Fear of the other: vulnerabilization, social empathy, and the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada

Abstract

In this paper, we use the Empathic Policy Framework to explore the concept of vulnerability in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that vulnerability is not a state of being, but rather an effect produced by emotional policy discourse. As a result, people are not inherently ‘vulnerable’, but rather ‘vulnerabilized’. We make this claim by exploring the potential of the EPF to illuminate the process of vulnerabilization in the context of migrant agricultural workers in Canada, exposing the emotional policy discourses that constitute vulnerability and enabling policy analysts to engage empathically with policy subjects. We aim to show that, when viewed this way, following philosopher Shelley Tremain, vulnerability is an ‘apparatus of power that differentially produces subjects, materially, socially, politically, and relationally’. The EPF can help attune policy analysts to these processes and the effects produced by them.