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 2022-2023, Lenka teaches on the module Beyond Boundaries (1st year BA) and convenes modules Feminist and Queer Technoscience (2nd year BA), Landscape and Power (3rd year BA) and The Ocean as Archive (MA Contemporary Art History Special Subject).
Beyond Boundaries, Feminist and Queer Technoscience, 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.
Publications and research outputs
Article
Mitchell, Elspeth and Vráblíková, Lenka. 2022. Feminist ethnomycology and the politics of visual culture. FlashArt,
Mitchell, Elspeth and Vráblíková, Lenka. 2022. Out of Office: Mycorrhizal encounters and the art of feminist un/learning. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture(58), pp. 96-107. ISSN 1756-9575
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2022. 'You keep belittling us and we are sick of it!': Four lessons learned from feminist interventions in Czech art schools. Gender and Education, 32(7), pp. 838-851. ISSN 0954-0253
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2021. Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its racist entanglements in the Brexit campaign. Feminist Encounters: Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 5(1), 05. ISSN 2468-4414
Khosi, Motlatsi and Vráblíková, Lenka. 2020. The Salon is now in session: a reflection on UNISA’s decolonial reading. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(7), pp. 23-36. ISSN 1539-8706
Berger, Anne Emmanuelle and Vráblíková, Lenka. 2019. Live Body: An interview with Anne E. Berger. parallax, 25(2), pp. 119-136. ISSN 1353-4645
Mercier, Thomas Clément and Vráblíková, Lenka. 2019. à corps: the corpus of deconstruction. parallax, 25(2), pp. 111-118. ISSN 1353-4645
Vráblíková, Lenka and Mercier, Thomas Clément. 2019. corps à: body/ies in deconstruction. parallax, 25(1), pp. 1-7. ISSN 1353-4645
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2018. Maria Do Mar Pereira: Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: An Ethnography of Academia. Czech Sociological Review, 54(3), pp. 481-484. ISSN 0038-0288
Daly, Ruth; Mitchell, Elspeth; Park, Gill; Vráblíková, Lenka and Zhao, Yelin. 2017. A Feminist Space at Leeds: collective reflections on an “Event”. Images: Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies, 7, pp. 261-272. ISSN 2247-7950
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2016. Roxana and other feminist (hi)stories: Book review of A. E. Berger’s “The Queer Turn in Feminism". Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 38(2), pp. 281-284. ISSN 1522-5321
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2016. From Performativity to Aporia: Taking 'tremendous responsibility' towards feminism and the university. Gender and Education, 28(3), pp. 359-371. ISSN 0954-0253
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2012. Negativita ve studování na umělecké škole [Negativity in the studying in the Art School]. Sociální studia [Czech Social Studies], 9(3), pp. 51-64. ISSN 1214-813X
Book Section
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2023. The University. In: Tilottama Rajan and Daniel Whistler, eds. The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 383-398. ISBN 9783031273445
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2023. Bodies in e-motion: Hélène Cixous and Sarah Kofman encountering Rembrandt. In: Lynn Turner, ed. Erotics of Deconstruction: Autoaffections of the Living. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2010. Feministický akční výzkum – Jak studovat na umělkyni? [Feminist action research - How to study to become a woman artist?]. In: Katarína Přikrylová, ed. Vizuální gramotnost. Prague: Univerzita Karlova, pp. 61-72. ISBN 9788072904877
Edited Journal
Mercier, Thomas Clément and Vráblíková, Lenka, eds. 2019. à corps, parallax, 25(2). 1353-4645
Vráblíková, Lenka and Mercier, Thomas Clément, eds. 2019. corps à, parallax, 25(1). 1353-4645
Film/Video
Vráblíková, Lenka and Mitchell, Elspeth. 2021. Out of Office: Mycorrhizal encounters and the art of feminist un/learning.
