Carsten Junker

Carsten Junker

University of Dresden; carsten.junker@tu-dresden.de

Conceptualizing Vulnerability in Cultural Historiography: Carsten Junker in Conversation with Tomasz Basiuk

As scholars of cultural history with backgrounds in (American) Literary and Cultural Studies, we will be in conversation about the multifaceted meanings that vulnerability acquires in our respective research areas. Engaging in dialogue, we will be addressing how vulnerability becomes relevant in our research and where it serves to frame and even constitute our objects of study, asking about what insights it potentially affords that might not be gained otherwise. Considering the epistemological potential of this concept in our respective projects and beyond as well as interrogating its theoretical implications will facilitate reflections on how conceptualizations of vulnerability relate to question raised in the purview of work on sociopolitical struggles for recognition (identity politics) and categorization (intersectionality) as well as other concepts such as stigma, shame, and victimization. We will address universalizing and particularizing claims to vulnerability and dynamics of appropriation as well as the ethical implications of such dynamics. Not least, we will consider how discursive articulations of vulnerability are formalized and how these formalizations shape our work in cultural historiography.

Bio

Carsten Junker is Professor of American Studies with a focus on Diversity Studies at TU Dresden. His research interests include North American literatures and cultures including Canada and the Caribbean from the seventeenth century to the present, structural violence, genre theory, and theories of authorship.

Selected presentations

  • Junker, Carsten. “Vicarious Writing, Or: Going to Write It for You.” Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2020, pp. 325-45, doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2020/3/7.
  • Junker, Carsten. “Of Cross and Crescent: Analogies of Violence and the Topos of ‘Barbary Captivity’ in Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph (1700), with a Postscript on Benjamin Franklin.” Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau, edited by Mario Klarer, Routledge, 2020, pp. 259-76.
  • Junker, Carsten. “The 4D List: Knowledge Production of Difference, Diversity, Decolonization, and Destruction.” Voices from Around the World, no. 1, 2018, kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/8575/1/Voices-Epistemic-FINAL.pdf.
  • Junker, Carsten. Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition. Winter, 2016. American Studies—A Monograph Series, vol. 271.