Borders and Vulnerability

The Urban Dictionary’s definition of “tsunamied” is very much not what Zalfa intended. In fact, she had to look it up on reading this entry in the show notes, and wishes she had turned on safe search.

For more on vulnerability, check out Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), Martha Fineman’s “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition” (2008), Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), and Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall (2023).

For more on the social model of disability, read Mike Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (1990). Read more about the origins of the social model at the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive. 

Wayde Compton’s description of the Canada-US border as a “strait razorous border” is a pun on the Georgia Strait, a body of water interrupted by the Canada-US/British Columbia-Washington State borders. Read more in 49th Parallel Psalm.

The International Boundary Commission’s photo of the Canada-US border is very telling. As is this photo of the Mexico-US border.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali
 
 Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries, with multiple passports.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Hello, dear listeners, and thanks so much for joining us on Season 2 of the podcast. This is just a quick message from us, your intrepid border-crazed hosts to note and to forewarn you that for some reason on this episode, my audio is a little off. There was just too much signal, too much of me coming into the recorder.

This means I sound a little robotic at times, maybe more so than usual. Sorry about that. And thank you to the heroic Steve Woodward, who's also known as the Podcasting Editor, for making me sound like a real person. Enjoy the episode.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Welcome to Season 2 of Borders Talk.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: We are very excited to be back. This season is going to be slightly different from season one in that we are focused on thinking through borders around keywords.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Our first keyword for this episode is vulnerability. Now Zalfa has done a fair amount of work on ideas of vulnerability and Vulnerability Studies. So Zalfa, first of all, could you tell us in what context you first came across vulnerability theory?
 
 Zalfa Feghali: I guess the first time I started thinking about it properly was during one of the lockdowns, one of the many lockdowns, because it was a word that was being bandied about by lots of different groups. And then there was this mythical group of vulnerable people who were ultimately expendable, because they didn't exist as actual people. They just existed as a group who would take the social hit for COVID-19.
 
 Gillian Roberts: The, like, pre-existing vulnerable people.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. So, we started using it pretty, I think, uncritically. And then it started taking on, I don't know about you, when you were starting to go back to campus, did you have to do vulnerability assessments?
  
 Gillian Roberts: I don't remember that, no.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: I think lots of different workplaces were asking people to do various risk assessments basically around calculating whether or not you or your family member or whatever were quote unquote vulnerable. And it got me thinking about how vulnerability is both weaponized and theorized differently in different contexts and how that had changed. I've started to write about this a little bit. I remember doing a sort of brief analysis of how many Google searches for the term vulnerability or am I vulnerable or how to define vulnerable, how that spiked during the pandemic.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Oh god.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Anyway, hopefully one day I will finish writing that thing. Nevertheless, thinking about borders and vulnerability, I think I've been doing it, and I would posit that you have been doing it for some time as well, but we just don't know or we haven't recognized that that's what we do. Do you want me to talk about borders and vulnerability or do you want to talk about vulnerability as a term and how it emerges and what it means?
 
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, let's start there and then move to borders, because I think you're right that we're so accustomed to thinking about vulnerability, perhaps especially in the wake of the pandemic, which is still going on, by the way, in those medicalized terms. But obviously there's a lot, or maybe not obviously for people who haven't been reading around this idea, that there are some particular strains of Vulnerability Studies and vulnerability theory that might be worth sketching out before we start to plug that into Border Studies.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I'm unlikely to be as comprehensive as I want to or should be, but we know a very standard recognizable definition of vulnerability is being susceptible to harm or, vulnerable means being susceptible to harm. It comes from the Latin word for wound, which is vulnus. The term vulnerable appears for the first time in the early 17th century. There's a Thomas Middleton pamphlet where it turns up. And more famously, and this is the example that I use in my book that I'm writing, so don't ask me to talk any more about it.
  
 Gillian Roberts: I make no promises.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Looking at you over the microphone like, do not do this to me, Gillian. More famously, we have it in Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is being performed around the same period, sort of 1609, 1616. 1609 is when the Middleton pamphlet comes out.

