Book Description
Vulnerability and resilience are concepts that have long been treated as individual and contradicting topics. In recent times, we have seen that vulnerabilities and resilience can go hand in hand and that vulnerabilities cannot be conceptualized only in simple terms because intersectionality must be considered as well as social, organizational, and systemic aspects and processes. One example is that women are more vulnerable (higher values in nearly all stress related measures) in the COVID-19 pandemic. This finding has to be analyzed from an intersectional perspective, because socio-economic factors, cultural factors, exposure to COVID-19 and the type of occupation (e.g. healthcare sector, frontline workers) play an important role in how vulnerable or resilient women can be in a given society. The large number of studies on COVID-19 vulnerabilities makes it necessary to take a closer look at the resilience factors that often go hand in hand with potential vulnerabilities. As we see in the literature about pandemics in general and COVID-19, there are some individual, organizational and systemic vulnerabilities that can be found in all pandemics. From that we can assume that there will be resilience factors within the same concepts that may buffer vulnerabilities.
