emergency: Racializing and Gendering National Vulnerability in Twenty-First-Century Citizenship and Deportation Regimes

Twenty-first-century efforts to address an "immigration state of emergency" are anchored by timeworn racialized and gendered discourses of national precariousness and belonging. Through an assessment of recent policies governing mixed-citizenship-status families, this article studies how rhetorics of protecting the security of a vulnerable national citizenry justify the disparate legal treatment of undocumented migrants and their US citizen children. Part 1 of the article explores how recent attempts to repeal birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented parents merely reflect in exaggerated form how procedures for determining foreign-born children's citizenship have long relied upon racialized and feminized discourses of national vulnerability. Part 2 examines how family-deportation regimes forcing undocumented parents to choose between deporting their citizen children with them or leaving them in state custodial institutions like foster care communicate that nationalist cultural assimilation should trump the constitutional right to family and national residency. Children's unique developmental needs combine with national security fears to authorize sociolegal states of emergency. By evaluating 2010-13 immigration enforcement legislation, the channeling of children from mixed-legal-status families into foster care, and new policies like prosecutorial discretion and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the article contributes to the feminist, ethnic, and migration studies literatures.

Spatial dysfunction in post-tsunami Baan Lion: Taking the Moken beyond vulnerability and tradition

This article focuses on the perpetuation of discourses of vulnerability and tradition for Moken people living on the Andaman Coast in Thailand. These discourses limit opportunities to see Moken agency and changes to contemporary livelihoods/lifestyles. This is depicted through the lens of the post-tsunami reconstructed village of Baan Lion on Koh Phra Thong island. We highlight that inappropriate donor reconstruction has led to spatial dysfunction for the local community (largely Moken). The village provides limited opportunity for place-making, connections to employment and trade, and some of the social benefits offered in other nearby local settings. While donors may have ‘built back safer’, we argue that they have not ‘built back better’, as their perception of local needs, livelihoods and lifestyle has not accounted for changes to contemporary Moken life that have occurred prior to and after the 2004 tsunami. The results are a largely depopulated and dysfunctional space whereby NGO and tourism activities are now trying to build a new sense of community and provide some opportunities to retain at least some of the transient population of Baan Lion.

Vulnerability as Hegemony: Revisiting Gramsci in the Age of Neoliberalism and Tea Party Politics

The concept of ‘vulnerability’ – a descriptor attached to those under a given set of oppressive circumstances – has by now become a familiar part of the political lexicon. This article examines recent academic, cultural, and political formulations of ‘vulnerability’, a dexterous category to be sure, and how what I call ‘vulnerability discourse’ has functioned in neoliberal times to describe a conceptual shift from the state as guarantor of rights to protector of private property. Analysing the terrain of vulnerability discourse sheds light on the dynamics of what Gramsci has termed the ‘integral state’ to elucidate how this discourse works to obscure the innovative ways the state and capital collude to consolidate class power. Through a reading of recent cultural and political phenomena – including academic discussions on precarity as well as the Tea Party movement – I argue that vulnerability discourse is a specifically neoliberal development whose magnitude invigorates both liberal and reactionary political agendas. As such, a critical approach toward vulnerability discourse provides an important explanatory opportunity that reveals the overlapping interests of several political tendencies. Vulnerability discourse puts forward an analysis of the human subject that renders unexplorable the correlation between that subject's vulnerability and the structures of capital that continue to produce unmet needs. In short, attention to this discourse highlights and articulates new terrains of struggle for materialist scholarship in neoliberal times.

Climate justice and bargaining coalitions: a discourse analysis

This article adopts a perspective of climate justice as an object of discourse and takes the bargaining coalitions at the Conference of the Parties as the relevant units to map the heterogeneous discourse on climate justice at the Cancun COP16. Based on the statements of nine coalitions, the analysis identifies three discourses on climate justice. The conflict discourse articulates the North–South duality over issues of historical responsibility for climate change. The transition discourse points to solving the problem of sharing the cost of mitigating climate change through a process of global low-carbon growth. The vulnerability discourse focuses on the urgency of ambitious actions by all parties. These three discourses, and their appropriation by the bargaining coalitions, are inherent of new alignments among developed and developing countries alliances and blocs that simultaneously reproduce and surpass the North–South ideological divide.

