BMJ Opinion: The need to unpack vulnerability in a pandemic – by Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra
Engaging with and applying conceptions of vulnerability has been one of the key drivers of our project. In her recent BMJ piece ‘The need to unpack vulnerability in a pandemic‘, our Primary Investigator Dr Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra applies Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds’ taxonomy of vulnerabilty to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Ganguli-Mitra discusses how the taxonomy can be used to contextualise the vulnerabilities that different groups face during the Covid-19 pandemic: the inherent vulnerabilities we all have to the virus, the situational vulnerabilities of care workers, and the pathogenic vulnerabilities that domestic abuse and violence victims face as a result of quarantine measures.
Recognising people as ‘vulnerable’ must be done in a nuanced way that does not conceptualise entire groups as frail and lacking the capacity to govern their own lives. Dr Ganguli-Mitra argues that delineating how different people have become, or have been made, vulnerable in different ways is necessary to a) effectively address and ameliorate these vulnerabilities and b) assign moral responsibility for doing so.
You can read the full piece here: ‘The need to unpack vulnerability in a pandemic‘.
For more information and discussions about the relationships betwen Covid-19 and vulnerability, we have podcast episodes on ‘Covid-19 & Undocumented Migrant Communities‘ and ‘Covid-19, Carers & Vulnerability‘.
Image by Chloe Evans on Unsplash.