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

Tomasz Basiuk is Professor of American Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw. His research interests include life writing, queer studies, and oral history. In 2016-2019, he served as PI in the HERA-funded project “Crusing the 1970s: uncovering pre-HIV/AIDS queer sexual cultures (CRUSEV).”

Selected publications

• Basiuk, Tomasz. “Five Contemporary Polish Artists Engaging with Race.” Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, special issue of Art Margins Online. Contemporary Art Across the Evolving Global Peripheries, 20 Jan. 2021, https://artmargins.com/five-contemporary-polish-artists-engaging-with-race/

• Basiuk, Tomasz. “One’s younger self in personal testimony and literary translation.” Queers in State Socialism. Cruising 1970s Poland, edited by Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, Routledge, 2020, pp. 23-32.

• Basiuk, Tomasz. “Coming Out in Poland.” European Journal for American Studies. 13.3 (2018): https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13519

• Basiuk, Tomasz. “LGBTQ and Polish Patriarchy.” Poland’s Memory Wars. Essays on Illiberalism, ed. by Jo Harper. Central European University Press, 2018, 196-202. [Published also in German and Polish translations.]