Human Vulnerabilities on Individual and Social Rights
Vulnerable Populations
Members of the Law faculty using the structure the FLT Project provides have organized a collaborative university-wide initiative focused on “vulnerable populations.” This new initiative engages work already being undertaken at Emory and cultivates new cutting-edge areas of interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition to law, scholars from comparative literature (those emphasizing trauma and testimony studies), anthropology, political science, and Women’s Studies have indicated that they find this initiative compelling and are eager to engage with others around its themes. In order to forge and expand our numbers, we will hold a series of bi-weekly seminars for Emory faculty and graduate students, complimented by workshops attracting outside-Emory scholars interested in post-identity politics. We will also support collaborative research and organize at least one major conference on the topic of vulnerability and state responsibility.
After the initial year during which our community of Emory scholars explore a range of disciplinary perspectives on the concept of vulnerability, we will add a year long Post-Doctoral Fellow to our group. This will allow us to introduce scholars in the early stages of their careers to our work and to stimulate and support research into areas relating to vulnerability and state responsibility. The Fellow will be expected to offer a seminar related to their research and will also be involved with the organization of the various workshops generated by the initiative. The application period for the post-doc fellowship 2008-2009 is complete. Please check back to this site in December 2008 for the 2009-2010 post-doc fellowship information.
The basic premise of the Vulnerable Populations initiative is that our current ways of defining who is entitled to legal protection and state subsidy and support are rapidly becoming inadequate, perhaps even irrelevant. Political alliances and analytical categories organized around race, gender, disability, sexuality, and class have proven limited and often divisive. Although post-modern fear of essentializing makes us wary of generalities, both theory and politics require some appeal to the universal. The concept of vulnerability has the potential to unite across differences and will be explored from the perspectives of legal and cultural studies focusing on important theoretical and political questions emerging in wake of decades of identity politics. We will consider both advantages and potential pitfalls inherent in an effort to find commonalities which will allow us to reformulate communities independent of traditional identity-based categories.
This project will have important implications for legal and scholarly debates on rights, freedom, and the legacies of liberal humanism. The initiative will also have an international and comparative dimension as we undertake imagining the next stages of feminism on the world stage and the unfolding of critical gender, race, disability, and sexuality scholarship under the shadows of globalization; multiculturalism and the rise of religious fundamentalisms.