Vulnerability and marginality

In the first chapter, we proposed that vulnerable and marginalised persons are constructed as cultural others – that is, that popular discourse, international agreements such as the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 1964/2013), declarations such as the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2006), and occasionally country-specific legislation such as New Zealand’s Vulnerable Children Act (2014) hold or imply that there is something ontologically different about vulnerable and marginalised people from everyone else. This is at variance with notions of vulnerability that hold that vulnerability is always contextual (e.g., Luna, 2009) and usually created. This chapter will consider a working understanding of vulnerability in practice and in research. We propose that vulnerability is not a class of persons, but a mutable, contextual, and layered construct that may apply to individual persons (and communities) from time to time, depending on circumstances and especially relationships. Nor, we propose, is vulnerability a durably definable characteristic of persons; it may change over time (Brown, 2014), and with fashions in economic and social policy. We suggest that the language of vulnerability has evolved into a category of persons because of policy and organisational convenience, and as a method of social control. It is easier and more expedient to talk about disempowered categories of persons rather than the messy business of individual persons with complex lives. However, some authors, particularly in the field of bioethics and medical research, argue that notions of vulnerability are appropriate for classes of persons (e.g., Hurst, 2008). We will consider the issue of resilience as the ‘flip side’ of vulnerability. Later in this chapter, we also consider contemporary understandings about marginality, which we propose again has to do with social control, and the ability – that is, the power – to label. Finally, this chapter will invite readers to examine their personal 15and professional attitudes about vulnerability and marginality in order to critique the sources of these attitudes and values, and explore ways to assess vulnerability and marginality as culturally constructed and an inherent characteristic of particular individuals at particular moments in time.