Clashing Vulnerabilities, Disability and Conflict

Don Kulick, Simo Vehmas

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Paperback

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English

Routledge
10 November 2025

Disability: social aspects; Personal & public health

Series: 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.

Edited by: Don Kulick, Simo Vehmas
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781041138020
ISBN 10: 1041138024
Series: Interdisciplinary Disability Studies
Pages: 188
Publication Date: 10 November 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Clashing Vulnerabilities, Disability and Conflict

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