Deconstructing ‘Vulnerability’: Epistemics, Identity, and Agency

Vulnerability is a term often invoked in academic discourse, with concepts like precariousness, risk, and resilience becoming commonplace. These theoretical terms increasingly permeate Dutch healthcare and social support practices, where individuals are empirically categorised through assessments such as the ‘frailty index’. However, labelling people as ‘vulnerable’ oversimplifies their lived realities. Individuals do not merely embody these labels or resist them; instead, they relate to them in far more complex and nuanced ways. This paper, grounded in ethnographic research in neighbourhoods within a middle-sized city in the Netherlands, explores these precarious pathways in which individuals labelled as ‘vulnerable’ navigate and make sense of their everyday lives in relation to the difficulties in accessing healthcare and social support in their neighbourhood networks. Inspired by Saba Mahmood’s (2009) notion of agency as ‘pious movements’, this study frames agency not as resistance to imposed power structures, but as the capacity to act within the constraints of those structures – agency as inhabited and lived movements. By critically engaging with the epistemological assumptions underlying these societal labels of ‘vulnerability’, the paper challenges the diminutive view of vulnerability as passive and subservient, asking instead how vulnerability is ‘done’ in practice and becomes both part of but underdetermines the lives of people in precarious situations. Ultimately, this research calls for a more nuanced and deconstructed understanding of vulnerability that goes beyond conventional epistemic labels, framing it as a fluid, intersectional, and dynamic concept shaped by the (re)negotiation of identity in response to socially constructed dimensions through daily, embodied movements that defy simple categorisation.