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

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: 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.

Source: Journal of Sociology

DOI: 10.1177/14407833261502099

Authors: Tom Barnes, Sophie Cotton, Niamh Crosbie

Institutions: Australian Catholic University, The University of Sydney

Language: English

Topic: Social impacts of COVID-19

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650