Vulnerability and the Politics of Care - (Proceedings of the British Academy) by Victoria Browne & Jason Danely & Doerthe Rosenow (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of existence, giving rise to the need for care in various forms. Yet we are not all vulnerable in the same way, and not all vulnerabilities are equally recognised or cared for. This transdisciplinary volume considers how vulnerability and care are shaped by relations of power within contemporary contexts of war, development, environmental degradation, sexual violence, aging populations and economic precarity.

It proposes that care for vulnerable populations or individuals is inseparable from other political processes of recognition, welfare, healthcare and security, whilst also exploring vulnerability as a shared, generative condition that makes caring possible. Ethnographic and narrative accounts of vulnerable life and caring relations in various geographical regions - including Japan, Uganda, Micronesia, Iraq, Mexico, the UK and the US - are interspersed with perspectives from philosophy, International Relations, social and cultural theory, and more, resulting in a compelling series of intellectual exchanges, creative frictions and provocative insights.

About the Author

Victoria Browne is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Oxford Brookes University, specialising in feminist theory and philosophy. Her books include Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (Palgrave 2014), and she has published widely in journals such as Hypatia, Signs and Radical Philosophy. Currently, Victoria is working on a book exploring the politics and temporalities of pregnancy - a project supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She is also co-editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Jason Danely's books include Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan (2014) and Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (2013). Jason's work on aging and care in Japan has been published in anthropology journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Medicine Anthropology Theory, and Ethnos. He has conducted comparative research on unpaid caregivers of older family members in Japan and the UK and is currently working on older ex-offender resettlement in Japan supported by an SSRC Abe Fellowship.

Doerthe Rosenow is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Un-making Environmental Activism: Beyond Modern/Colonial Binaries in the GMO Controversy (Routledge 2017) and has published widely in the field of International Relations and related disciplines in journals such as Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. Her current research is on decolonial thought, settler colonialism and Indigenous writings. She is Associate Editor of the journal Security Dialogue.