Morels are edible fungi which fruit en masse the first spring season following large wildfires in western North America. This thesis explores processes of opportunism and socio-political change following so-called “natural” disasters through a multi-sited case study of the post-wildfire morel mushroom (Morchella sp.) harvest in Western Canada. The analysis shows that vulnerability was highly dynamic and unpredictable as it emerged in complex socio‐material assemblages that included care arrangements, embodied experiences and agencies, and past instances of neglect and exploitation. These concepts are empirically examined through an analysis of how vulnerability emerges in the lives of four self‐advocates with intellectual disability during Melbourne's first and second COVID‐19 lockdowns. Third, in following a socio‐material conceptualisation of intellectual disability, more‐than‐care expands discussions about agency in the context of vulnerability. Second, it recalibrates dominant conceptions of the temporality of vulnerability to ensure sensitivity to the unpredictability of emergent vulnerabilities. First, it grounds studies of vulnerability in histories of spatially uneven investment in infrastructure and resources that shape how care and other practices can assemble to produce, challenge and manage vulnerability. The more‐than‐care framework is grounded in socio‐material conceptualisations of disability and advances a tripartite framing of vulnerability.
Importantly, the framework shifts responsibility for managing vulnerabilities away from carers alone. This intervention breaks with conceptions of vulnerability centred on care needs that leave other circumstances that inform vulnerabilities. It provides a framework for conceptualising vulnerability in an unequal, neoliberalising and ableist world and sheds new light on the ever‐evolving constitution of vulnerability and disability. More‐than‐care detaches vulnerability from the identity category of disability. This article offers more‐than‐care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care.
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