The IAS Vulnerability Seminar Series hosted a panel that 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. This event was chaired by Allison Deutch (IAS, UCL).

This talk considered the vulnerability of those assigned to a category which most human groups treat with angry revulsion: the stupid. Professor Steven Connor will suggest 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. Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English and Fellow of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge. From October 2018 he will be Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on many topics, including Dickens, Beckett, Joyce, value, ventriloquism, skin, flies and air.

IAS Vulnerability Seminar: Vulnerability and Censorship

The law is traditionally centered around the norm of an able-bodied, competent, independent, self-sufficient and autonomous man. This creates a legal systems which privileges the values of autonomy, privacy and bodily integrity.

The Institute of Advanced Studies hosted a conversation with Elisabeth Lebovici to discuss her new book Ce que le sida m'a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle (‘What AIDS has done to me. Art and Activism at the End of the 20th Century’, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2017).