Vulnerability has become a focal point in myriad scholarly and applied fields as well as a touchstone in popular culture and discourse. Vulnerability defines our condition as human beings – our openness to being affected by others, our susceptibility to injury, our mortality, our uncertainty. Vulnerability underlies how we think, feel, and exist. To be alive is simply to be vulnerable. Negotiations with our own vulnerability and that of others shape our ways of life, both individual and sociopolitical. And we live at a time when a sense of vulnerability to harm is omnipresent, not just from physical conflict, but from misogynist and racist violence, environmental catastrophe, global pandemics, and unabated climate change. Vulnerability is also a precondition for caring about and for others. Categorizing people as “vulnerable” or "at risk" determines much of our social welfare and healthcare policies, as well as society's conception of what it is to be a mature, capable adult human.


Erinn Gilson takes a philosophical lens to vulnerability and explores its meaning and significance, seeking to illuminate some of its complexity as an experience and condition. In particular, she considers how we might approach situations of significant vulnerability to harm differently by holding onto a more expansive sense of what vulnerability is and means.