Risk from Vulnerability Under Lockdown: Racism, Class and Gender Inequality in Western Sydney

Scholarship on risk has found that Covid-19 lockdowns heightened tensions between individual risk-taking and collective susceptibility to high-risk situations. Integrating insights from sociology, political economy and geography, this article shows that more attention to temporality, spatiality and scale is needed to understand risk from vulnerability. Drawing from interviews with workers following the Covid-19 ‘Delta wave’ in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, it finds that workers were pressured to make time-sensitive decisions in constrained spaces of work because of higher-scale decision-making. Multi-scalar dynamics intensified risk from vulnerability by increasing exposure to biological and socioeconomic harms and by shifting risk management onto already-disadvantaged workers, households and racialised communities. While Sydney's lockdown regime had distinctive aspects that effectively divided the city in two, these lessons help us understand risk governance in many cities divided similarly by inequalities of class, racism and gender.