Current
Upcoming Events and Workshops
2012/2013 VHC Workshops
An Uncomfortable Conversation: Vulnerabilities and Identities • September 14-15, 2012
Corporate Rights versus Children’s Interests (at UBC)• October 19-20, 2012
Contract as “Public Law” at the Intersection of Globalization and Privatization• February 22-23, 2013
Vulnerability and Labor • April 5-6, 2013
An Uncomfortable Conversation: Vulnerabilities and Identities
September 14 & 15, 2012
Emory University School of Law, Gambrell Hall, Room 575, 1301 Clifton Road, Atlanta 30322
Critical legal scholars have long focused on identity, both highlighting the extent to which the law either protects or subordinates individuals based on their identity categories and also considering the ways in which identity classifications themselves are constructed and mediated by legal thought and culture. Recent movements in critical legal studies have contemplated the institutional and social conditions structuring inequality, including those that overlap with identity 
frameworks, such as intersectionality theory, as well as paradigms reaching beyond identity to more universal categories such as human rights, capabilities and, more recently, vulnerability. This workshop seeks to explore the relationships between identity and vulnerability, as well as those between particularity and universality, with an emphasis on the ability of these concepts to deepen existing critiques of legal liberalism and advance questions of substantive justice.
We will examine the possibilities and problems associated with organizing critical legal theory around specific identity categories such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, on one hand, and more universal categories, such as vulnerability or dependency, on the other. Central to this investigation is how we examine and evaluate the impact of both identity-based and universality-based critical theory on the state and institutions organized to provide education, social welfare, employment and training, healthcare, environmental policy, family structure, and cultural recognition. In considering the recent revitalization of purportedly universal or “post-identity” approaches, we ask how these frameworks approach systemic disparities in access, opportunity and resources differently from identities analyses. Specific areas of inquiry might include consideration of these issues and questions in the context of feminisms, critical race theory, intersectionality, queer studies, disability, poststructuralism, transnationalism, political and the “class crits” movement.
To view An Uncomfortable Conversation: Vulnerabilities and Identities Workshop Call for Papers as a PDF click here