On Vulnerability maps out an array of perspectives for critically examining the nature of vulnerability, its unequal patterning across different social groups, alongside the everyday social processes that render us vulnerable – interactions, identity and group dynamics. Each chapter equips the reader with a particular sensitising framework for navigating and questioning what it means to be vulnerable or how people cope amid vulnerability. From deviance, stigma and the spoiling or fracturing of identity, to perspectives such as intersectionality, risk, emotions and the vulnerable body, the book traces the theoretical roots of these different analytical lenses, before applying these through illuminating examples and case studies. Drawing on scholarship across more interpretative, analytic and critical traditions, the chapters combine into a multi-dimensional toolkit which will enable the study of the cultural meanings of vulnerability, the political-economic factors that shape its patterning, with a critical sensibility for ‘unlearning’ many assumptions, therefore challenging our sense of who is, or who can be, vulnerable. This book is designed to equip undergraduate and post-graduate students and researchers across the social, health and human sciences, aiding them as they study and question the experiences and structures of vulnerability in our social world.

Researcher and thought leader Dr. Brené Brown offers a powerful new vision in Daring Greatly that encourages us to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly and courageously. 'It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly' -Theodore Roosevelt Every time we are introduced to someone new, try to be creative, or start a difficult conversation, we take a risk. We feel uncertain and exposed. We feel vulnerable. Most of us try to fight those feelings - we strive to appear perfect. Challenging everything we think we know about vulnerability, Dr. Brené Brown dispels the widely accepted myth that it's a weakness. She argues that vulnerability is in fact a strength, and when we shut ourselves off from revealing our true selves we grow distanced from the things that bring purpose and meaning to our lives. Daring Greatly is the culmination of 12 years of groundbreaking social research, across the home, relationships, work, and parenting. It is an invitation to be courageous; to show up and let ourselves be seen, even when there are no guarantees. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. 'Brilliantly insightful. I can't stop thinking about this book' -Gretchen Rubin Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her groundbreaking work was featured on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday, NPR, and CNN. Her TED talk is one of the most watched TED talks of all time. Brené is also the author of The Gifts of Imperfection and I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't).

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”

To love is to risk hurt. Yet Jesus blessed the vulnerable: the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners. This study of the Beatitudes examines the idea of healthy vulnerability and unpacks practical ways to prayerfully implement it in relationships.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations, and culture, from the #1 bestselling author of Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection Don’t miss the five-part Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.” Social scientist Brené Brown, PhD, MSW, has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives—experiences of courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy. In Braving the Wilderness, Brown redefines what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization. With her trademark mix of research, storytelling, and honesty, Brown will again change the cultural conversation while mapping a clear path to true belonging. Brown argues that we’re experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other. She writes, “True belonging requires us to believe in and belong to ourselves so fully that we can find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary. But in a culture that’s rife with perfectionism and pleasing, and with the erosion of civility, it’s easy to stay quiet, hide in our ideological bunkers, or fit in rather than show up as our true selves and brave the wilderness of uncertainty and criticism. But true belonging is not something we negotiate or accomplish with others; it’s a daily practice that demands integrity and authenticity. It’s a personal commitment that we carry in our hearts.” Brown offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness. Brown writes, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”

Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson developed out of the desire for dialogue with the late feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s extraordinary, previously unpublished, last work on love and vulnerability. The collection publishes this work for the first time, with a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors responding to it, to Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole and to her life and death. Anderson’s path-breaking work includes A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). Her last work critiques, then attempts to rebuild, concepts of love and vulnerability. Reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, myth and narrative all have a role to play. Social justice, friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work are central to her thinking. Contributors trace the emergence of Anderson’s late thinking, extend her conversations with the history of philosophy and contemporary voices such as hooks and Butler, and bring her work into contact with debates in theology; Continental and analytic philosophy; feminist, queer and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies. Discussions engage with the Me Too movement and sexual violence, climate change, sweatshops, neoliberalism, death and dying, and the nature of the human. Originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki, this large, wide-ranging collection, featuring a number of distinguished contributors, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on interpersonal relations, sympathy and empathy, affect and emotion.

This book breaks new theoretical ground by constructing a framework of ‘relational vulnerability’ through which it analyses the disadvantaged position of those who undertake unpaid caregiving, or ‘dependency-work’, in the context of the private family. Expanding on existing socio-legal scholarship on vulnerability and resilience, it charts how the state seeks to conceal the embodied and temporal reality of vulnerability and dependency within the private family, while promoting an artificial concept of autonomous personhood that exposes dependency-workers work to a range of harms. The book argues that the legal framework governing the married and unmarried family reinforces principles of individualism and rationality, while labelling dependency-work as a private, gendered, and sentimental endeavor, lacking value beyond the family. It also considers how the state can respond to relational vulnerability and foster resilience. It seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding of resilience, theorising its normative goals and applying these to different hypothetical state responses.

By being her anxious, honest, and just plain silly self, Jackie Davis’ potato-shaped character proves that, even though opening up to others is scary at first, vulnerability can be a superpower. Vulnerability Is My Superpower features Jackie Davis's relatable diary comics about self-discovery, mental health, relationships, and childhood. From bouts with anxiety and insecurity to the thrill of simple pleasures like secretly trying on other people’s coats at a party, she’s figuring things out as she goes along, navigating domestic life with her husband, Pat (aka “the Purple Guy”), and sharing her most embarrassing thoughts and habits so you don’t have to. For anyone who struggles with self-confidence or just likes to scrutinize the curious workings of relationships and everyday life, the confessional comic gems in this book invite laughter at even the most awkward and vulnerable moments while making you feel less alone.

Why are small and culturally homogeneous nation-states in the advanced capitalist world so prosperous? Examining how Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland managed the 2008 financial crisis, The Paradox of Vulnerability shows that this is not an accident. John Campbell and John Hall argue that a prolonged sense of vulnerability within both the state and the nation encourages the development of institutions that enable decision makers to act together quickly in order to survive, especially during a crisis. Blending insights from studies of comparative political economy and nationalism and drawing on both extensive interviews and secondary data, Campbell and Hall support their claim by focusing on the three states historically and, more important, in their different responses to the 2008 crisis. The authors also devote attention to the difficulties faced by Greece and Iceland. The implications of their argument are profound. First, they show that there is a positive side to nationalism: social solidarity can enhance national prosperity. Second, because globalization now requires all states to become more adaptable, there are lessons here for other states, large and small. Lastly, the formula for prosperity presented here is under threat: highly homogeneous societies face challenges in dealing with immigration, with some responding in ways that threaten their success. The Paradox of Vulnerability demonstrates how the size and culture of a nation contribute in significant ways to its ability to handle political and economic pressures and challenges.