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Introduction: Vulnerability and Social Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2017

Kate Brown
Kate Brown*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

At the same time as failures to adequately protect ‘the most vulnerable’ seem to have become a pervasive feature of the political landscape, policies which seek to address vulnerability have proliferated. Government actors, public officers, researchers, media commentators, charities and members of the public alike use vulnerability to articulate an array of personal and political troubles, yet alongside this seemingly shared narrative a multitude of ideologically inclined assumptions and agendas operate by stealth. How vulnerability is drawn upon to frame social issues reworks and reconfigures long-running contestations related to moral dimensions of the welfare subject, understandings of the ‘self’ and wider beliefs about human behaviour. At a time when the pressures of contemporary life increasingly find release through aggression against the socially marginalised (see Wacquant, 2009; Harrison and Sanders, 2014; Atkinson, 2015), vulnerability has become a key concept for social policy research. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of vulnerability appears to be something of a zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the time’ (Brown, 2014a, 2014b,2015), extending into and shaping responses to a vast array of policy matters.

Type
Themed Section on Vulnerability and Social Justice
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 423 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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