The State of Vulnerability: How Knowledges of Harm Limit State Intervention

• In Event: 30669 - Knowledge #1: Data, Risk, and Knowledge in Health Policy

Abstract

Since the 1980s, “vulnerability” has emerged as a key logic shaping contemporary governance. Scholars have observed that states label individuals “vulnerable” to justify state protection and support on the basis of their heightened risk of psychological trauma, criminal victimhood, and other forms of social harm (Brown, Ecclestone, and Emmel 2017; Laperrière, Orloff, and Pryma 2019; Sweet 2023). Paige Sweet’s recent work on the crime victims’ movement argues that “trauma and vulnerability tether the demand for state-sponsored service programs to the state’s responsibility to protect good citizens from bad Others” by “hybridizing welfare and penal state capacities” (2023:1685). However, vulnerability discourse is deployed in myriad institutions that crisscross the “many hands of the state” (Morgan and Orloff 2017) to warrant the provision of state resources to a variety of citizens (and non-citizens). In the U.S., it is used to adjudicate asylum cases, justify treatment instead of punishment for veterans who have committed crimes, and validate workers’ disability claims. The capacious use of “vulnerability” across these diverse institutional domains necessitates attention to how state actors develop specialized expertise to assess and respond to the vulnerability of individuals in different organizational contexts.

What is vulnerability; how does the state “know” it; and what does vulnerability enable the state to do? Drawing from our research in three different sites of state deployment of vulnerability discourses: asylum, veterans courts, and disability, we argue that vulnerability, as an object of knowledge, emerges within “specific organizational spaces where different epistemic cultures come together to form unique and hybridized ways of knowing” vulnerability, or what Vogler has termed “epistemic logics” (Vogler 2021:12). Across these “unique and hybridized” definitions, vulnerability signals the state’s implicit recognition of macro structural conditions that are the upstream causes of individual need and risk, while determining what “counts” as an individual’s exceptional vulnerability that should be mitigated through micro-level interventions. In this way, the state bounds vulnerability, transforming it into an individual condition that can be evaluated and acted upon through extant state institutions.

Authors

• Victoria I. Piehowski, SUNY at Buffalo

• Jane Pryma, Boston University

• Stefan Vogler, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign