‘Vulnerability’ as a conceptual category can be traced back to the Latin word vulnerabilis, where it refers to susceptibility to harm, wounding, or injury. Georgio Agamben (1998), a leading proponent in political philosophy, observes how individuals can be reduced to a vulnerable condition through political exclusion and legal abandonment. The question of vulnerability is momentous amidst the geopolitical turmoil, economic precarity, state fascism, cultural tension and erasure, social upheavals, and ecological crisis that define the present era.

The prevailing state, corporate, and technocratic hegemonies wield the power to render individuals vulnerable to systemic forms of control and exploitation. Such conditions disproportionately affect marginalised social groups, which range from refugee populations, stateless persons, and individuals at the intersection of gender, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and other identity vectors. As Jasbir Puar (2017) persuasively argues, vulnerability is differentially distributed, racialised, and weaponised through varied technologies of governance and systemic structures of violence like wars, colonisation, and capitalism.

There have been debates within contemporary critical scholarship to theorise vulnerability not merely as a condition of lack but as a productive space of political contestation, ethical encounters, and epistemic possibilities (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016; Puar 2017; Butler 2020). Judith Butler argues that the condition of vulnerability is not entirely stripped of action; agency persists even under precarious constraints. Furthermore, vulnerability need not simply be viewed as a negation of strength. Subversive possibilities potentially might emerge through the very demonstration of vulnerability albeit as a ‘performative act’ of visibility, resistance, and solidarity.

The conference on (Re)Thinking Vulnerability: Conditions and Contradictions seeks to problematise the unwieldy and mutative category of “vulnerability” by posing questions such as: What are the possibilities and limits of deploying vulnerability as a conceptual framework? Who benefits from its framing? When is the performance of vulnerability reduced to a state of violence and spectacle? How can we attend to vulnerability without devolving to voyeurism or assumption of passivity? How do we understand the representation of vulnerable subjects in art and scholarship? How is vulnerability commodified in media, academia, and scholarship and to what effects? How do technologies mediate and contest new and existing conditions of vulnerability?

What are the varied forms of networked solidarities that emerge from a shared condition of vulnerability? This conference invites reflections on vulnerability as both a critical frame and a methodological stance from various disciplines such as literature, media and communication studies, sociology, psychology, geography, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, feminist and queer studies, public health, and medical humanities. It seeks to grapple with the ambivalence of the term in asking how we reconcile the ethical promise it offers with the dangers of its appropriation for socio-political control. It intends to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration to better apprehend vulnerability across the intersectional axes of race, class, caste, gender, and citizenship. We invite conceptual papers, empirical research, case studies, and textual analysis that can expand on the shifting terrains of ‘vulnerability’ in its conditions and contestations.

Through this conference, the participants will gain a deeper understanding of the manifestations of vulnerability across diverse contexts and vantage points, including resilience, resistance, care, peace, susceptibility, precarity, ageing, borders, representation, justice, risk and retribution. This event aims to provide a platform for emerging and experienced scholars to engage in meaningful discussions and participate in ongoing developments in the diverse fields engaging with vulnerability.?