Since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center somberly
inaugurated the new millennium, critical discourses on trauma,
grieving and vulnerability have gained relevance in the academic
sphere. The global dimension of these events was however based on
their mediatic repercussions worldwide, rather than on the actual
physical impact that they had on the world population. Throughout
the following two decades of the twenty-first century, intersecting
environmental, economic and technological developments into
globalization are revealing a heightened awareness of a similarly global
vulnerability that visibilize embodied forms of ongoing trauma, public
grieving and structural oppression of precarious life forms and
environmental conditions. These stand against the backdrop of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR), which is ambiguously put
forward as either the origin or solution of this situation. The last two
years of pandemic have intensified the interdependence of virtual
connection and social alienation/exclusion relating techno-digital
hyperconnectedness and embodied forms of existence, giving a new
sense to the concept of “risk society” developed at the turn of the
century (Beck 1992; Giddens 1998). This special issue critically explores the forms of human and
environmental vulnerabilities that are generated in the context of the
4th IR, including vulnerable forms of human and non -human
intersubjectivity such as online embodied (onlife) interfaces or
“inforgs” (Maynard 2015), precarious life and working conditions
resulting from the global dimension of the 4th IR, environmental forms of vulnerability in the 4th IR, the role of the pandemic in raising
awareness about global vulnerability, or the hierarchical
naturecultures (Haraway 2003) emerging from transhumanist ethics.