On February 20-22, 2018 the InterGender Consortium in cooperation with the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies and the Graduate Gender Programme is organizing a PhD course on the Politics of Vulnerability at Utrecht University.
This PhD course will focus on vulnerability as a political matter. In contemporary Western contexts, vulnerability is situated within the realm of individual responsibility and neoliberal conceptualization of productivity where it occupies a place of undesired failure or error. The course will offer possibilities to re-conceptualize vulnerability beyond these existing normative and devaluing frameworks. It will ask how it is possible to engage vulnerability beyond such neoliberal logics and without falling into a trap of either celebration of vulnerability or its understanding as a state that is to be necessarily ‘overcome’. The course will, hence, focus on an approach to the political question of vulnerability as both individual, psychical, and structural phenomenon and as one that is situated within specific local and global power relations.
With the course we aim to address vulnerability as a process of living that materializes social individual and structural power relations while simultaneously opening possibilities for their reconfigurations. Thus, by providing an alternative approach to and a practical engagement with vulnerability – an approach that focuses on ambivalences, tensions, and spaces of in-between-ness – the course will offer the re-conceptualization of conditions of being as situated practices of living where the personal is political and the political is personal.
Deadline for applications: January 7, 2018
Applications should be sent to: InterGender Consortium Coordinator Edyta Just (edyta.just@liu.se)
Maximum number of PhD participants: 20
More information can be found here.
