Research theme 2017-18: Vulnerability

Listen to the Vulnerability Sound Archive on Soundcloud.

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The following events were organised by the research group:

IAS Vulnerability Symposium: Food Decay - Art, Sensation, Materiality (22 June 2018)

This symposium considered food as subject matter, metaphor, and material in art, in order to explore the vulnerabilities of artistic form, of art's audiences, and of the category 'art' itself.

Speakers addressed the representation of food in art, art criticism, visual and material culture, and literature since the nineteenth century. We sought to explore the sensual complexity of responses to diverse media, in response to art historical methodologies and languages that are dominated by concepts of visuality. Speakers considered still life by Chardin, Courbet, Vollon, and Manet, alongside illustrated gastronomic literature, fin-de-siécle novels, photography, and film. How do these painted, printed, articulated, shot, and digitized representations of the culinary evoke multi-sensory experience in differing, but mutually inflecting ways?
We approached this question through the concept of decay. In the nineteenth century, critics sometimes claimed that works of art or the figures within them seemed to be decomposing like aging meat or ripening cheese. Often this was to debase art, challenging its claims to temporal endurance and continuing value, suggesting that the materials of art were fragile, vulnerable forms. The organic materiality of paint often seemed particularly unstable. In so doing, critics even suggested that art was capable of threatening the viewer's body, provoking reactions best described through the senses of taste, smell, and touch. Rather than conceiving of the eye as an instrument that functioned at a safe distance, many described it as a vulnerable organ through which the entire body was made subject to harm or injury. Opening out such expressions of ambivalence, anxiety, and disgust creates space to interrogate embodied encounters with art in the present as well as in the past. Whether real or metaphorical, food has played a central role in art, its criticism, and its institutions.

Speakers included:

• Jinhee Choi, Reader in Film Studies, King's College London
• Frédérique Desbuissons, Lecturer in History of Art, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne
• Allison Deutsch, Junior Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
• Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art, University College London
• Gustavo Gomez-Mejia, Lecturer in Communication Studies, University of Tours
• Marni Kessler, Associate Professor of Art History, The University of Kansas
• Bertrand Marquer, Lecturer in French Literature, University of Strasbourg
• James Rubin, Professor of Art History, Stony Brook University

 

Vulnerability Seminar VIII: Zarina Bhimji in conversation with Tamar Garb (30 May 2018)

The IAS Vulnerability Seminar Series welcomed the artist Zarina Bhimji for a screening and talk. Bhimji was in conversation with Tamar Garb to discuss her 2011 film installation, Yellow Patch. Inspired by trade and immigration routes across the Indian Ocean between India and Africa, Yellow Patch is an exploration of space with a characteristically evocative use of sound. Shot on 35mm on location in India, the film focuses on distinct details of the landscape and architecture. These uninhabited spaces conjure stories about those who were once present and urge us to question why they are no longer there. Yellow Patch is part of a major body of film works that includes Waiting (2007) and Jangbar (2014). This conversation was chaired by Gabriella Nugent.

Vulnerability Seminar VII: Vulnerability and Censorship (30 April 2018)

The IAS welcomed Anthony Julius. He is a highly regarded lawyer and Deputy Chairman of law firm Mishcon de Reya. He is also a noted scholar and author who has written extensively on law, literature, art, and culture. Having completed a PhD with UCL English and having taught at UCL Faculty of Laws, in 2017 he joined the Faculty as the first ever Chair in Law and Arts. 

Vulnerability Seminar VI: Landscapes of Vulnerability - a conversation with artists Lola Frost and Edmund Clark (25 April 2018)

What is the relation of vulnerability to precarity, fragility and risk in the making of art? How might art make visible vulnerable states and subjects in ways that challenge conventional aesthetic, political and social categories, subverting existing hierarchies of power while staging quiet, yet potent, modes of dissent?
Anna Marazuela Kim, IAS Fellow, writer and photographer brought into conversation painter Lola Frost and photograher Edmund Clark, whose new bodies of work, in painting and photography, bring into view bodies confined both institutionally and psychically.

