Dr Lenka Vráblíková
Staff details
Lenka’s work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, transnational feminisms and political ecology, and brings together visual and textual analysis, autoethnography and artivist research. She is particularly interested in examining the role forests, mushrooms and their foragers have played in the cultural and political imagination of European heteropatriarchal and colonial modernity, with the aim to generate new notions of belonging in a world defined by unequally distributed social precarity and ecological emergency.
Lenka is a co-founding member of Feminist Readings Network that provides transnational and translingual space to explore feminist, queer and anti-racist thought, art and pedagogy. Before joining the Department of Visual Cultures, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the College of Human Sciences at UNISA (the University of South Africa).
Academic qualifications
- PhD in Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom 2017
- MA in Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom 2011
- MgA. in Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic 2010
- BcA. In Fine Arts, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic 2008
Teaching and Supervision
In the academic year 2021-2022, Lenka teaches on the module Beyond Boundaries (1st year BA) and convenes modules Landscape and Power (3rd year BA) and The Ocean as Archive (MA Contemporary Art History Special Subject).
Beyond Boundaries, Landscape and Power, The Ocean as Archive
Research interests
Lenka's current research focuses on three areas: The first area focuses on feminist visual ethnomycology. She examines how fungi have become ‘the threatening Other’ in the racist nationalisms in modern and contemporary Europe and how they can become a potent means to unravel the divisive binary ‘native’ vs. ‘alien.’ The second area concerns how gender operates in art education and entangles with Eurocentrism, capitalism and its correlate, the overcome state-socialism. The third strand of her research addresses the politics of the body in contemporary cultural theory, focusing on how translation–conceptualised as a necessary yet impossible practice–transforms the understanding of the key aspects of our political, socio-cultural and affective life such as embodiment, belonging and political and cultural representation.
Research areas: visual culture studies, feminist visual ethnomycology, transnational feminisms, critical and creative ecologies, embodiment and belonging, postcolonial and decolonial theories, feminist deconstruction, postsocialism, critical university studies and anti-disciplinarity, gender and art education, collaborative practice-led research methodologies.
