Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity

Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity

Author: Shaun Best

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1351003178

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Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity evaluates the contribution that Bauman has made to education studies. It outlines the central themes within social analysis in Bauman’s writings, and examines how researchers have applied his key ideas to explore current theoretical issues. The book focuses on Bauman’s ideas in relation to the management and consumption of education, including topics such as student voice and individual identity; relationships and inclusive education. Identifying and discussing underpinning assumptions about Bauman’s work and its application to education, the book addresses the connection between his work and wider debates, providing a critical and clarifying re-examination of Bauman’s contribution to the role of education within solid, post and liquid modernity. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of education theory and the sociology of education. It will be of great interest to readers seeking a critical appreciation and application of Bauman’s work to an educational context and Bauman scholars interested in the application of contemporary social theory to education and its role in identity formation in areas such as sex and relationships education.


Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-07-10

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 074565701X

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In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.


Higher Education in Liquid Modernity

Higher Education in Liquid Modernity

Author: Marvin Oxenham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1135080240

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Based in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, this volume describes and critiques key aspects and practices of liquid education--education as market-driven consumption, short life span of useful knowledge, overabundance of information--through a systematic comparison with ancient Greek paideia and medieval university education, producing a sweeping analysis of the history and philosophy ofeducation for the purpose of understanding current higher education, positing a more holisitic alternative model in which students are embedded in a learning commutity that is itself embedded in a larger society. If liquid modernity has left a vacuum where, according to Bauman, the pilot’s cabin is empty, this volume argues that no structure is better positioned to fill this vacuum than the university and outlines a renewed vision of social transformation through higher education.


In Search of Politics

In Search of Politics

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-07-03

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0745656978

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We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises and struggling to brace itself for new ones, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives - livelihood, human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid - feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky. Is there a connection between the shape of the world we inhabit and the way we live our lives? Exploring that connection, and finding out just how close it is, is the main concern of this book. What is at stake in this inquiry is the possibility of re-building the"'private/public" space, where private troubles and public issues meet and where citizens engage in dialogue in order to govern themselves. Individual liberty can only be a product of collective work, it can only be collectively secured and guaranteed. And yet today we are moving towards a privatization of the means to secure individual liberty. If seen as a therapy for the present ills, this is bound to produce effects of a most sinister kind. The act of translating private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten. The argument of this book is that making the translation possible again is an urgent and vital imperative for the renewal of politics today. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time - will be of particular interest to students of sociology, politics and social and political theory.


Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-24

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 074566962X

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Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.


Social Theory Re-Wired

Social Theory Re-Wired

Author: Wesley Longhofer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-22

Total Pages: 943

ISBN-13: 100088824X

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This third edition of Social Theory Re-Wired is a significantly revised edition of this leading text and its unique web learning interactive programs that "allow us to go farther into theory and to build student skills than ever before," according to many teachers. Vital political and social updates are reflected both in the text and the online supplements. "System updates" to each section offer an expanded set of contemporary theory readings that focus on the impacts of information/digital technologies on each of the text’s five big themes: 1) the Puzzles of Social Order, 2) the Social Consequences of Capitalism, 3) the Darkside of Modernity, 4) Subordinated/Alternative Knowledges, and 5) Self-Identity and Society. New to this edition: The "big ideas/questions" thematic structure of the text as well as the connections between classical and contemporary theorists continues to be popular with instructors. This feature is enhanced in the new edition An expanded "Podcast Companions" series now pairs at least one podcast to every reading in the book Many new updates to the exercise platform allow students to theorize and build theory on their own New readings excerpts include such important recent work as: Shoshana Zuboff’s "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," Ruha Benjamin’s "Race After Technology," David Graeber’s "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," Sherry Turkle’s “Always-On/Always-on-You.”


Wasted Lives

Wasted Lives

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 0745637159

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The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.


The Emerald Guide to Zygmunt Bauman

The Emerald Guide to Zygmunt Bauman

Author: Shaun Best

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1839097388

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This book is the first introductory guide to the work of Zygmunt Bauman, designed specifically for students and those new to his work. It provides a firm foundation for the independent reading of Bauman and for exploring the many interpretations of his influential ideas.


On Education

On Education

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0745662056

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What is the role of education in a world where we no longer have a clear vision of the future and where the idea of a single, universal model of humanity seems like the residue of a bygone age? What role should educators play in a world where young people find themselves faced with deep uncertainty about their future, where the prospects of securing a stable, long-term career seem increasingly remote and where intensified population movements have created more diverse communities in which different cultures find themselves living side by side, no longer bound together by the belief that the other would eventually be assimilated into ‘our' culture? Faced with the bewildering features of our liquid modern world, many young people are inclined to withdraw - in some cases into the online world of games and virtual relationships, in other cases into anorexia, depression, alcohol or even drug abuse, hoping to find shelter from a world perceived as more and more dangerous. Others launch into more violent forms of behaviour, like street gangs and the looting carried out by young people who have been excluded from the temples of consumption but are eager to participate in the ceremony. And all this happens while our politicians look on, uncomprehending and indifferent. In this short book Zygmunt Bauman - the leading social theorist of our liquid modern world, here in conversation with Riccardo Mazzeo - reflects on the predicament of young people today and on the role of education and the educator in a world where the certainties of our predecessors can no longer be taken for granted.


Liquid Evil

Liquid Evil

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1509508155

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There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since time immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends ends that were at times horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvass woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds. In its present form evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later but we have no idea when and where they will occur. In this new book, the sequel to their acclaimed work Moral Blindness Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis guide the reader through this new terrain in which evil has become both more ordinary and more insidious, threatening to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and powers of dissent at the very time when they are needed most.