Curiosity Café: Vulnerability

We will be hosting our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, February 4th from 6:00-8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6-6:30. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30-8:30pm with a 10 minute break in the middle. Please get a ticket here, and see below (*, **) for a note about a change in our ticketing policy.

Event Description

The topic of our next café is: Vulnerability

It is often assumed that to be vulnerable is to be susceptible to physical or emotional harm. Consequently, portrayals and descriptions of vulnerability both in our day-to-day lives as well as in the media we consume are reductively negative, equating it with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, and passivity, among other things. 

At our next Curiosity Café, led by returning guest co-moderator Eirini Martsoukaki and Sofia Panasiuk, we will discuss these common presumptions about vulnerability. The first half of our discussion will be devoted to exploring manifestations of vulnerability in our daily lives: we will explore the language we use to talk about vulnerability (‘TMI’, ‘trauma dumping’, ‘building walls’) and the ways in which leaning into vulnerability can be difficult, unsettling, empowering, or transformative.

In the second half, we’ll examine the social norms about vulnerability and what effects, if any, these norms have. In what contexts are we expected to be vulnerable? What are the consequences of having social norms or expectations around vulnerability? Has social media (e.g., Instagram, Reddit, X) enabled vulnerability to be shared and experienced in meaningfully different ways than before?

A note about Ticketing Change

*We are implementing a change to our Curiosity Café ticketing system! All of our tickets are now Pay-What-You-Can, with an important exception** (see below). It is important to us to be transparent with all of you, so here’s our reasoning:

• We want to promote $ accessibility by only asking our attendees to pay what they can, while also allowing us to grow our capacity as an organization. We have some exciting new initiatives planned for 2025, so think of your ticket as an investment in our community and future work <3
• We want to encourage people who get tickets to actually attend so that as many people as can come get to attend.
• This requires less back-end monitoring to adjust ticket category quantities on Eventbrite.

As before, our suggested donation amount is $10, but this amount is a very generic recommendation based only on our needs as an organization. We encourage you to adjust what you are paying according to this amount and your own financial circumstances.

**We will still have 5 free tickets available for our attendees. If paying anything at all is not financially feasible for you, or our ticketing system presents some other barrier for you, please contact our Director of Community Programs, Sophia, at sophia@beingnbecoming.org. These tickets will be first come, first served, no questions asked! You can expect to hear back from her within 72 hours.

About the Curiosity Café Series

For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join us at our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: every two weeks, we invite members of our community to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about.

Accessibility

Some accessibility-related information* about our event and the venue:

• This event involves a verbal discussion, with a handout to guide the discussion
• There will be a large-print version of the handout available
• We ask the staff at the Maddy to turn off the speakers playing music in the room we are in. Unless we end up in their “VIP” room upstairs (very unlikely!), this keeps background noise to a minimum.
• There will be earplugs available to tamper background noise
• There are about five steps up to the entrance of the Madison, and another to get in the door. In order to get upstairs, where we sometimes hold our events, there is another set of stairs that are quite steep. While we hope to be in the downstairs room, we cannot guarantee this until closer to the event date.
• There are two single stall bathrooms located downstairs that we will have access to. The other bathrooms, located on the main and upper floor, are gendered.
• Should you be accompanied by a support person, please contact us in advance so that we can add them to our guest list. Their ticket will be included, for free, as part of your pay-what-you-can ticket.

*We recognize that this list provides a far-from comprehensive picture of accessibility-related concerns you might have. Please feel free to contact our Café Coordinator at sophia@beingnbecoming.org, or the Madison Avenue Pub (416-927-1722) with any other questions or concerns you might have.