Vol. 19/2026
Geteilte Vulnerabilität
Hoppe, Katharina; Zöller, Ira [Publishing editor]
Content
Scientific article
Editorial: Geteilte Vulnerabilität / Hoppe, Katharina [Autor:in] … – 2026
Hoppe, Katharina; Zöller, Ira
Abstract:
Pages: 1-6
Scientific article
There is no planet B. Uninhabitability as a Focal Point of Notions of Vulnerability
Sauter, Aurora A.; Schmidlin, Jasmin
Abstract:
The term of uninhabitability arises in scientific and social-political debates as focal point of the climate crises. In this article, we argue that uninhabitability is the focal point at which the extent of climate change’s threat potential, and thus its crisis-specific notion of vulnerability is negotiated. Uninhabitability and vulnerability are thus discussed as mutually constitutive aspects. As we will outline, both vulnerability and uninhabitability are not easy to define. As a conceptual description of real climatic changes as well as modelled forecasts, uninhabitability is discussed in particular as a moment of loss of one’s home. At the same time, this understanding of uninhabitability risks stylising a fictional endpoint, thereby overlooking local autonomy and paternalistically victimising vulnerable communities. For vulnerability, too, we develop two central lines of thought, in which vulnerability is defined on the one hand as an essential characteristic of human life or certain social groups as deficient and on the other hand as the result of relationships of dependency. This differentiation allows us to specify the problem description of uninhabitability: on the one hand as a threat to the ability to protect oneself and on the other hand as a crisis of the ability to relate to others. It is shown that uninhabitability and vulnerability are reciprocally related and together co-constitute the problem description of the climate crisis. The proposed differentiation concludes with an outlook on the different potential responses.
Pages: 7-18
Scientific article
Beyond the Pathogenic. Conceptualising More-than-Human Vulnerabilities through Human–Microbial Relations
Hartmann, Viona
Abstract:
The article develops a concept of more-than-human vulnerability through the example of human–microbial relations. Starting from a critique of the dominant pathocentric discourse on microbes, which primarily frames them as threats, the article shows how this discourse is entangled with biopolitical power relations, inequalities, and the ideal of antimicrobial worlds. Drawing on Judith Butler’s ethics of shared vulnerability and Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, the text argues for a relational, non-essentialist understanding of vulnerability that encompasses both human and microbial actants. Vulnerability is thus understood not as a deficit or a condition to be overcome, but as an ontological condition of co-constitutive interdependence. Using the example of the antagonistic co-evolution of bacteriophages and bacteria, the article shows that vulnerability should be conceived as an emergent property of historically, ecologically, and politically situated relations. The approach thereby opens an analytical framework for rethinking human–microbial relations beyond dichotomous logics of control and threat.
Pages: 19-34
Scientific article
On the ‚virtue‘ of resilience in psychiatric research. Toward a relational vulnerability
Zöller, Ira
Abstract:
Against the backdrop of ecological crisis, the nexus of mental health and ‚nature‘ is coming into focus. This article analyses which understandings of this nexus researchers and practitioners in the field of mental health are developing and which interventions they are suggesting to confront these challenges. A buzzword in this context is the concept of vulnerability, which is used to suggest subsequent interventions, one of which is resilience. Based on participant observations at the largest congress for mental health in Germany in 2024, the article examines current notions of vulnerability and its implications. Building on Judith Butler’s (2018) work, I offer a relational understanding of vulnerability to critique the shortcomings of approaches that seek to overcome the dependency on more-than-human others and promote individual solutions. Based on Butler’s work and social science literature on mental health, the article highlights how a relational conception of vulnerability deepens an understanding of mental health, acknowledging its dependency on and entanglement with ‚nature‘.
