Vulnerability: A Research Method for Literary and Cultural Studies

This unique interdisciplinary project develops a new way of reading that can be applied to literary and cultural studies. The project refines vulnerability theory, a multidisciplinary field of study in the sciences and social sciences, to offer a way of using the concept of vulnerability as a reading method in literary and cultural studies. The project focuses on missing and murdered Black and Indigenous People, and the treatment of women and children at American borders, two ongoing and linked cross-border crises of vulnerability in North America that have not been examined together with sustained critical attention. The project identifies and maps an emerging body of cultural responses that explicitly engage with these interconnected crises of vulnerability.

In developing a way of 'reading for vulnerability', the project will culminate in a major scholarly monograph by the Fellow that draws on extensive archival research in the US, UK, and Mexico. The monograph will take a cross-border approach to analysing the significance of the U.S.-Mexico and Canada-U.S. borders in relation to seemingly 'national' crises - unaccompanied and separated children travelling to the United States (Part 1); Missing and Murdered Black and Indigenous People (Part 2); and femicide at the U.S.-Mexico border (Part 3) - by studying how fiction, poetry, film, and performance art have responded to these crises in the last three decades.

The project's associated development activities will deploy this research to three groups of beneficiaries: 1. academics working on any area of vulnerability; 2. NGOs working on gender and race-based vulnerability in North America; 3. the public, in particular secondary school teachers.

1. Academics: The Fellow will create and lead a multi- and interdisciplinary Vulnerability Studies Network, which will meet virtually during Year 2 of the project, bringing together scholars, researchers, and practitioners from different fields of study and including different national contexts to stage collaborative discussions about the ways in which the concept of vulnerability is mobilised in different disciplines. The Network will hold three events: one each on the two crises of vulnerability examined in this project, and one on a topic to be decided by the Network. Members of the Vulnerability Studies Network will collaborate in the proposal and publication of an edited collection, Keywords in Vulnerability Studies, of which the Fellow will be an editor.

2. NGOs: The development activities will see the Fellow develop skills in policy engagement through the creation of a freely available online policy toolkit for NGOs in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, focusing on the two cross-border vulnerabilities and proposing policy options and strategies. This material will also be translated into Spanish.

3. Teachers, and the Public: In order that the public benefits from the project, the Fellow will produce a downloadable teaching resources on Indigenous literature and Black literature for secondary school teachers, as well as a free short online module (MOOC) on the topic of "Black Lives Matter Literature", the first MOOC on this topic in the UK.