Vulnerability in health literacy

Racialization, gender, and disability in welfare-state spaces

Abstract

This linguistic ethnography compares discourses circulating among civil servants in Norway’s public health and welfare system with the lived experiences of migrant women living with disabilities. The article investigates how discourses and experiences of vulnerability influence organizational and subjective health literacies. Vulnerability emerges as a dual phenomenon: i) a structural phenomenon, discursively racializing, gendering, and disabling subjects and ii) a collective, relational, and deeply embodied experience illuminating the universal nature of vulnerability as a human phenomenon. The first form of vulnerability sheds light on discursively structured inequalities in health and welfare spaces, and the ways that multiple social factors increase subjects’ exposure to health-related risk through lack of access to health information. Moreover, normalizing discourses of vulnerability produce and order knowledge hierarchies, adding more value to scientific, state-directed information than diverse and experiential health literacies. When internalized by subjects rendered vulnerable (in this case migrant women living with disabilities), such discourses may further victimize, pacify, isolate, and exclude, thus obstructing rather than enabling subjects to enact more relevant health literacies for themselves. The second form of vulnerability identified in the study, sheds light on vulnerable experiences not as marginalizing, but universal. Such experiences of vulnerability enable novel forms of microlevel agency – wiggle room – to recast existing knowledge hierarchies and pursue more relevant literacies. A deeper exploration into discourses of vulnerability will contribute to the undressing of epistemic injustices that regulate subjective and organizational health literacies at the intersection of migration and disability in Norwegian welfare and beyond.