Love and Vulnerability: In Memory of Pamela Sue Anderson

love and vulnerability
Friday 16th March to Sunday 18th March 2018
Mansfield College, Oxford

This conference focuses on Pamela Anderson’s wonderful, but largely unpublished, late work on love and vulnerability. The event is interdisciplinary and international, reflecting Anderson’s achievements in British and European Philosophy, Theology and Feminism and her influence in Europe, North America and China. Speakers include her teachers, colleagues and former students. While focusing on love and vulnerability, participants will explore connections with related themes drawn from her work, such as forgiveness and its limits; dialogue; epistemic injustice; self-confidence; nonsensicality; ineffability; and vulnerability in relation to invulnerability, violence, human and divine affectivity, narrative, friendship, thoughtfulness, resilience, belonging, and enhancing life. Her engagement with Kant, Wittgenstein and the French philosophers, Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Lévinas and Michèle Le Doeuff, will also be represented. The portrait of Pamela’s passionate commitment to making sense of what it is to be human will be shared through a special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities.

This is a free event; there is no need to register.

For a full programme of speakers and abstracts, please download the word document here. 

Conference Programme

FRIDAY 16th March

Mansfield College

2.15 pm Conference Opening & Welcome

2.30 pm Associate Professor Laurie Anderson Sathe, Saint Catherine, Minneapolis: A Place at the Table for Love and Vulnerability

3.00-4.30 pm Panel I

Professor Alison Assiter, West of England, Bristol: Some Aspect of Vulnerability

Professor Carla Bagnoli, Modena and Reggio Emilia: Love's Vulnerability

Professor Stephen Mulhall, Oxford: A Savour of Holiness Groping for Expression: Perfectionism, Irony and the Theological Virtues

TEA

5.00-6.15 pm Keynote I & Discussion

Professor Adrian Moore, Oxford: The Concern with Truth, Sense, et al: Androcentric or Anthropocentric?

Regent’s Park College

DINNER

8.15 – 9.45 pm Panel II:

Professor Paul S. Fiddes, Oxford: Forgiveness, Empathy and Vulnerability: An unfinished conversation with Pamela Sue Anderson

Dr Nicholas Bunnin, Oxford: Vulnerable Selves and Openness to Love

Dr Mao Xin, Sun Yat-sen: The Three Faces of Vulnerability: The vulnerability of the ‘I’, the vulnerability of the other and the vulnerability of the third

SATURDAY 17th March

Mansfield College

9.30-11.00 am Panel III: 

Dr Alison Jasper, Stirling: Mortal Vulnerabilities: Reflecting on death and dying with Pamela Sue Anderson

Professor Heather Walton, Glasgow: Strong as Death: Loving, creative practice

Dr Roxana Baiasu, Oxford: Vulnerability and Resilience

TEA/COFFEE

11.30 am-1:00 pm Panel IV: 

Professor Dorota Filipczak, Lodz: Disavowal of a Woman as a ‘Knower’ in Selected Literary Works Read in Light of Pamela Sue Anderson’s Concept of Vulnerability

Professor Elizabeth Frazer, Oxford & Professor Kimberly Hutchings, Queen Mary London: The Politics of Vulnerability

Dr Sabina Lovibond, Oxford: Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical Reasoning

Regent’s Park College

1.15-2.45 pm Speakers’ Buffet Lunch & Unveiling of Pamela’s Portrait

Mansfield College

3.45- 5.00 pm Keynote II & Discussion

Professor Beverley Clack, Oxford Brookes: Wisdom, Friendship and the Practice of Philosophy

TEA

5:30-7:00 pm Panel V: 

Professor Alan Montefiore, Oxford: Pamela Anderson and ‘Vulnerabilty’

Dr Heike Springhart, Heidelberg: Vulnerable Forgiveness - Theological reflections on the limits of forgiveness and vulnerable human life

Professor Günter Thomas, Ruhr, Bochum: The Risks of Love and the Ambiguities of Hope

DINNER

SUNDAY 18th March

Mansfield College

9.30-11:00 am Panel VI:

Dr Paula Boddington, Oxford & Cardiff: ‘The city of dreaming spires looked like a dump – I didn’t notice the beautiful architecture, I saw the people taking crack in public toilets’: Vulnerability, invisibility, and child sexual exploitation

Dr Chon Tejedor, Hertfordshire & Valencia: Vulnerability and the Ethics of Belonging

Professor Morny Joy, Calgary: Vulnerability, Ethics, and Ontology

TEA/COFFEE

11.30 am-1:00 pm Panel VII:

Professor Andrea Bieler, Basel: Human and Divine Affectivity: Theological Explorations

Associate Professor Kristine A. Culp, Chicago: Vulnerability and Enhancing Life

Revd Dr Susan Durber, Taunton URC, Moderator of Faith and Order Commission, WCC: Pamela Sue Anderson: Witness to the Gospel, prophet to the Church: What might the Church hear from her work?”

1:00 pm Conference Close