Clashing Vulnerabilities, Disability and Conflict: (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies)

This book is about how we might think about vulnerability—what it is and how it operates—by looking at cases where different kinds of vulnerabilities clash. Disability is often portrayed as a vulnerability in itself, and disabled people are often labelled a prototypical “vulnerable group”. This book disassembles that label by highlighting how vulnerabilities involving people with disabilities emerge and how they often conflict with other vulnerabilities: the vulnerabilities of disabled students vs. the vulnerabilities of under-educated and harassed teachers, for example. Or the struggles for legitimacy that pit neuro-divergent groups against people with chronic illnesses, one casting doubt on the validity of the other. Or the different uses of curb cuts for people in wheelchairs and people with visual impairments—uses which sometimes clash. Clashes like these illustrate the role that conflict plays in defining “vulnerability” and they lead us to think about how we might try to adjudicate between different claims of what can count as a vulnerability. Providing new insight into power and non-power, ideology, socioeconomic structures, and the vicissitudes of disability as both a subject position and a lived experience, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, anthropology and sociology, policy, and philosophy.

Table of Contents:
0.Introduction - Clashing Vulnerabilities. 1.Curb clash: Blindness, wheelchairs, and tactile paving. 2.Embodied vulnerability vs. capitalist privilege. 3.Freedom vs. disability. 4.Rights vs. wrong: Debates about sex and disability. 5.Grassroots disability movement vs. Disability organizations. 6.French teachers vs. disabled students. 7.Long Covid vs. Functional Neurological Disorder: punching down. 8.Day centre staff vs. service users during the Covid-19 pandemic. 9.Inherent vs. contingent vulnerabilities in the care for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities.

About the Author :
Don Kulick is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University and Visiting Chair Professor at Hong Kong University. Simo Vehmas is Professor of Special Education at Stockholm University.

Review :
An excellent volume with each chapter offering fresh revelations! This critical subject is rarely discussed in disability studies. Every fix for one vulnerability creates new problems for another form of vulnerability. The probing essays challenge us to be attentive to conflicts and more innovative in seeking solutions. Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook University An extraordinarily useful discussion of conceptual tensions inherent in disability, which should be required reading for all who wish to explore its complications. Tom Shakespeare, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine In showing the need for detailed, empirically based analyses to gain an understanding of vulnerabilities in conflict, this collection marks a significant step in the development of the field of disability studies. Jackie Leach Scully, University of New South Wales