‘Frightening Yet Fulfilling’: Vulnerability, Precarity and the Labour of Harm Reduction

Harm reduction workers minimise the adverse health, social, and legal consequences of drug use through their engagement with people who use drugs (PWUD). Felix, a nurse overseeing drug use at a harm reduction facility in Barcelona, offers a glimpse into the hidden realities of their work. His account reveals how exposure to structural inequalities and violence shapes the socially situated experience of vulnerability at work. Taking us into his social relations with PWUD, he explains how these relations help him mitigate his exposure to violence and are emotionally rewarding, while heightening his vulnerability. His vulnerability is also shaped and redefined by the uncertain, unstable and insecure work arrangements explicitly imposed by his employer. By shedding light on how vulnerability and precarity intertwine during harm reduction work, this account unpacks the subjectivity-making process central to workers’ experiences of precariousness.