Gillian Roberts: Sorry, did you mean to say the Scottish play?
  
 Zalfa Feghali: Well, it's too late now!

Gillian Roberts: Because I think you've just rendered us very vulnerable.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Well, I mean, as we shall come to discover, we were always already vulnerable, my friend.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Continue.

Zalfa Feghali: And so Macbeth at the very end, when he's having a fight with Macduff, he says: “Let fall by blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmed life.” So, you know, don't waste your energy fighting with me because I am invincible. So vulnerability and invulnerability here. So invulnerability here is presented, but not discussed. I'm invincible. There is such a thing as invulnerability, which we learn in the play is fictional. It then, the word—

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, spoiler. It doesn't work out so well for Macbeth.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: It just doesn’t. I'm sorry, people. All of you doing your GCSEs.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Our hardcore GCSE audience.

Zalfa Feghali: I know you're listening. I need to break it to you. It does not end well, indeed. So the word vulnerable then takes something like 200 years to turn into a noun. So it starts off as a modifier. Its first appearance as vulnerability is in something like 1809 or something like that, in a Regency novel. But obviously when we think about vulnerability now, it has these social and political and embodied resonances, and it always has. It's the way that it's theorized in a range of fields. So you can go from bioethics to research design to disaster studies when you're thinking about small islands and their vulnerability to being-
 
 Gillian Roberts: Like climate change.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. I was just going to say, to being tsunamied, which is, I've just verbed a tsunami.

Gillian Roberts: Okay, Shakespeare.

Zalfa Feghali: And he wrote a play about an island as well, so really.

Gillian Roberts: Famously.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, indeed. So it has all of these resonances, and there are also legal frameworks that define vulnerability and define people as vulnerable and in need of safeguarding, especially in the UK. So you have this idea of safeguarding specific groups of people who, for whatever reason in this framework, wouldn't have the ability to give consent or don't have decisional capacity. So vulnerability is around, especially when we think about research. And in clinical settings, it's around decisional capacity. There's a big debate around different groups who might be eligible or ineligible to be part of clinical trials.
 
 Gillian Roberts: It's like around consent, presumably.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: It's around consent, except you have the big question mark. The thing that throws this for me, and this was early on in my reading, and I had just the best time reading about this because it just, yeah, I'll tell you. Everything was around consent, except for the group that isn't allowed to be automatically in clinical trials, and that's pregnant women. And that's obviously nothing to do with consent. And it's nothing to do with decisional capacity. And it has everything to do with trying to work out a way of saying, we don't think you have the capacity to make a decision for yourself because there's another human being inside of you. There are those discussions that we could maybe have a talk about another time. But the exceptions to vulnerable groups are what throw them into relief. How is a vulnerable group decided upon? Are they vulnerable forever? How does that change? Can that change? And pregnant women or pregnant people are the group that has the capacity to expose how vulnerability is fictional, does fluctuate, is situational. It's made up of a bunch of relationships. We can think about how vulnerability is actually more closely related, in the way that you and I might want to think about it, to like a social model of disability. And I would think that's like Mike Oliver's thinking about it. And our amazing friend and acquaintance, Polly Atkin, the poet, in an amazing conversation that I had with her about five years ago, posited a social model of vulnerability in that same vein. So as we start to think about vulnerability in those terms, we might recognize that different disciplines will have maybe stilted or incomplete ways of thinking about it that aren't joined up. What I've been trying to do is not necessarily join them up, but see the various tendencies that different disciplines seem to have when thinking about vulnerability. So you go to Law and Legal Studies, and Martha Fineman who is, for me, one of the reasons that I started thinking about vulnerability in scholarly terms. She wants to reframe legal systems to entirely be focused around vulnerability in the life course and vulnerable people, rather than the legal fiction of the legal subject. Right? So the legal...
 
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, like the autonomous, invulnerable legal subject.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely, exactly. And that legal fiction is useful for a whole range, or used to be useful, or... has been considered to be useful by various groups of people, shall we say.

Gillian Roberts: Or, was useful for some people, but not others.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, but not others. I think this is a really radical idea, but she gets a lot of resistance to that. You also have, as I know you know Gillian, scholars like Judith Butler. One of the things that they say is around distinguishing between, we were just talking about this precariousness and precarity. Often I worry that I don't know the difference between them, but Butler does. That's kind of what counts at this point.

Gillian Roberts: I'm pretty sure they do.

Zalfa Feghali: Indeed, yes. Then you have scholars like Lauren Berlant and even people like Susan Sontag who are writing about vulnerability and illness and disability and pain and maybe not talking about vulnerability in that moment. It is something that we're all doing, but we sometimes don't package it that way. Vulnerability Studies is big and fun and sometimes extremely depressing.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, and I guess it impacts on so many different disciplines and fields of study. You start to see it everywhere, I think, or I imagine that you are seeing it everywhere. Do we want to pick up on this precarity versus precariousness distinction? Because one of the things that's coming up in what you're saying is these things that are not quite universal. There's the tendency to think in universal terms and then pull back from that. I guess that distinction is part of working through that, isn't it? Where precariousness, in the way Butler conceives of it, is something that everyone experiences by virtue of being like a living being.

Zalfa Feghali: An embodied living being, exactly. Yeah, and that's very Fineman-esque that we will all experience some kind of vulnerability in the life course.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so when you're an infant, you can't look after yourself, and you might become an old person who can no longer look after themselves, etc. or have degrees of things that are not possible on your own. And so that is kind of precariousness, but precarity is something a bit more specific, isn't it?
  
 Zalfa Feghali: Yes, precarity is more around, and for lack of a better word, an instrumentalized, weaponized precariousness that is, and I think you put it like this when we were talking earlier, that is political, that is politicized, that is allocated to people. And Butler, one of the things that they say is, you know, it is vulnerability is unequally allocated across different groups of people or inequitably. I mean, Butler is talking about Abu Ghraib, and a lot of other situations across their work on vulnerability. But it's about who becomes grievable. What groups do we care about in terms of what may or may not happen to them? What are we outraged by? What are we not outraged by? Or what are we willing to sort of be okay with or forego?
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, we being really the white supremacist state.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yes, yes. Not we individually, but also to some extent we individually. So there is a, there is, I mean, I'm not speaking for Butler now. There is a kind of strain of thinking in vulnerability studies around how can we as individuals, what, what can we do? Is there agency? And a lot of the time the response is, well, the word “ability” is in vulnerability. It is there. We are agentic beings. Vulnerability is premised on the idea that we can't be agentic to some extent, that idea of decisional capacity. But actually, agency takes different forms, and we are used to defining it in certain ways. There is hope in the dark, perhaps.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Well, we could all use some hope in the dark. And let's keep hold of that hope as the conversation continues, because I think we're going to touch on some pretty dark stuff. Can we segue now to thinking about how we take that conceptualization, which is really multiple conceptualizations of vulnerability, and look at borders in that way?
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Okay, so I'm thinking about this from the perspective of my work around North American borders, but there is applicability elsewhere. When we think about borders, they're often framed in terms of fragility and porousness. There are images there of vulnerability, but really, this goes back to the second episode, Gillian, when we were talking about Gloria Anzaldúa, from Season 1, second or third episode, I think.
 
 Gillian Roberts: I think it was the fourth episode.

Zalfa Feghali:  It was the fourth episode. Well, I stand corrected and mildly embarrassed that I've just sort of blocked anything out where I was present.

Gillian Roberts: Remember, time is a patriarchal construct.
 
 Zalfa Feghali:  It very much is true. And it is also worth noting that the first many few episodes we did not record in order.
 
 Gillian Roberts: No, exactly. It was possibly the second one we recorded.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: There we go. Yeah, time is what it is. But when we think about Gloria Anzaldúa, that very, very famous line that the border is an open wound, and you think about vulnerability, which is premised on the idea of woundability and woundedness, you can start to understand borders as sites of wounding. There's a lot of stuff to say there. So you have at the US-Mexico border this open wound, you have, and this is my invitation to you to maybe say a little bit more, you have Wayde Compton who describes the Canada-US border in equally, I think, in equally violent terms or terms that evoke injurability. He says, “strait razorous border,” which I've always said to students, for me, it's actually really uncomfortable to say those three words. And that's from 49th Parallel Psalm, which I always call 49th Parallel Blues. For different reasons, anyway.
 
 Gillian Roberts: I mean, that'd be a great album, right? 49th Parallel Blues.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Maybe it exists or it should exist. Maybe we should make a playlist, a 49th Parallel Blues playlist. Anyway, before we go on and think about, I'm going to talk in a minute about the US-Mexico border and the US administration's behavior around that.

Gillian Roberts: Remember, keeping the hope in the dark, hope in the dark.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Hope in the dark, in the very dark. But I wonder if from the other side, of this desk, you also see borders as sites of wounding.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think this is partly to do with the legacy of a foundational text such as Anzldúa's La Frontera, but also that double take that I think lots of privileged white Canadians need to do at the Canada-U.S. border, right? Because it's a very lazy assumption that, oh, the Canada-U.S. border is totally different from the U.S.-Mexico border because it's not a violent place. Look at the U.S.-Mexico border. It's a place of violence, of violent policing. And certainly that's not the case with the Canada-U.S. border, but it all depends on who you are. And that really brings to the fore that differentiation between precariousness and precarity. And I think when Compton uses that line, he's writing about, specifically about Black British Columbia, right? But one of the brilliant things that that text does is it really exposes how that myth of Canada as the Promised Land, especially in relation to Black refugees from enslavement in the United States in the 19th century, well, it's not so great when they get to Canada, right? It's a disappointment. And so that act of crossing the border becomes an act of self-harm.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, so in the fleeing from or in the attempt to escape from a certain kind of wound and wounding and vulnerability, there follows a different sort across the border. Absolutely.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. And that policing of identities at borders still happens at the Canada-US border. There's no physical wall that's been built there. So it looks different. I mean, parts of the Canada-US border, they kind of look hilarious in contrast to the Mexico-US border because, you know, it might just be a cut line through some trees.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: I mean, but that's so interesting, right? That imagery. And in the show notes, maybe we'll link to a couple of images here of the serious fortification and the contrast of the US-Mexico border, which is an addition a certain kind of physical scarring in the landscape. Whereas there are some images that I know you're describing of an absence. So what does that entail? That's really interesting to me. That scarring takes a different form.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah. In the terms of the boundary agreement between Canada and the United States, the border has to be maintained. It has to be scarred over and over and over again. And of course, you know, we've been talking about Compton's example, writing about Black British Columbians, but if we think about Indigenous peoples and Indigenous nations for whom the border cuts across their lands, that scarring is all important. And it's a fictional settler-colonial line drawn across their territories, but it has massive political implications according to the politics of the settler-colonial nation-state. So I think that even if we might primarily associate the Mexico-US border with vulnerability, and have good reasons for doing so, it's too easy to overlook the ways in which the Canada-US border is also a site of violence and of wounding and therefore also vulnerability as it's trying to shore up its own defenses, right? So it's about the nation-state's vulnerability and the nation-state's vulnerability to, well, its neighbour. And at this particular point in time,

Zalfa Feghali: I was, yeah, I wonder if you want to talk about or if. Yeah, I wonder if you want to talk about that and possibly Greenland.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yeah. Maybe we need a whole other episode about Greenland. Or what is it? Blue, white, and red land? I'm not sure of the order.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Oh my goodness, yeah.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, it's appalling. But this is slightly tangential, but I feel like the US president's entertaining the notion of getting away with what he calls an imaginary line for very different reasons—
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yes.
  
 Gillian Roberts: for Canada to become the 51st state, which I have to say, it's the sort of thing I've been bracing for my whole life. But also-  
 
 Zalfa Feghali: You know what's in there? A Conversation article is in there, Gillian.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Oh, yes. Listeners, we have tried, we have tried. But it's such a contradictory position to be in, right? And I've seen on social media, you know, various activists make this reflection, too, where we don't want to default to nationalism and the violence of nationalism, but neither do we want to accept the current US brand of fascism across the border. So it's, I think the technical term is, it's completely fucked up.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yes. I mean, how else could we put it, frankly? And if we travel southward, following the fucked-upness, where Trump wants to claim or has a kind of spurious claim to sameness and a different form of expansion to Canada and beyond, there is a marked difference between that and what he is doing at the US-Mexico border. While that isn't necessarily representative of every border in the world, I think it's one that we're seeing come to fruition at this moment. I think I'll just go back to an executive order he signed in January. This is January 2025, in case my sense of time falls away at some point.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Is this a Border in the News that I feel coming on here, Zalfa?
 
 Zalfa Feghali: This may be a Border in the News, but it's a Border in the News that actually dovetails and coincides with a border and vulnerability. So it's very apt. And this order is called Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States, which is following on from a previous very similar executive order he signed in the first presidency. And he began by announcing, well, it begins rather, by announcing that quote, “American sovereignty is under attack. Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military age males from foreign adversaries and illicit narcotics that harm Americans, including America." I don't claim to understand the last section, but that's fine. So that order just reiterates that very familiar and also very unevidenced narrative of American border vulnerability. And it evokes these images of a border at constant risk of being overrun by these unrelenting invading entities. So the order again, and I quote, “this assault on the American people and the integrity of America's sovereign borders,” the idea of integrity is what I'm interested in here, “represents a grave threat to our nation.” So this executive order positions the US-Mexico border as super permeable, its integrity is compromised, even while its kind of remedies for this are further fortify it. It's a 2000-mile political boundary, put up additional physical barriers, get some more aerial surveillance systems, deploy personnel down there. So this porousness is maintained though, not by... So the image that's evoked is people are streaming down south towards this border to kind of hold it up, and at the same time, these drug cartels in Mexico control who can and cannot travel, and that's directly in the order, can and cannot travel to the US from Mexico. So, there's a war happening at this place. It's a complex image that's being constructed. The border is therefore the only line of defense against vulnerabilities created and damaged wrought by these external bad actors. That is what's happening. “The bad people are trying to get in.” This seems like a very obvious set of observations, but in order to create this image of being under constant attack, you also have to accept that American borders are vulnerable, even while in different scenarios they're invulnerable. So it is this paradoxical situation at this place. A lot of people, including me, will say, you know, look at this guy and these borders and dog whistle politics and white supremacy, and that's all true. But state narratives of the US-Mexico border have always done this. They've always foregrounded its fragility and they've always constructed images of invasion. Invasion by people, invasion by drugs, invasion by disease. So you have this even while something like the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which we call the new NAFTA, establishes and confirms how important it is that this border remain porous. Right? So there are these things that are competing with each other all the time.
  
 Gillian Roberts: I don't think Trump likes his agreement anymore.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Well, I think that is very true. But the US's two land borders need to be porous for trade and economic reasons, even while they can't be. So on one end, to the north, he's saying it's so porous that it might as well not exist. And on the other end, he's saying, or it is being said, that it is so porous that it's extremely dangerous, but we'll take your cheap stuff. Right? And again, these might seem like common sense observations, but from the perspective of thinking about it as vulnerability, as participating in vulnerability discourses, I think it's really interesting. So over the last 60 years, US administrations and agencies have cast the US-Mexico border as their main antagonist in tackling the flow of drugs. So you have, for example, Nixon's Operation Intercept in 1969, or preventing the movement of people. And what's interesting about preventing the movement of people, which is kind of what we're talking about now, you have in 1994, this feels like, for me, this feels very recent, but actually it's a long time ago.
 
 Gillian Roberts: We have this conversation with Debbie, didn't we?
 