Vulnerability Seminar V: Vulnerability and post-imperial identities: from Brexit to Ancient Rome and back (20 March 2018)

The narrow majority for the Leave campaign in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership has a number of explanations, but the impact of the demise of the British empire upon identities within the UK must be among them. In particular, the vulnerability of English identity needs to be examined from a post-colonial perspective if we are to understand some of the long-term dynamics of imperialism, and their consequences for the future of the United Kingdom. In this seminar, Andrew Gardner (UCL Archaeology) will also pursue a comparative dimension, with analysis of the Roman empire - which inspired many aspects of British imperialism - shedding further light on the politics of identity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Vulnerability Seminar IV: Living with Uncertainty - Precarity, Vulnerability and Service Industry Workers on Screen (14 February 2018)

This talk theorised precarity as a global workplace issue and forceful change to labour practices through a series of critical observations extracted from Keith B. Wagner's forthcoming book, Living with Uncertainty: Precarious Work in Global Cinema. As a glaring omission in the study of film, this paper traced different filmic manifestations of precarity in the gig-economy and services industries found in films by Jia Zhangke (China), Marwan Hamed (Egypt), Neill Blomkamp (South Africa), Sebastian Silva (Chile) and Bong Joon-ho (South Korea). Such an approach provides a much-needed revivification of labor-themed films and complicates claims that these directors are simply film festival darlings or entrepreneurial auteurs. As the first film and media scholar to theorise precarity, Wagner (UCL CMII) makes both macro- and microscaled evaluations as a means to call attention to workers' real and cinematic misfortunes, articulating what Kathi Weeks (2011) calls 'the problems with work' in the twenty-first century. 

Vulnerability Seminar III: Narratives of Vulnerability - Rethinking stories about the figure of the refugee in Europe (7 February 2018)

The seminar welcomed Kate Smith (University of Huddersfield) for this talk. The role of vulnerability in relation to mechanisms of governance and social welfare practices has received growing interest, but how 'vulnerability' is operationalised in asylum policy is less well understood. This paper explored narratives of vulnerability in relation to the figure of the refugee in Europe.

Taking a narrative approach to stories told about refugees, Smith put forward the argument that access to asylum has gradually moved away from spontaneous asylum seeking to more controlled routes. This transition has increasingly drawn on the notion of vulnerability to highlight distinctions between people who deserve protection and those who do not. In particular, this paper focused on the ways in which the UK Syrian Vulnerable Person's Resettlement Programme is underpinned by stories of 'the vulnerable' and exemplifies the latest hierarchy of rights and entitlements to emerge in relation to the figure of the refugee. Smith also offered insights into some of the ways in which asylum policies create the conditions where vulnerabilities are generated and produced. As such, this paper brought a critical perspective to the state increasingly narrowing the protection space for refugees and redefining 'the vulnerable' as an essential marker of asylum policy.

Vulnerability Seminar II: Vulnerability and Law (31 January 2018)

The seminar welcomed Jonathan Herring (University of Oxford). The law is traditionally centered around the norm of an able-bodied, competent, independent, self-sufficient and autonomous man. This creates a legal system which privileges the values of autonomy, privacy and bodily integrity. This paper explored the challenge in the vulnerability literature to this norm and considered what the law might look like if it used as its norm the vulnerable, interdependent, and relational person as its starting point.

Vulnerability Seminar I: Stupid Shame (17 January 2018)

In his talk, Steven Connor (University of Cambridge) considered the vulnerability of those assigned to a category which most human groups treat with angry revulsion: the stupid. Connor suggested that stupidity is more tightly than ever twinned with shame in our growing epistemocracy. But if the power to shame is toxically potent, the condition of shame, though the most exquisitely painful form of vulnerability, may also harbour surprising, and dangerous powers of insurgence.

 

#MeToo: A Panel Discussion on Vulnerability and Visibility (21 November 2017)

The impact of the online #MeToo campaign and the ongoing fallout following the exposure of Harvey Weinstein continues to be felt across politics, the arts, and media. Against this backdrop and as part of the IAS 'vulnerability' research theme, this panel discussed the complex relationship between vulnerability and visibility. Panelists touched on the ways in which visibility can be empowering - exposing the reality of sexual violence, or giving a voice and platform to disadvantaged groups - but also how visibility can sometimes leave women and others vulnerable to various forms of harassment or abuse.

Contributors included:
Shaista Aziz, Journalist, writer, and stand-up comedian
Dr Tiffany Page, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cambridge
Kate Parker, London Director, The Schools Consent Project
Laura Thompson, PhD researcher, City University London