'Rethinking vulnerability: Breathing, grieving and appearing as sites of/for organizing', a seminar by Prof Melissa Tyler (University of Essex)

Rethinking vulnerability: Breathing, grieving and appearing as sites of/for organizing

by Professor Melissa Tyler

In a context in which there are unprecedented numbers of dispossessed people across the world, in which rights and resources are becoming more and more inaccessible to those who need them most, and in which the obligations we have to one another are increasingly being undermined, or violated, questions such as the following seem to be even more and more urgent: How might vulnerability be re-thought beyond its traditional associations with dependency, as a weakness or limitation to be ‘overcome’, and reimagined as the basis of more radical, care-orientated forms of organizing? What ethical and political scope might understanding vulnerability as the basis of solidarity open up, enabling us to think about how – and why – we might organize our lives in ways that are orientated more towards relationality and solidarity, now and for the future?

Based on a forthcoming book, Organizing Vulnerability, this talk will explore how our desire for recognition comes to be organized in ways that both accentuate and exploit the independency that is constitutive of the human condition, at the same time as opening up scope for a recognition-based understanding of our shared, but always socially situated, mutual exposure to one another. The discussion will focus on three themes or sites of social relationality: breathing, grieving and appearing, to consider how we might rethink vulnerability as the basis of ethics and politics.

About the speaker

Melissa Tyler is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies and Director of the Centre for Work, Organization and Society at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on feminist theory, gender and the body, and on lived experiences of precarity in creative work. Her book, Organizing Vulnerability will be published by Bristol University Press early in 2026.