 Zalfa Feghali: We had this conversation. I have this conversation daily. Apparently, some of the songs that I listen to on a daily basis that I'm sure just were released last month are oldies. Anyway, that's a different sort of vulnerability, I think. So this 1994 Customs and Border Patrol Prevention Through Deterrence Initiative, and lots of people talk about this, but it's a very early creation of a hostile environment by literally using the physical environment and its hostility down at the US-Mexico border to deter people and weaponizing that. The border is the enemy in terms of stopping the flow of people, in stopping the flow of drugs, in stemming the flow of terrorists, in stopping the transmission of disease. Even while we must keep it porous, but we can't keep it porous. So there are these competing discussions. And so we have contemporary narratives of the border, both construct and distort vulnerability, but they're preceded by a very long track record. So I don't think we can be that surprised by them. Nevertheless…
 
 Gillian Roberts: I mean, I was just thinking when you were talking about vulnerability of the United States to drugs from the US and Trump's attempts to cast Canada as a sort of northern Mexico from which tons and tons of fentanyl is coming, but it's actually a really teeny tiny amount in comparison. Let alone the amount of guns that cross from the US into Canada.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: I mean, if all people did, and some people do, and thank you very much for that, was sort of debunk all of the crap that gets made up about what happens at these borders and many other things, it would be a full-time job and one that I leave to the experts. And again, I say thank you to them.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah, there's a lot of work to be done. Now, after January, there have been some events that are probably worth commenting on in the city of LA.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, and I won't go into major details because I haven't done the work, but there are protests and demonstrations going on across the US and particularly in Los Angeles to protest ICE raids against perceived undocumented folk or undocumented folk. And I think what that brings into view is how the border actually has moved into everyday life. The border is basically where ICE agents can come and get you. The border can be in your workplace, the border can be as you walk down the street. This fear of deportation and the sort of, I mean hypocrisy, but just the contradiction in terms of, we really, really want you to do this work, but also we're going to deport you as you do this work, is notable. Shall I say notable?
 
 Gillian Roberts: It's notable. It is noteworthy. It is noted.

Zalfa Feghali: We have noted it. Yeah. Hope in the dark.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Hope in the dark. And I suppose LA being a sanctuary, a city of sanctuary as well, has raised the ire of the administration.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: And deploying the National Guard is an escalation that, well, that experts there are saying is unnecessary. And that people who are cleverer and more on the ground than we are, are very clear, is just not right.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Yeah. As with many things with Trump, there seems to be a sense of a particular kind of spectacle that is deemed necessary, according to that perspective, but it is absolutely horrifying. So yeah, back to the hope in the dark.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Well, I think it's worth saying that vulnerability isn't just about being harmed all the time. It's not just about feeling weak and being at risk. It's also a space and a site, just as borders are, of potential, of ability, of agency and of hope. So I think it isn't good enough for us just to go, oh no. But I mean, this is literally what we've done. But when we think about vulnerability, it's not good enough to just point out vulnerabilities and precarity, but to actually acknowledge the ways in which vulnerability and precarity are daily being reframed, resisted, forestalled, worked around, and how people who we would understand today to be in a state of vulnerability, these are not always terminal conditions. Sometimes there will be a situation where vulnerability is there more so than it's not there, but it's also not one in which we should do the the lazy mental work of just going, ah, okay, vulnerable group, that takes us right back to COVID. And the vulnerable people were totally, totally dispensable. They can take the hit for us. We're actually, groups that are vulnerable are vulnerable because of, back to the social model, because of structures that are in place that keep them that way.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Thank you Zalfa for talking us through how we might think about vulnerability in relation to borders and that very important reminder to keep that hope in the dark. Our next keyword is going to be hospitality.

Zalfa Feghali: Where I will be quizzing.
 
 Gillian Roberts: Where I will be in the hot seat. So we look forward to that conversation. Zalfa especially looks forward to that conversation and we hope you do too.
 
 Zalfa Feghali: Bye. What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.
  
 Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.