Changing Vulnerability: On Fatbergs, Fentanyl, Ethnography, and Other Troublesome Things

by Don Kulick (Editor), Michel Naepels (Editor)

This volume explores a diverse array of cultural contexts to understand how vulnerabilities were involved in survival, domination, representation, relationality, agency, and humanity.

Viewed as a prospect to be grasped rather than as a limit to be overcome, vulnerability has emerged as a key concept—a framework for thinking about a myriad of phenomena—in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and bioethics. In Changing Vulnerability, contributors focus on objects; sense and representation; relationships that enable, inhibit, and exploit agency; humanity and human faculty; nonsense; colonial domination; and engagement with the biosphere. These different facets of vulnerability variously co-occur, clash, highlight, obscure, enable, or disable contingent on their social and historical context.

328 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 9, 2027

About the author

Don Kulick is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His books include Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes.