About the Chair

The UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies came into being on 26 September 2022 with the execution of the Agreement between UNESCO and the University of Hyderabad, with Pramod K Nayar as the Chairholder.

 

The project on “Vulnerability Studies” will revolve around the UN’s SDGs which cover the principal domains in which we now perceive glaring vulnerabilities. Vulnerability Studies is the academic-theoretical wing of the UN’s SDGs, so that the  Chair would eventually be able to provide a theoretical, pedagogic and curricular framework for SDGs. The Chair will study, research and address the multiple vulnerabilities resulting from Poverty, Gender Inequalities, Climate Change and Environmental Crises, Health Crises, the ‘Greying’ of populations, Cultural and Heritage Desecration and Human Rights Violations.  Its specific objectives are to develop a conceptual vocabulary of vulnerability, develop pedagogic tools and cultural apparatuses to ameliorate, sensitize and maybe even prevent an amplification of the multiple vulnerabilities the globe witnesses and the archivization of a history of contemporary vulnerability across industrial disaster, inequality, climate change, among others. The Chair will bring together academics who work with different forms of vulnerability. The Chair is a teaching and research unit, as defined in the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme and hence will evolve teaching courses (at tertiary level), outreach activities and undertake research leading to publications.