Description
This paper focuses on the concepts of vulnerability and resistance in climate politics, focusing on how gendered and racialised discourses relate to material outcomes. Climate change is posed as a form of colonial violence and a site of struggle over whose lives are to be enriched and whose vulnerabilised and the discursive justifications for the ensuing inequalities.
Drawing on a new book, to be published with Liverpool University Press in 2026/27, this paper first outlines the critique of vulnerability, drawing on feminist arguments around paternalism and victimisation. It then offers an alternative: a breaking down of vulnerability into the concepts of precarity, which builds on the work of political economists; grievability, which builds on the work of Judith Butler, and ‘islanding’ a resistance concept that builds on Pacific Studies. Taken together, this paper turns vulnerability discourse on its head and tries to relocate these conversations within the reality of climate change.
