‘Vulnerability as a methodological and epistemological intervention: What might it mean to write vulnerably?’ by Dr Tiffany Page (University of Cambridge)

When:
November 27, 2017 @ 4:15 pm – 5:30 pm
2017-11-27T16:15:00+00:00
2017-11-27T17:30:00+00:00
Where:
Oxford Brookes University, Gibbs Building, room 217
Gipsy Ln
Oxford OX3 7PT
UK
Cost:
Free
Contact:
Brookes Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society

Abstract:
In this talk Tiffany Page will consider what vulnerability is and what it does, and its role within the research process. As part of this she will raise the idea of ‘vulnerable writing’, and consider its possibility within feminist methodological approaches to research. The term vulnerable writing describes the process of explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. This comes from a core concern in thinking about feminist methodologies and approaches to tensions in research, especially in transnational contexts, in addressing how we might respond to others in ways that allow for the acknowledgement of vulnerability in being faced by events which exceed knowledge, and how we can remain open to alternatives through enabling the space and time to question assumptions and forms of certitude, to return to materials, and to change our minds.

Tiffany Page is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her research is interdisciplinary and includes the areas and intersections of vulnerability, gender inequalities and institutional violence. In particular she examines vulnerability as a political, methodological and ethical concept as a means to consider embodied responses to local and global social issues. In relation to gender inequalities in higher education, Tiffany’s research examines practices, cultures and leadership that produce particular institutional responses to staff sexual misconduct and help to sustain conditions in which forms of gender based and sexual violence occur.