ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a working understanding of vulnerability in practice and in research and also considers the issue of resilience as the 'flip side' of vulnerability. It argues that vulnerability is not a class of persons, but a mutable, contextual, and layered construct that may apply to individual persons from time to time, depending on circumstances and relationships. The chapter examines the personal and professional attitudes about vulnerability and marginality to critique the sources of these attitudes and values, and explores ways to assess vulnerability and marginality as culturally constructed and an inherent characteristic of particular individuals at particular moments in time. Such complex and multidimensional concepts of marginality lead people to the conceptualisation of citizenship. A. Higuchi writes that discourses that set out poverty as the only measure of marginality are too restrictive because they set out income as the sole indicator to address social exclusion.
