Techno-politics of vulnerabilities and the production of disasters and crises

Five decades of extensive research on disaster vulnerability have consolidated this concept as a cornerstone of analysis and knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities. Seeking to engage the Francophone sphere with a range of international debates concerning the relevance and limitations of this notion, this special issue revisits its trajectory through a focus on the technopolitics of vulnerability in the Global South. We examine a body of scholarship that approaches vulnerability as both a scientific and a political project within critical social sciences and humanities research on disasters in the Global South, with particular attention to how “the political” is conceptualised in this work. We then outline four lines of inquiry emerging from the contributions to this issue, structured around a technopolitical perspective. In doing so, we argue that an approach centred on the technopolitics of vulnerability provides a productive framework for renewing research on risk and disasters.