Pages: 35-49
Scientific article
Reclaiming Vulnerability as Structural Relation. A Postcolonial Feminist Critique of Asylum Governance
Grujić, Marija
Abstract:
This article examines how vulnerability—long central to feminist and postcolonial ethics—has been repurposed in contemporary asylum governance as a tool of triage and selection. Drawing on scholarship on the bureaucratisation of vulnerability, I analyse how digital assessment infrastructures translate lived experience into administratively actionable categories and produce intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, and coloniality. Within these infrastructures, women and children are coded as archetypal subjects of protection, racialised men are frequently rendered unintelligible as vulnerable, and queer applicants become recognisable primarily through Westernised scripts of identity and trauma. Bringing together Butler’s concept of recognisability and Brown’s wounded attachments, I show how asylum governance operates through a constitutive double bind of wounded inclusion versus ungrievable exclusion. Reclaiming vulnerability as a political relation therefore requires shifting the burden of legibility from claimants to institutions and foregrounding institutional accountability and epistemic justice.
Pages: 50-59
Scientific article
Resistance of Bodies. Shared Vulnerability and Collective Mobilisation within the 8M Movement
Kraus Witzel, Kyra Zoe
Abstract:
This article reconceptualises vulnerability as a political resource rather than a merely ethical concern associated with passivity and dependency. Drawing on Judith Butler, it argues that vulnerability is not a deficit but a constitutive, relational condition and a fundamental resource for social resistance. The analysis centres on the „unstrikeable“ strike of soup kitchen workers in Buenos Aires within the Argentine 8M feminist movement. Faced with the paradox of being unable to stop their life-sustaining work, these workers performed a „performative contradiction“ by distributing raw food instead of cooked meals. This act made their invisible care work visible and disrupted neoliberal logics that render informal labour precarious. The paper demonstrates how the 8M movement utilises a shared state of vulnerability as a starting point for collective mobilisation. Ultimately, the study shows that these assemblies do not seek to overcome vulnerability but use it as a tool to demand social recognition and transform hegemonic structures of power.
Pages: 60-74
Scientific article
„All you can do is talk and try to be empathetic“. Vulnerability and Sensitisation in Clinical Research
Strotmann, Marc
Abstract:
How can we perceive the vulnerability of others, how does it affect and touch us? This article explores this question drawing on empirical cases from clinical research in the neurosciences and, in this context, defines the relationship between vulnerability and sensitivity. The development of highly invasive technologies—including neurotechnologies discussed in this article—calls for attention to dimensions of vulnerability: the success of new technological possibilities also gives rise to previously unnoticed experiences (Dalibert 2016; Oudshoorn 2016). The situational dynamics in which experiences of vulnerability manifest themselves generally elude the formal criteria that ethical guidelines seek to establish. Inspired by a phenomenological perspective (Waldenfels 1990; Liebsch 2010), forms of sensitisation will therefore be described. To this end, I draw on ethnographic research and interviews with neuroscientists who describe their interactions with severely affected patients. The focus of this article is on the extent to which the relationship between vulnerability and sensitivity opens up an approach to how, within specific contexts (e.g., clinical research), openness to dimensions of vulnerability can be practiced, but also how it can lead to excessive demands.
Pages: 75-87
Scientific article
Conspiracy-Ideological Sovereignism and the Legitimising Order of Law. Systematisation of an International Phenomenon
Hundertmark, Ben; Kretschmann, Andrea; Rowitz, Lara
Abstract:
The article offers an analysis of the international phenomenon of conspiracy-ideological sovereignism, with particular attention to the German case of so-called ‚Reichsbürger‘. We argue that the structural similarities across sovereignists scenes worldwide allow for an understanding of such conspiracy-ideological sovereignism as a modern travelling ideology that takes shape in various local manifestations, among them ‚Reichsbürger‘ in Germany. We conceptualise the phenomenon along three core features: scene members reject the existing order, invoke a past order regarded as ‚natural‘, and appeal to an alternative legal framework. By doing so, we address a research desideratum in two respects: firstly, ‚Reichsbürger‘ have so far received little analytical attention in light of the international state of research, and, secondly, normative perspectives continue to dominate the characterisation of the phenomenon globally.
Pages: 88-107