Engaging Vulnerability Research Seminar

Uppsala University
Schedule, Spring 2022

Time: Thursdays at 10.15-12.00
Venue: Campus Engelska parken, room ENG 3-2028
The seminars are conducted in English.
For more information and readings, contact mats.hyvonen@antro.uu.se
Previous seminar series:
Schedule, spring 2016
Schedule, fall 2016
Schedule, spring 2017
Schedule, fall 2017
Schedule, spring 2018
Schedule, fall 2018
Schedule, spring 2019
Schedule, fall 2019
Schedule, spring 2020
Schedule, fall 2020
Schedule, spring 2021
Schedule, fall 2021

As a warmup to the Clashing Vulnerabilities conference that will be held in either Fall 2022 or Spring 2023, you are invited to participate in a three-part webinar on January 27th, February 24th, and March 24th, 2022. Download the webinar flyer here

Webinar 1: Thursday January 27th, at 16:00 CET, on Zoom

LAURA KIPNIS, “Sexual Suicide Redux”

Perhaps American conservative George Gilder wasn’t wrong in his poignantly titled 1973 manifesto Sexual Suicide when he forecast that women wearing pants would spell the end of Western civilization. Whenever the traditional gender binary (and attendant sexual arrangements) begins to look precarious, every side—patriarchs v. feminists; TERFS v. trans activists—wields their side’s vulnerability to violence and injury as the preferred form of moral suasion. Even Dave Chappelle’s an injured party! How to weigh competing claims of endangerment in the context of collapsing binaries?

Thursday January 27th, 2022, at 16:00 CET. Zoom link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/67097591785

Webinar 2: Thursday February 24th, at 16:00 CET, on Zoom

LUCAS BESSIRE, “Aquifer Aporias”

In certain places and times, what is now missing from the land, from memory, from democracy and from our emotional lives seems to align. These absences, in turn, render people vulnerable to conjoined forms of economic, environmental, social and affective collapse. This talk examines one such alignment in the context of extreme aquifer depletion on the United States’ High Plains in order to reflect on the defining crises of the contemporary and the potential of ethnography to suggest more sustainable ways ahead.

Thursday February 24th, 2022, at 16:00 CET. Zoom link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/68914165278

Tuesday March 1st, at 13:15, room 2-0043, Campus Engelska Parken

Carolien Hulshof presents chapters from her ongoing dissertation project Walking the Line: Unyago and Msanja in Zanzibar at the higher seminar in Musicology. Contact Carolien to receive the chapters.


Webinar 3: This webinar has been postponed until September. Information about the new date and time will be available in the coming weeks.

YAMINI NARAYANAN, “Mother Dairy: A More-Than-Human Politics of India’s Cow Protectionism”

Hindu ultranationalist politics (called Hindutva) seeks to narrowly reconceptualise India as a “Hindu state”. Cows figure prominently in this imaginary. India criminalises cow slaughter, based on the well-known Hindu reverence of cows as sacred. However, during the reign of the ruling Hindu nationalist party, BJP, India has also become one of the largest global producers of beef. This talk addresses this seeming puzzle by demonstrating how the cow-worshipping, beef-criminalising, aspirational Hindu state obscures an industrial scale of underground cow slaughter. Unwanted dairy cows are illicitly transported to slaughterhouses, in ways that create and exploit the vulnerabilities both of ‘low’ caste Dalits and Muslims (who perform the risky, racialized labour of slaughtering cows), and the cows, which are racialized and Hinduised. Seeking to overcome the anthropocentrism of the people vs. animals impasse that characterises much political debate, I conclude with some thoughts on a post-dairy society, one based on an ethic that is anti-caste, anti-anthropocentric, and anti-Hindutva.

This webinar has been postponed until September. Information about the new date and time will be available in the coming weeks.

Friday April 22nd, at 13:15, on Zoom

Axel Rudolphi, dissertation chapter: What Good Can Art Do? – Liminality and Value in Socially Engaged Art. Higher Seminar in the Philosophy of Language and Culture (PLC).


Thursday April 28th, at 10:15-12:00, on Zoom

This seminar, hosted by Ida Grönroos, Meryem Saadi, Axel Rudolphi and Chris Meyns, is based on the book The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011) by Jack/Judith Halberstam. Reading: the (unnumbered) Introduction, chapter 3 (‘The Queer art of failure’), and chapter 6 (‘Animal Failure: ending, fleeing, surviving’).

Zoom link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/68439202905 Contact Ida Grönroos for the passcode: ida.gronroos@abm.uu.se

Tuesday May 17th, at 13:15, on campus and on Zoom

Meryem Saadi presents a chapter from her dissertation project (working title: Re-thinking vulnerability: What we can learn from small artist-run organizations in rural Sweden).


Friday June 3rd, at 10:15-12:00, on Zoom

Final review of Macario Lacbawan’s dissertation manuscript. Anders Burman, Senior Lecturer in Human Ecology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, will be the examiner.


Tuesday June 7th, at 14:15-16:00, Engelska parken (room 4-2007)

Ida Grönroos presents a chapter from her doctoral thesis titled Delicate Matters: records of social vulnerability in Swedish archives at the higher seminar for the Department of ALM.


Wednesday June 8th, 13:15-15, in Rausingrummet, building 6, Department of History of Science and Ideas

Leyla Belle Drake’s Half-time Seminar. Please contact Leyla for a copy of the manuscript: https://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N18-1565

Thursday June 16th, 14:15-16:00, in room Eng 2-1022 and on Zoom

Kasper Kristensen: Mock defense of the dissertation Spinoza’s Philosophical Anthropology: Common Capacities, Differing Vulnerabilities, in collaboration with the Higher Seminar in the History of Philosophy. Opponent: Martina Reuter, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

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English Park Campus – Centre for the humanities: http://www.engelskaparken.uu.se/?languageId=1