Reconfiguring Vulnerability and Dis/Ability: An Agential Realist Exploration to Disentangle Vulnerability Effects in Austria's COVID‐19 Response

TL;DR

This paper explores how vulnerability and disability interacted during Austria's response to the pandemic, showing that vulnerability is dynamic and shaped by social and material factors.

Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of 'vulnerability effects' to show how vulnerability is both produced by and shapes social practices.

Findings

Vulnerability is a fluid and context-dependent process shaped by material and discursive practices.

Vulnerability effects reveal how systemic inequalities and resistance shape agency and resilience.

The study challenges static views of vulnerability by highlighting its relational and emergent nature.

Abstract

This article examines how vulnerability emerged, evolved and was contested during Austria's COVID‐19 response, by attending to the entangled realities of people with dis/abilities. Using a posthumanist, agential realist lens and a diffractive methodology, the research explores how vulnerability is not a fixed state but a dynamic process shaped by material and discursive practices. It introduces the concept of ‘vulnerability effects’ to articulate that vulnerabilities are simultaneously a product of and a catalyst for material and discursive practices within systems of dis/ability and crisis response. Drawing on Carol Thomas’s distinction between disablism and impairment effects, the analysis moves beyond binary framings to capture how vulnerabilities are simultaneously produced by systemic inequalities and contested through creative acts of resistance. Through the narratives of participants navigating institutional restrictions, inaccessible environments and intersecting crises, the article illustrates how debilitating conditions and activist affordances intra‐act, shaping the possibilities for agency and resilience. The findings reveal the fluid, context‐dependent and performative nature of vulnerability, challenging static paradigms in crisis response. By reframing vulnerability as relational and emergent, the article calls for inclusive and response‐able approaches to policy and social structures that address systemic neglect and promote equitable opportunities.

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