Aesthetics of Vulnerability

Vulnerability is often understood through the language of fragility, deficit and dependence. This book reconsiders it as a relational condition in which bodies and environments shape one another, opening possibilities for new forms of perception and meaning. Taking autistic experience as a privileged field of inquiry, the volume explores how sensory intensity, proprioception, repetition, stimming and the search for predictability can reveal distinctive ways of inhabiting the world. Drawing on phenomenology, autoethnography, neurodiversity studies and environmental humanities, it examines perception as an embodied and affective process inseparable from the environments in which it takes form. Artistic practices produced by and for neurodivergent people illuminate this perspective, showing how touch, rhythm, movement and immersion can become modes of knowledge. Aesthetics, understood as aisthesis, thus becomes a way of rethinking vulnerability as a generative relation between bodies and worlds.