Ambient vulnerability

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the concept of ambient vulnerability. Ambience concerns the overlapping and shifting material forms that constitute a person’s surroundings – including (but not limited to) air quality, flow, temperature, humidity, noise and light – that contribute to their health, wellbeing and (dis)comfort. Building on a growing movement across a range of disciplines towards the study of socialmaterial relations, we suggest that ambience is an important approach for critically understanding the complex interconnections among nature, society, and technology in the production of lived ecologies. The vulnerability framing locates our expressly political understanding of ambience, reflecting and reinforcing social inequalities. Moreover, different types of vulnerability across the dimensions of the ambient environment are interdependent and accumulate, often intensifying one another. We delineate some of the key features of ambient vulnerability, specifically: cumulative impacts; permeability; unevenness; phenomenological differentiation; and multiple temporalities. The paper shows how ambient environments are shifting and complex, a turbulent milieu of contextual factors, but they are essential to our understanding of social and ecological vulnerability in the 21st century.