Young White British Men and Knife-Carrying in Public: Discourses of Masculinity, Protection and Vulnerability

Whilst quantitative research to date gives us some indication of the prevalence at which knife-carrying occurs among young British men, there have been few explanations for why it occurs, and for what the relationship might be between broader social issues of control and power and the behaviours of young men themselves. Drawing on interviews with 16 young white British men, the present paper explores the ways in which the sample accounted for knife-carrying. Two interpretative repertoires were identified: (1) attributions of blame to authorities for a lack of protection and a subsequent justification of knife-carrying, and (2) discussions of masculinity in relation to knife-carrying. The findings suggest that what is required are policy and practice responses that take into account the symbolic functions of knives for young white men, and which recognise the dilemmatic bind that such men are caught in when they attempt to negotiate competing demands of protection and control.

LGBT Students’ Short Range Narratives and Gender Performance in the EFL Classroom

By means of the analysis of six short range narratives, utilizing as a methodology (Feminist Post –Structuralist Discourse Analysis) FPDA,this paper unveils some significant moments which evidence the way LGBT EFL students draw on different discourses to adapt, negotiate,resist, emancipate, and reproduce heteronormativity. EFL students Methodological FrameworkConstantly shift positions and perform their gender assuming simultaneously powerful and powerless stances in the EFL classroom.The study categorizes the emancipatory discourse as a way to resist, the discourse of vulnerability as a way to reproduce and cope withmarginalization, and the homophobic discourse as a way to position LGBT individuals as abnormal. Finally, the article will reflect on themoments LGBT student mitigate their oral skills and constrain their participation in class, due to the fact that they are frequently evaluatingtheir comments to avoid accidental disclosure of their sexual identity.

Theorizing about the other. Vulnerable groups and strategies for social inclusion in public health policies: a brief account of Brazilian case

PurposeThis paper seeks to address the issue of contemporary vulnerabilities in the context of late capitalism, analysing how policy making directed at the public health system in Brazil has targeted groups that are made visible from an exclusion perspective, whether by their sexual, ethnic, geographic or gender identities.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses the array of public policies behind the construction and development of the Brazilian Unified Healthcare System, confronting them with ethnographic research of practices of care in health services.FindingsThe themes of vulnerability and health are being worked upon within the public health system in Brazil as forms of “inclusion”: discrimination and prejudice are considered one of the aspects of health vulnerability. Government health policies are supporting projects, seminars and methods of facilitating social movements' expression, and also concrete actions towards denouncement of discrimination, which has been criminalized. However, contemporary public health is also a new normative field adapted to the neoliberal market, where risks are individualized and individuals are held responsible for what they do with their bodies.Originality/valueThe focus on both governmental policies and practices of public healthcare in the Brazilian context, highlighting the complexities of the application of risk and vulnerability discourses will be informative not only to scholars in the field of public health, but to practitioners and policy makers alike.

‘Oh, I’m just, you know, a little bit weak because I’m going to the doctor's’: Young men's talk of self-referral to primary healthcare services

Young men visit their general practitioner (GP) less frequently than young women and tend to utilise primary healthcare services reluctantly. This research aimed to explore the ways young men used their talk to make sense of their own masculinity in the context of their healthcare visits, and to explore the ways they used their talk to make sense of those visits in terms of multiple masculinities and gendered behaviours. This was an important area for research as previous work has not focused on young men. Interviews, lasting approximately 1 h, were conducted by a male researcher with seven men aged 22–33. Questions related to visiting the GP, attention to healthcare and help-seeking behaviours. These were analysed, using an eclectic approach informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Participants subscribed to a hegemonic masculinity that constructed men as strong, stoical and reluctant to seek help. However, at times, these men negotiated and disengaged from such discourses. Women were constructed as immediately responding to symptoms and seeking help for minor illnesses. In contrast to traditional masculinity, the young men drew upon discourses of vulnerability and embarrassment. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for Health Psychology.

Protection as subjection

Border and immigration enforcement has been central to post-9/11 national security efforts, resulting in unprecedented resource allocations at and beyond the physical borders of the USA. This paper brings together feminist and postcolonial examinations of post-9/11 military interventions with examinations of US–Mexico border enforcement to examine a relatively unexplored aspect of US border enforcement policy—state-based ‘humanitarian’ efforts to reduce undocumented migrant deaths associated with unauthorized entry. Based on a discursive analysis of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) press releases, CBP and Border Patrol videos and public statements, industry publications, state policies and congressional hearing transcripts, this paper examines the way in which ‘humanitarian’ objectives (i.e. reducing migrant deaths) have been integrated into US border enforcement discourse and policy. In particular, I draw on feminist and postcolonial theory to examine the gendered and racialized discursive maneuvers through which undocumented migrants are transformed from potential ‘terrorist threats’ or ‘criminals’ into ‘vulnerable victims’ deserving of assistance. I argue that gender and race are key to producing politically powerful and legible discourses of rescue and vulnerability and draw into question a contingent politics of life predicated on ideologies of gender, race and nation. In doing so, I bring a feminist postcolonial analytic framework to understandings of US–Mexico border enforcement efforts in order to query how gendered and racialized rescue narratives are key to justifying violent state projects that re-assert hegemonic power relations in the post-9/11 world.

