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.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional policy analysis
• social empathy
• COVID-19
• Canada
• migrant workers
• vulnerability

Recent publications

Levasseur, K., S. Paterson, and L. Turnbull (eds.). 2020. Thriving Mothers/Depriving Mothers: Mothers, Motherhood and Welfare. Toronto: Demeter Press.

Paterson, S. and F. Scala (2020). ‘Feminist Government or Government Feminism? Exploring Feminist Policy Analysis in the Trudeau Era.’ In Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities? Gender and Politics Today and Tomorrow, A. Dobrowolsky and F. MacDonald (eds.). University of Toronto Press. Pp. 49–67.

Paterson, S. and *L. Larios. 2020. ‘Emotional States: Transnational Motherhood, Policymaking and the Politics of Empathy in Canada.’ Critical Policy Studies.

Paterson, S. 2019. ‘Emotional Labour: Exploring Emotional Policy Discourses of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Ontario, Canada.’ Public Policy and Administration, 36(2): 252–272.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Refer to the contributions in the special issue of Critical Horizons 17(2) (see also Ferrarese 2018), which explore the politics of vulnerability more broadly.

2. Although formally eligible, in practice migrant workers face significant challenges accessing these public programs (Preibisch and Ortero 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Larios

Lindsay Larios is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the politics of pregnancy and birth, and precarious migration as an issue of reproductive justice in the Canadian context.

Stephanie Paterson

Stephanie Paterson is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Quebec, Canada. Her work centers on the effects produced when states take up and deploy feminist knowledge and expertise, which has led to substantive expertise in feminist and critical policy studies; feminist governance; and the politics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.