Unsettling vulnerability: Queer and feminist interventions

Abstract

In this Special Issue we invited an international audience to address the aim to unsettle notions of vulnerability and question the research practices associated with its use in the psychology discipline. The seven articles1expose the paradoxes of vulnerability by starting from experience in different countries, such as: India, Chile, South Africa, Finland, and the USA. They do so by critically interrogating the notion of vulnerability, often cutting across intersectionalities such as: institutional constructions of vulnerability, populations identified as “vulnerable”, researcher’s own vulnerabilities, and the lived experience of “vulnerability”. The papers are presented in this editorial through a cohesive narrative, which highlights topic and contextual specificities of each as well as commonalities and intersections across them. By encouraging new practices for how feminist and queer researchers view, read, and interpret experience in psychological research and activism, this special issue aims to inspire different understandings of vulnerability, that reflect discourses and experiences that promote agency, resistance, solidarity, and transformative social change through transnational collaboration and connection.