Negotiating vulnerability: The experience of long-term social security recipients

Abstract

This article addresses the prominence of ‘vulnerability’ as a way of making sense of disadvantage and suffering in both social policy and social science. It examines the interplay of vulnerability as a material phenomenon and cultural script by foregrounding the experiences of the most marginal benefit claimants in Australia’s residual social security system. The article questions whether the everyday disruptions and challenges that unsettle yet settle-into life in poverty are intelligible within authorised idioms of vulnerability that govern access to support. By examining what people surviving on benefits are vulnerable to and how they are compelled to demonstrate their status as vulnerable, it contributes a critical account of lived experiences of vulnerability that holds both its discursive and phenomenological dimensions in view.

Multiple Vulnerabilities in Medical Settings: Invisible Suffering of Doctors

“…We are reacting on two trends in literature on vulnerability. The first one focuses on deprivation, marginalization, disadvantage, poverty and social problems [49]. Doctors cannot be attributed to this group.…”

More Than Making Do: Towards a Generative Account of Getting by on Welfare Benefits

“…Andres and Round, 2015; Hall, 2016; Patrick, 2017) and manage the stigma and trauma associated with poverty (e.g. McKenzie, 2015; Mitchell, 2020; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013).…”

“…Ethnographic research in impoverished neighbourhoods or housing estates in particular has shown how structures of family and community care provide practical resources in times of struggle and a source of purpose and pride (McKenzie, 2015; Smith, 2017). However, coping is not inherently constructive or successful; it can come at the cost of health (Harrison, 2012), social capital (McKenzie, 2015), time and emotional strain (Patrick, 2017), dignity (Mitchell, 2020), debt (Marston and Shevellar, 2014) and destructive behaviour towards self or others (Hoggett, 2001).…”

“…More simply, it ignores the painful and painstaking work that getting by can entail. While not everyone I spoke to was familiar with the kind of enduring and endemic hardship that Lucashenko describes, many were (see Mitchell, 2020). Nessa articulated the idea of getting by as scraping through: ‘[You’re] just living so basic; you’re just surviving.’ Excelling at survival is likely to offer little comfort to those barely getting by and worn down by the effort.…”

“…She advocates desire as an alternative research frame: ‘Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities’ (Tuck, 2009: 417). But stories of hope are also fraught in a cultural politics of welfare that attributes deservingness to those who display the right blend of misfortune and fortitude (Mitchell, 2020). The challenge is to tell of hope amid the privations of welfare without falling into overly rosy accounts of resilience or reinforcing the expectation that people face difficult situations with plucky resolve.…”