The article serves as an introduction to the special section “Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Trialogue,” which brings together three researchers who have made important contributions to the field of vulnerability studies from different perspectives and in different disciplines: Elodie Boublil, Kate Brown, and Erinn Gilson. At the outset, the article discusses some characteristic features of the current discourse on vulnerability, in particular the question of why the concept of vulnerability is not only very popular but is also often used in such (...) a diverse and vague manner. In addition to an increased multidisciplinary interest, transdisciplinary conflicts over fundamental epistemological, ontological, and methodological positions are identified as an essential factor; furthermore, the plurality and vagueness of the notion are attributed to an increasing “duplication” of vulnerability as an academic concept on the one hand and as an element of cultural semantics and political discourse on the other. The special section discusses this peculiar mixture of popularity, plurality, and vagueness of the vulnerability concept in an interdisciplinary, reflexive, and critical manner. The introduction outlines key aspects of the three contributions to the trialogue and highlights some convergences and common themes. At the end, the three authors are also briefly introduced. (shrink)

The article concludes the special section on vulnerability. By reflecting on the arguments in and the convergences between the contributions to the preceding trialogue, it outlines three key challenges in vulnerability research. Across disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological boundaries, the contributions agree in their criticism of negative, individualistic, and/or essentialist conceptualizations of vulnerability; instead, they call for a non-dualist, pluralist, and participative approach to vulnerability that takes the lived-through experience of individuals as its starting point. Based on this decision, the challenges (...) arise of (1) how to conceptualize and identify the structures of lived-through experiences of vulnerability and of (2) how the experiences of individuals and groups in different social positions can be collected, understood, and interpreted. The trialogue texts, we argue, provide important impulses for the development of a multi-perspective methodology, which permits to analyze vulnerability in a way that is theoretically, ethically, and methodologically appropriate. Finally, by taking lived-through experience as a starting point, the articles in this special section (3) contribute to a better understanding of the contentious polysemy of the term vulnerability. By analyzing the constitutive ambivalence and ambiguity of experiences of vulnerability as well as the difficulties of intersubjective communicability, the contributions help to understand why articulations of vulnerability are often vague and why vulnerability can be politically instrumentalized. In this way, the comprehensive understanding of vulnerability (e.g., as positive and negative, enabling and inhibiting), promoted in the trialogue, also becomes a means of moral and political criticism. (shrink)