Imaging vulnerability: the iconography of climate change

This paper explores the iconography of climate change in contemporary climate action campaigns in the UK. I aim to show how sample images are simultaneously scientific denotations of global warming and cultural connotations of danger and vulnerability. I further demonstrate that while similar images are associated with different agendas and geographical visions, they attach to a shared discourse of vulnerability that has Western (colonial) roots. The paper concludes with an overview of possible ways for climate action campaigns to effectively convey their political messages without recycling colonial visions of the world.

Tick box for child? The ethical positioning of children as vulnerable, researchers as barbarians and reviewers as overly cautious

Children have historically been marginalized in research with proxies used as appropriate sources of information about children's experiences, perceptions and understandings. In the context of research governance and ethical review, the default setting in many countries reflects a long history of framing children within a discourse of vulnerability and seeing research with (or on) children as inherently risky. This perspective inevitably positions researchers as ‘(potentially) dangerous’ and requires reviewers to adopt a (super-) cautious approach to any research proposal involving children's participation. Halse and Honey [Halse, C., Honey, A., 2007. Rethinking ethics review as institutional discourse. Qualitative Inquiry 13 (3), 336–352] suggest that this forces the researcher into the position of barbarian and the reviewers into the role of the research subject's champion. However, the discourse of child vulnerability competes with the discourse of child participation and involvement. Research with children is further complicated since children also have tended to be viewed as a homogenous group although this clearly misrepresents the diversity, individuality and multiplicity of their geographies. The tensions that arise from children being protected from the predations of the ‘barbarian researchers’ have meant that researchers have tended to undertake research on the least vulnerable/most adult-like children. This has resulted in some interesting and important research although the findings are likely to have much less utility than if researchers made greater efforts to engage or been given the opportunities to engage with the more marginalized children. Researchers and reviewers are a heterogeneous group each sharing some barbarian and champion tendencies. Both groups need to acknowledge their own ‘adultist’ assumptions and discursive practices in relation to involving children within research and consider the benefits (as well as the risks) that can accrue from researching children's own perspectives. Currently, the ‘tick box’ approach automatically identifies a research study as inherently more risky, forcing researchers into a defensive position and framing children as vulnerable even when the risks may be neglible and the risks of not doing the research are higher for children. Considering ways in which we could stretch our current understanding of vulnerability through the use of child-led and oriented ethics review could accommodate the strengths, expertise and capacities of children.

Vulnerability, gender and “proxy negativity”: Women in relationships with HIV-positive men in Australia

In contemporary international HIV discourse, women are positioned as especially vulnerable to HIV. This vulnerability is ascribed to gender inequality and its many structural, social and sexual manifestations. It is an important discourse in that it foregrounds how the realities of women worldwide constrain their ability to control their lives and bodies and, consequently, their ability to protect themselves against HIV infection. At the same time, its analysis rarely exceeds a generalised description of gender and power and, as such, fails to usefully engage with the specificity of serodiscordant gender relationships. Drawing on qualitative interviews with HIV-negative women and their HIV-positive male partners, who participated in a larger study on HIV and heterosexuality in Australia, we argue that without a considered analysis of the gendered interplay of differing HIV statuses, the vulnerability discourse remains limited in its capacity to capture the diverse, complex ways in which these HIV-negative women negotiate HIV in their sexual lives, how they are positioned in their relationships, and how vulnerability can figure in less obvious ways. We discuss how gendered meanings invested in the women's HIV-negative status constituted a powerful conduit to heteronormality for their male partners. The mixing of serostatuses made it possible for the men to assume a kind of proxy negativity, a desired state of redeemed masculinity. We explore two ways in which this proxy negativity operated among the couples and shaped their sexual practices. As a result, this paper makes an important contribution by showing how vulnerability to HIV infection can hinge on the different ways serodiscordant couples manage gendered meanings around serostatus emotionally and sexually.

