Politics of Vulnerability
Research Series, 2009-2010
THE POLITICS OF VULNERABILITY: SUBJECTS, BODIES, COMMUNITIES
Fundamental to human being and social life, vulnerability can be the condition for suffering and inequality but also the ground for cooperative empowerment and growth. Thoroughly gendered and often sexualized, vulnerability can be used to justify cultural abjection and social exclusions. But vulnerable subjects, bodies, and communities can also interrupt prevailing norms or provoke individual and collective transformation.
By bringing together scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences to address the Politics of Vulnerability, the Center aims to open new questions and provoke creative consideration of the unexamined gender and sexual dynamics of vulnerability, including the vulnerable boundaries of disciplined knowledge that feminist studies continues to negotiate.
Friday, October 16, 2009
4pm - 5:30pm, Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library 3rd Floor
Public Lecture:
Vulnerability, Disposability, Desubjectivation
Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor of English, Duke University
Saturday, October 17, 2009
9am - 2pm, Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library 3rd floor
Panel Presentations
The Politics of Vulnerability: Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Friday, October 30, 2009
4pm - 6pm, HUM 115 (open to Rice faculty, fellows, and advanced graduate students)
Feminist Research Group:
From the Blood of Race to the Chromosomes of Gender: The Legal Criteria of Race and Sex in Cases of "Fraud"
Jenifer Bratter, Associate Director of Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University
Kristen Schilt, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago
Seminar Leader: Sarah Fenstermaker, Professor of Sociology, University of California – Santa Barbara
Friday, November 13, 2009
4pm - 5:30pm, HUM 117
Public Lecture:
The Part that has no Part: Sexuality, Autology, Genealogy and the End of Recognition in Contemporary Australia
Elizabeth Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
12pm - 1:30pm, Ken Kennedy Conference Room, Duncan Hall 3076
Public Lecture:
"I'm Not Too Aware Down There": Incorporating the Vulva into the Female Body Image
Christine Labuski, CSWGS Postdoctoral Fellow, Rice University
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
12pm - 1:30pm, Ken Kennedy Conference Room, Duncan Hall 3076
Public Lecture:
“Never Again a Mexico Without Us”: Gender, Indigenous Autonomy, and Multiculturalism in Neoliberal Mexico
Melissa Forbis, CSWGS Postdoctoral Fellow, Rice University
Friday, February 5, 2010
5:30pm - 6:30pm, James A. Baker III Hall, Kelly International Conference Facility
Public Lecture:
Discussing the Undiscussable: HPV Vaccination, the Politics of Non-Knowledge, and the Limits of Queer Biocitizenship
Steve Epstein, Professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University
This event is co-sponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Friday, February 19, 2010
4pm - 6pm, HUM 115 (open to Rice faculty, fellows, and advanced graduate students)
Feminist Research Group:
9/11 Cultures and Political Knowledge
Susan Lurie, Associate Professor of English, Rice University
Seminar Leader: Linda Kauffman, Professor of English, University of Maryland – College Park
Friday, March 26, 2010
9am - 1:30pm, Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library 3rd Floor
3rd Annual Graduate Symposium:
Apertures: Openings in the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Call for Papers (Abstracts due January 11, 2010)
Preliminary Program
Keynote Speaker: Monica Perales, Assistant Professor of History, University of Houston
'Who has a greater job than a mother?': Defining Mexican Motherhood on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Early 20th Century
Saturday, April 24, 2010
9am - 2pm, Founders Room, Lovett Hall 2nd Floor (Entrance B)
Seminar: Works-in-Progress on The Politics of Vulnerability
Seminar Leaders:
Wendy Brown, Heller Professor of Political Science, University of California – Berkeley
Sharon Holland, Associate Professor of English, African & African American Studies, and Women's Studies, Duke University
Carol Quillen, Associate Professor of History, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and Director of Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, Rice University
This series was sponsored by the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences.
Events Contact: cswgs@rice.edu
Angela Wren Wall, Center Coordinator, 713.348.5784
Brian Riedel, Projects Coordinator, 713.348.2162