IAS Research Themes 2017-18

Each theme is open to the widest possible interpretation and is assumed to address the concerns of many disciplines and departments while providing a frame for thinking across or even bypassing entrenched or established modes of thinking. It may be useful for prospective applicants to know that the conversations we have been having around each have included the following concerns:

Lies

• Deceit, mendacity, misinformation and falsehood
• Technologies of deception and denial, digital developments and the fabrication of facts, fictions, factoids and fibs
• Alternative facts, post-truth, fake news, double-speak and misrepresentation
• Counter factual narratives, myth and make-believe, stories and fables
• Language and lying, ontologies of lying
• The long history of lying
• Extracting the 'truth': torture, duress and persecution
• False evidence, ideologies, fakes and forgeries
• Heresy and hearsay, rumour and gossip, wilful ignorance and secrets, evasion and erasure
• Polemics, persuasion, propaganda and politics, conspiracies and concealment
• Veridical evidence, witnessing, perjury, oaths and testimony, lying and the law
• Lie detectors and mind machines, brain scanners and neuroscience, forensics and fabrication
• Ethics and honesty, withholding information and economising with the 'truth'
• Masquerading and masking, conmen and tricksters, self-preservation, subjectivity and strategic display/disguise.

• Repression, refusal, regression and deferral
   

  

Vulnerability

• A state of being wounded, subject to harm or injury
• A relational condition of dependence invoking external and internal forces or dangers
• Figurations of vulnerability, in literature, art, humanitarian discourse, politics and poetics
• The constitution/construction of vulnerable subjects and groups, regions, languages, populations or communities
• The instrumentalizations of vulnerability in human rights discourse, humanitarian studies, refugee studies, public policy and politics
• Vulnerability and victimhood: ethics, values, agency and moral judgement
• Vulnerability and violence: epistemic, actual and strategic
• The relationship of 'vulnerability' to 'precarity', 'fragility' or 'risk'
• Vulnerable forms: genres, mediums, practices, objects, structures, materials, modes of being, life-worlds
• The gendering/ageing/sexing of vulnerability: vulnerability and intersectionality
• Vulnerability and visibility, vulnerability and difference, vulnerability as image
• Vulnerability and the law, discourses of protection, care and control, compassion and support
• Vulnerability, performance and performativity
• Vulnerability and power, vulnerability and strength/resilience

Images

The Doris Salcedo Shibboleth installation in the Tate Modern turbine hall by Lyanne Wylde, 2008 (bottom)

Pinocchio by Andrea Costamagna, 2016 (top)