Subverting the hegemony of risk: vulnerability and transformation among Australian show children

Background Australian show people traverse extensive coastal and inland circuits in eastern and northern Australia, bringing the delights of ‘sideshow alley’ to annual agricultural shows. The show people's mobility for most of the school year makes it difficult for their school-age children to attend ‘regular’ schools predicated on assumptions of fixed residence. This situation requires innovative approaches to educational provision if show children are not to be rendered vulnerable and at educational risk. Purpose The research reported here investigated whether and how the establishment in 2000 of a specialized institution, the Queensland School for Travelling Show Children, was meeting the specialized educational and sociocultural contexts and needs of the show children three years after establishment. Sample Participants in the study included the children, their parents and school and district educational personnel. Design and methods The research employed a qualitative design, highlighting naturalistic inquiry and attending to participants' words as reflections of their worldviews. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in August 2003 in Brisbane and Southport (i.e. the capital city of the state, and a large coastal city in south-eastern Queensland) with 35 people: 20 children in two groups; six parents; seven staff members from the school; and two leaders of state education. Interview data were analyzed by means of close textual reading of the transcripts and through identification of recurrent themes. Results The results presented are that the principal discourses of vulnerability associated with the show children derive from the anti-nomadic assumptions and attitudes that constitute sedentarism—the centuries-old process by which permanent residence is constructed as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ and mobility is positioned as ‘deficit’ and ‘deviant’. The study's findings demonstrate that this process has become allied with a hegemony of risk rhetoric, whereby the uncontested dominance of taken-for-granted assumptions about the vulnerability of certain groups can potentially function to capture and control the show children's ‘difference’. By contrast, the Queensland School for Travelling Show Children emerges from the analysis of the interview data as a vehicle for subverting that hegemony through its construction of an alternative system of schooling in which the children's mobility is ‘the norm’ and their ‘difference’ is the basis of creating new and transformative understandings of the purposes and forms of education. Conclusions The main conclusion is that identification of children who are ‘at risk’ or ‘vulnerable’ needs to be placed in the broader context of their sociocultural positioning. If this positioning constructs them as ‘deficit’ or ‘deviant’, as with the sedentarist view of the Australian show children, it must be critiqued and subverted if its practice of schooling is hegemonic rather than transformative.

Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly

Using a large, computerized corpus, this study aims to provide lexico-grammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and aging. It focuses on elderly, a word that is pivotal to the domain in question and whose associative meaning is contested. The collocational profile drawn up on the basis of corpus evidence shows that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. In addition to making a contribution to discourse-oriented aging research, the article also demonstrates the use of corpus linguistic methods within a sociolinguistic framework.I am grateful to several colleagues for their comments on a draft version, including most notably Susan Hunston, Virpi Ylänne-McEwen, Kieran O'Halloran, Angie Williams, and two anonymous reviewers. Veronika Koller contributed to the initial corpus searches and also provided useful feedback on the first draft. Eva Kerbler's support during the revision phase was invaluable and much appreciated. I am indebted to Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB) for financial support while spending a sabbatical at the Centre for Language and Communication Research of Cardiff University. Material from the Bank of English® reproduced with the kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

I. Found(ing) Discourses of Desire: Unfettering Female Adolescent Sexuality

This special feature takes stock of the current landscape of theory, practice and research on female adolescent sexuality in the wake of Michelle Fine’s seminal 1988 Harvard Educational Review article, ‘Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire’. Using a bevy of feminist analyses of how the oppression of female sexuality functions as a primary force in the overall oppression of women, Fine’s paper opened many new doors for feminist scholars of sexuality. This paper interjected feminist analyses into mainstream psychology’s perspectives on sexuality as a key feature of female adolescent development and education. Relying on multiple methods that rested heavily on the voices of actual girls, in a richly contextualized ethnography Fine avoided the simplistic blaming tactics – blaming the ‘victims’, blaming the teachers – so often lurking below the surface of such research. The denial of female adolescent sexuality through the sanctioned discourses of victimization, vulnerability and morality was laid bare, and the missing discourse of girls’ sexual desire is now a significant discourse of research, theory and practice focused on girls’ sexuality. The inclusion of, indeed the reliance on, the perspectives of young women marginalized by race (African-American and Latina) and class (poor) as positive informants rather than subjects of surveillance or suspected ‘bad girls’ marked another notable turn. Fine, in offering a model for weaving together primary empirical research with policy analysis in a new and significant way, also made not-so-subtle demands on feminist scholars to find more multidimensional approaches for putting pressure on existing systems through radical scholarship. In acknowledgement of the recent 15-year anniversary of its publication, this special feature explores and illustrates the new avenues of research and theory, as well as the inclusion of new forms of practice, that have sprung from Fine’s