This anthology honours Jürgen Straub’s influential contributions to cultural and social psychology, humanistic psychology, hermeneutics, and social theory. Bringing together leading scholars, it explores and further develops Straub’s concept of relations of harm and vulnerability, which examines how past experiences of violence and injury continue to shape individuals, relationships, and societies across generations.
The volume investigates the methodological, empirical, and theoretical potential of this concept as a sensitising framework for qualitative social research. Through perspectives ranging from aesthetic practice and embodied experience to post-migrant societies, the contributors highlight both its analytical value and its limitations. In doing so, the book presents relations of harm and vulnerability as a productive and evolving approach to understanding the enduring effects of violence and discrimination in contemporary social life.

Monique Kaulertz is a social psychologist and doctoral researcher at Ruhr University Bochum. Her work explores the articulation of suffering, violence, and vulnerability in contexts of migration and displacement, drawing on cultural-psychological, social-theoretical, psychoanalytic, and qualitative approaches.

Ines Gottschalk, PhD, is a social scientist and research associate at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin. Her research focuses on collective violence, memory, and learning processes in educational and public contexts, drawing on cultural-psychological and qualitative approaches.

Dilek Aysel Tepeli, PhD, is Junior Professor of Intercultural Communication with a Focus on Migration Research at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her research examines intergroup relations, collective harm, stigmatization, and social inequalities in post-migrant societies from cultural-psychological and figurational sociological perspectives.