Vulnerability, Illness and Literature

Social vulnerability. Climate Vulnerability. Vulnerable Populations. The list goes on. While vulnerability has become a key term in sociology, public health, climate sciences and disaster management, its roots are older. Derived from the Latin word for wound ("vulnus"), vulnerability refers to the predisposition or propensity to be harmed. It is a constitutive feature of embodied life. Dangers and risks lurk around everycornerforwearemortal,porousbodiesthatarefraughtwithfrailty. But vulnerability is also the precondition for intimacy and ethical life. Because we are vulnerable and permeable, we are by nature entangled with other lives and other substances. Vulnerability enables connections, understanding and relationality.

The infrastructures and institutions that we have built (physical or digital) are vulnerable to incipient failures and bad actors; the environments that we inhabit (the climate, the land, the oceans) are exposed to vulnerabilities often of our own design. Moving across scale, from microbe to individual, from populations to planetary systems, this course will examine the ways that vulnerability works to connect bodies, persons and structures. Through multidisciplinary readings across sociology, ecology, philosophy, cybernetics, fiction and poetry, we will explore the contradictions opened up by individual protagonists, biological processes and infrastructural deformations. It is my hope that vulnerability will allow us to think up a new ethics sustaining self-care, our care for other lives, and for our planet.