Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity

Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity PDF

Author: Shaun Best

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 176

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 PDF

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.

In Search of Politics

In Search of Politics PDF

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.

Higher Education in Liquid Modernity

Higher Education in Liquid Modernity PDF

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.

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness PDF

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.

Consuming Life

Consuming Life PDF

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-08

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0745655823

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With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market. The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences. The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

Born Liquid

Born Liquid PDF

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-11-26

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1509530703

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Born Liquid is the last work by the great sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, whose brilliant analyses of liquid modernity changed the way we think about our world today. At the time of his death, Bauman was working on this short book, a conversation with the Italian journalist Thomas Leoncini, exactly sixty years his junior. In these exchanges with Leoncini, Bauman considers, for the first time, the world of those born after the early 1980s, the individuals who were ‘born liquid’ and feel at home in a society of constant flux. As always, taking his cue from contemporary issues and debates, Bauman examines this world by discussing what are often regarded as its most ephemeral features. The transformation of the body – tattoos, cosmetic surgery, hipsters – aggression, bullying, the Internet, online dating, gender transitions and changing sexual preferences are all analysed with characteristic brilliance in this concise and topical book, which will be of particular interest to young people, natives of the liquid modern world, as well as to Bauman’s many readers of all generations.

Wasted Lives

Wasted Lives PDF

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 (Dis)Order of U.S. Schooling

The (Dis)Order of U.S. Schooling PDF

Author: Eric Ferris

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1000886654

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This book critically interrogates the function of schooling in the United States of America using the writings of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Asking whether the function is to produce citizens, workers, a combination of the two, or something altogether different, it argues that the designs of schooling are part of a carefully crafted ordering, illustrated via an analysis of the ways in which schooling introduces students to various forms of coercion and seduction that socialize students in particular ways: ways that support an order. By engaging with the prolific and insightful works of one of the most prominent social thinkers of the 21st century, this book considers schooling and its contributions to order. Be they solid or liquid modern ordering mechanisms, ordering through repression and seduction, or supporting ordering through the creation of boundaries separating an “orderly inside” from its “disorderly outside,” schools imperfectly support the construction of order and in doing so, privilege some representations and individuals over others. To order is to harness ambivalence and steer it in directions that privilege the “in” group at the expense of the “out” group; and schools, from the curriculum they teach to the values and ideas they promote, are desirable captive marketplaces instrumental in steering this ambivalence. The author ultimately suggests that the function of schools, whether recognized or not, are not so much to educate students to be free thinkers, but rather to be orderly cogs in a particular functional social machine. As such, the book will be of interest to faculty, scholars, and postgraduate-level students with interests in the sociology of education, schooling, sociology, and social theory.

Liquid Evil

Liquid Evil PDF

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.