Dr Lenka Vráblíková

Lenka works in transnational feminisms and political ecology, particularly in the field of feminist visual ethnomycology

Staff details

Dr Lenka Vráblíková

Position

Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies

Department

Art

Email

L.Vrablikova (@gold.ac.uk)

Lenka is a lecturer in Critical Studies at the Department of Art and a lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures. She is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, contemporary art, transnational feminisms and political ecology. 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 transnational Feminist Readings Network and a member of Woods - Community for Cultivation, Theory and Art (Czechia). Before joining Goldsmiths, 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

TEACHING
modules convened and taught in Visual Cultures (BA History of Art, BA Fine Art and History of Art, BA Curating) and Art (BA Fine Art):

Modules convened and taught:

  • Feminist and Queer Technoscience (2nd year BA, Visual Cultures)

  • Landscape and Power (3rd year BA, Visual Cultures)

  • Feminist Lab: Art and Technoscience (2nd year BA, Fine Art, Critical Studies)

modules co-taught:

  • Beyond Boundaries (1st year BA Visual Cultures)

  • Fine Art Critical Studies (1st year Fine Art, Critical Studies)

SUPERVISION

  • supervisor of BA Dissertations in Visual Cultures (BA History of Art, BA Fine Art and History of Art)

  • supervisor of MA Dissertations in Visual Cultures (MA Contemporary Art Theory)

  • main supervisor of PhD Dissertation "Marianne North in Brazil: Gender, Female health and Plant Horror" (Hannah Wroe)

  • supervisor of BA Dissertations in Fine Art (Critical Studies)

For Term 1 of 2023-24 academic year Lenka was Acting Programme Leader for BA Curating Programme

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, contemporary art, 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.

Grants and awards

2022: Mycorrhizal Encounters (Research England Enhancing Culture Fund)
with Dr Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds, UK.

2022: ERC-funded Visiting Research Fellowship
Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, Czechia.

2021: CoLeGen: exploring the colonial legacies of UK geoscience in Africa (AHRC and NERC seed funding for 'Hidden histories of encironmental science')
with Dr Pete Yeandle (Loughborough University), Dr Keely Mills (British Geological Survey) and Prof Eric Odada (University of Nairobi)

Publications and research outputs

Article

Artist's Book

Book Section

Conference or Workshop Item

Edited Journal

Film/Video

Printed Ephemera

Project

Other

Professional projects

2023 - Conceptual Design and Dramaturgy of Art Symposium “Gardening Ecofeminisms,” Centre for Art and Ecology KAFKÁRNA (6-8.10. 2023), with Kateřina Vídenová and Amálie Blandrová, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czechia (https://www.umprum.cz/cs/web/o-umprum/udrzitelnost/kafkarna/gardening-ecofeminisms)

2022 - Educational material design of Guided Walk for Secondary Schools "Jak se s houbami učit spolupráci [Learning Collaboration with Fungi].” Critical Pedagogy project "Futuropolis: The School of Emancipation" conducted by NaZemi and Institute Uzkosti, funded by Ministry of Educationa, Czechia.
https://futuropolis.cz/knihovna/jak-se-s-houbami-ucit-spolupraci-pruvodce-prochazkou-lesem-pro-zaky/

Research projects

2022-2024: Mycorrhizal Encounters: The art of feminist un/learning and the cultural politics of fungi.
with Dr Elspeth Mitchell (University of Leeds)