03 – Shifting our understanding of vulnerability

How do we conceptualise vulnerability in the context of humanitarian disasters? In this third episode of the Intersecting Vulnerabilities in Humanitarian Disasters miniseries, Ekatherina Zhukova, Researcher at Lund University in Sweden, and Andrew Littlejohn, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University in the Netherlands discuss shifting our understanding of vulnerability to locate responsibility not in people, but with societal institutions and systems that produce vulnerability of particular places or people. Zhukova and Littlejohn also discuss shifting our thinking about humanitarian disaster responses from a one size fits all approach to emphasise bottom-up processes, where we begin with ethnography and investigation to understand the worlds of the people we are trying to help before dictating how their world is to be reconstructed.