Introduction: Clashing vulnerabilities

Abstract

<p>Any list or discussion about “vulnerable populations” will inevitably include people with disabilities—often together with children, prisoners, and pregnant women, among others. There is a kind of elective affinity between “disability” and “vulnerability”: in many ways, the two words are synonymous. Both imply incapacity, inability, and dependency, and this association has an expansive range of practical consequences. Some of those consequences are affirmative (accessibility accommodations in public spaces), and some are monstrous (the T4 Euthanasia Program in Nazi Germany). When vulnerability is imagined as a characteristic of entire populations, cause and effect become blurred, and the source of those groups’ reputed vulnerability is easily displaced from the social world to the inherent (in)capabilities of the group designated as vulnerable. “Protection” from the injustices that vulnerable people may face can manifest in practices of consideration and care, but “protection” can also result in exclusion, segregation, and intrusive surveillance and monitoring.</p>