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This introduction provides an analytical back ground for the notion of vulnerability as it is currently perceived mainly in social sciences, ethics, philosophy, queer studies and governmentality. Used both as descriptive and normative term, vulnerability, along with resilience and policy management, has acquired political dimensions, which are distant from those given by the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas. In present day social and political discussions vulnerability has gained enormous popularity and seems to be a genuine 'sticky concept', an adhesive cluster of heterogeneous conceptual elements. Keywords: vulnerability, resilience, governmentality, intersectionality, racism, queer, vulnerable agency, sticky concept

This introduction provides an analytical back ground for the notion of vulnerability as it is currently perceived mainly in social sciences, ethics, philosophy, queer studies and governmentality. Used both as descriptive and normative term, vulnerability, along with resilience and policy management, has acquired political dimensions, which are distant from those given by the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas. In present day social and political discussions vulnerability has gained enormous popularity and seems to be a genuine 'sticky concept', an adhesive cluster of heterogeneous conceptual elements. ; Peer reviewed

Die Studie widmet sich intersektionalen Verletztbarkeiten, sozio-geografischen und rassistischen Ungerechtigkeiten sowie dem Traumapotenzial von Reproduktionsmedizin, Menschenhandel und Schwarzmarkt-Organhandel. Mittels eines empirischen, kritisch-diskursanalytischen, künstlerischen und philosophisch-theoretischen Zugangs entwickelt die interdisziplinäre Studie praktische kreative Werkzeuge für eine Pädagogik, die Würde und Integrität betont und die Menschenrechte im Alltag der betroffenen Bevölkerung unterstützt. Applying a phenomenological lens, this study investigates intersectional vulnerabilities, socio-geographical and racial injustices, as well as the potential of trauma in reproductive medicine, human trafficking and black-market organ trades in a global context. The interdisciplinary study combines notions of writing back from within Pedagogy and hands-on creative social work tools, which emphasize dignity and integrity, and support self-efficacy and human rights in the everyday lives of affected populations.

Abstract
Housing wealth is the single largest portion of household wealth in most Western societies today, yet little research has examined how individuals make decisions regarding the use of the housing wealth that they possess. In this article, we leverage insights from relational economic sociology to understand how individuals' subjective valuations and other economic judgments are influenced when space in a home is relationally earmarked. Using a series of original vignette experiments and survey tasks in conjunction with qualitative responses, we find that earmarking a room for a close social tie does indeed matter for valuation. Furthermore, we reveal that individual economic judgments are strongly influenced by different relational content associated with relational earmarks compared to a control. Put differently, we systematically show how modifying the constitution of an earmark strengthens or lessens the appropriateness of its match and prompts distinct patterns of economic decision-making. Our analyses extend relational economic sociology to studies of housing while also building intellectual bridges with research on judgment and decision-making (JDM).

A burgeoning literature spanning sociologies of culture and social network methods has for the past several decades sought to explicate the relationships between culture and connectivity. A number of promising recent moves toward integration are worthy of review, comparison, critique, and synthesis. Network thinking provides powerful techniques for specifying cultural concepts ranging from narrative networks to classification systems, tastes, and cultural repertoires. At the same time, we see theoretical advances by sociologists of culture as providing a corrective to network analysis as it is often portrayed, as a mere collection of methods. Cultural thinking complements and sets a new agenda for moving beyond predominant forms of structural analysis that ignore action, agency, and intersubjective meaning. The notion of "cultural holes" that we use to organize our review points both to the cultural contingency of network structure and to the increasingly permeable boundary between studies of culture and research on social networks.

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice's Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

Storytelling is a fundamental part of human interaction; it is also deeply social and political in nature. In this article, I explore reproductive storytelling as a phenomenon of sociological consequence. I do so in the context of donor conception, which used to be managed through secrecy but where children are now perceived 'to have the right' to know about their genetic origins. I draw on original qualitative data with families of donor conceived children, and bringing my data into conversation with social script theory and the concept of relationality, I investigate the disjuncture between the value now placed on openness and storytelling, and the absence of an existing social script by which to do so. I show the nuanced ways in which this absence plays out on relational playing-fields, within multidimensional, intergenerational relationships. I suggest that in order to understand sociologically the significance and process of reproductive storytelling, it is vital to keep both the role of social scripts, and embedded relationality, firmly in view.

A wide-ranging conversation has been unfolding in the past two decades on the colonial origins and legacies of international relations (IR) and the ways in which these might be overcome. Critiques and counter-projects that draw inspiration from Latin American decolonial thinking have become an increasingly prominent part of this, particularly in the past few years. In this article, I offer an assessment of this nascent decolonial IR. I make two broad arguments: that dominant modes of decolonial critique in IR need to be supplemented by projects that unravel-that is, make sense of and disrupt-racialized power and knowledge relations as they play out across multiple political, economic, and epistemic sites; and that achieving this requires more nuanced and targeted decolonial methodologies than those that are currently available. This leads me to reframe coloniality in IR as a methodological problem, not to supplant questions of epistemology, ontology, or ethics in decolonial IR but to render them more amenable to empirical analysis. Illustrating my discussion through reference to the global governance of "traditional knowledge," I sketch out a methodological framework for decolonial IR that is attentive to the slow, context-specific processes through which coloniality (re)emerges but is also reshaped.

This article advances the argument that the acceleration of practices introduced by digital technologies also impact key concepts of social theory. Digital technologies not only give rise to new concepts, but they also reconfigure our entire socio-political conceptual vocabulary. In particular, this acceleration reorganises the relationship between the spatial and temporal dimensions of political concepts. As a consequence, our spatially defined understanding of authority, hierarchy or relation underestimates the repercussions of shifting temporalities. This article pursues this shift from space to time and outlines how temporal relationality is gradually impacting the representations and images we live by.