The politics of human vulnerability: tracing intersections of care, nature and the state

The Covid-19 crisis brought to the forefront the importance of addressing the politics of human vulnerability after the cumulative impact of decades of neoliberal policies, exclusionary migration laws, environmental degradation and aggressive capitalism. The pandemic exposed the centrality of interdependent networks of care giving and receiving in shaping people's capabilities to confront, cope with and recover from health, material, natural and emotional shocks. Nation-states have assumed a dominant role in the management of emergent pandemic-driven vulnerabilities through moral narratives and policies with ambivalent and far-reaching economic, political and social consequences. Taking the pandemic as a point of departure, this panel brings together historical and ethnographic informed perspectives on the politics of human vulnerability focusing on how different ideologies of care and 'nature' prevent or enhance forms of embodied agency within, beyond and against state regulations. We invite papers addressing: how (and which) popular views of care and 'nature' underlay people's understandings of socio-ecological crisis, vulnerability and healing practices, and how they shape capabilities to cope with and recover from bodily and livelihood disruptions and hazards; and, how regulatory policies and hegemonic classifications contribute to reinforcing the unequal value of bodily vulnerability along the lines of race, class, gender, age and nationality. This panel will expand current theorisations of the politics of human vulnerability focusing on the intersections of care, nature and the state. In addition, it explores how embodied knowledges, practices and moralities are instrumental for anticipating, coping, resisting and recovering from livelihood disruptions, socio-environmental crisis and health insecurities