The modern research university is an unsustainable institution. It normalizes academic activity along the lines of a scientist engaged in normal science and seeks to measure the success or failure of academics based largely on the quantity of their contributions to a particular discipline, often measured in terms of papers published and conference presentations. The ensuing race to produce academic studies is creating unprecedented mountains of academic studies, but often in haphazard, unstructured, and unsustainable ways, especially in the humanities and (...) the social sciences, which do not discover nomothetic laws or accumulate knowledge in a fashion similar to science. This not only undermines the quality of work being done and the character of academics doing this work but also results in the thoughtless, endless, largely unstructured mountains of new studies that no one can keep up with. (shrink)

Postmodernist thinkers have often claimed that there is something like a `modernist' model of theory and metatheory in the social sciences which is objectivistic, dogmatic, and generally over-ambitious, aiming to dominate the theoretical landscape like a modernist skyscraper. This paper suggests that there is little to support such a view, and that most sociologists and social anthropologists, and many other social scientists, have been much more cautious and tentative in their claims than postmodernists have claimed. The alleged distinctiveness of postmodern (...) social science is therefore itself open to question. The paper includes a discussion of reflection and reflexivity in realist philosophy of science and in the social theory of Habermas and Bourdieu. (shrink)

To Bauman the incongruities of life are best reflected in an analytical effort that moves between perspectives without forcing them into a synthesis. He seems to arrogate the right to inconsistency when operating from points of view. This violates a curious requirement of scholarly discourse: an author is free to select his conceptual framework and method — but once they are selected, he must stick to them. This practically inviolable rule of consistency might come (as Bauman himself suggests) from the (...) juridical pretensions sociology had from its birth. Consistency gives an aura to academicians who feel called to legislate, judge and legitimize. To Bauman, however, truth in judgement, reality in empirical studies and responsibility in practical affairs are approached by a constant movement between incongruous points of view.These ambitions make heavy demands on the composition of his writing. In many stretches of linear argument, imagery is interjected, showing lateral connections and complications — conversely, in many pieces of interpretation causal explanations intrude. A discourse with all these boundary violations is rather suspect in modern eyes. When Bauman contaminates the purity of analytical lines with terminology from other branches, he is demonstrating in a stylistic way that our reality is multitudinous — be it premodern enchantment, ambivalence in modernity or liberated postmodern polyvalence. (shrink)

The wide range of semiotic possibility, through networks of motor communications, reveal processes for decision-making with playful meaning. We describe a physical education experience according to a sequence based on five motor games, corresponding to five networks of motor communications, with the purpose of revealing the signs to interpret a fully comprehension of playful communication. A total of 180 high school students were part of this pedagogic experience. Events were obtained through the systematic observation of three game conducts, to be (...) compared through the five games and thus offer indicators of motor complexity regarding decoding. Through the game sequencing studied, three blocks with different networks of motor communications were shown: their exclusivity and stability, their instability, and ambivalence, in addition to signs based on relationships of opposition, reidentification, and relativization. We propose that these signs should be transferred to a significant pedagogy with curricular interest for the physical education class. (shrink)

The most important structural feature of the music of the New World is its often-time polyrhythmic and polymetrical character. This is also a key to unlocking the nature of social form and democratic persona in the diasporic and settler metropolises of the New World. In such settings, composers and musicians working with simultaneous temporalities, lines, groups, textures and characters offer intimations of a just totality for culturally fragmented societies.

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as (...) example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously. (shrink)

Drawing on Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe's article concerning the main themes of Bauman's sociology, this article emphasizes what was left aside. Another characteristic quality is focusing on the Polish issues, that is, the native tradition in humanities, the specific vicissitudes of sociology after 1945, Bauman's personal background, his gradual change of philosophic views through the phase of his dissident activity till the 1970s, when he transgressed the Marxist worldview. The way in which way Bauman combines many talents is also (...) pointed out and analysed and his latest creative period, opened by the publication of Legislators and Interpreters, is brought to light. Bauman's diagnosis and weighted appreciation of the present-day cultural breakthrough, named postmodernity, were enriched and deepened with each subsequent book. There is a touch of genius in the scope and mode of dealing with this problematic. Bauman's international fame seems to be well deserved and firmly grounded. (shrink)

This article explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if we saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. Following Bauman's sociology of the stranger and Derrida's deconstructions of hospitality, the article unfolds in three parts. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. In the second (...) part we consider the intolerance of strangers the modern will-to-order has caused. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. In the third part we ask how educational spaces hospitable to strangers can be opened up, and argue that we would do better not to construe living with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice. (shrink)

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Kołakowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public (...) sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism. (shrink)

: This response seeks to pick up on the key questions and concerns raised by Nancy C. M. Hartsock and Karen Houle in their critiques of The Spectacle of Violence. I mold my response around two emotions that are never far from the question of violence: fear and hope. Is it fear of ambiguity that stops us from delicately blending the experiential with the discursive, the nodal with the circular, the corporeal with the epistemic, or the oppressive with the constitutive? (...) If so, we can only hope that the power of such ambivalence lies in its ability to unsettle these treasured lines of force. (shrink)

In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity, Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of Bauman's work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary construction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea of the boundary are significant in Bauman's critique of (...) modernity's search for a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of modernity. Bauman's contention is that modernity's search for a meta-order leads to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order. Different images of the stranger in Bauman's work are identified and the ways in which Bauman's conception of freedom and `community' is intrinsically linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated. (shrink)

This paper reviews the social scientific literature on biometric surveillance, with particular attention to its potential harms. It maps the harms caused by biometric surveillance, traces their theoretical origins, and brings these harms together in one integrative framework to elucidate their cumulative power. Demonstrating these harms with examples from the United States, the European Union, and Israel, I propose that biometric surveillance be addressed, evaluated and reframed as a new form of control rather than simply another means of inspection. I (...) conclude by delineating three features of biometric technologies—complexity, objectivity, and agency—that demonstrate their social power and draw attention to the importance of studying biometric surveillance. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the fruitfulness of seeing allosemitism as an aspect of cosmisation. We explore possible tropes such as creating order from chaos, embracing Christian identity and supersessionism, and legitimising the Bible’s truth claims. Drawing from the Swedish press of the period 1770–1900, allosemitism and cosmisation are explored through the lens of three tenacious myths, all of which date back centuries: Blood Libel, the Wandering Jew and Israelite Indians. The ‘Jew’ as the Other is frequent in previous research. (...) The combination of allosemitism and cosmisation gives us another way to explain the Othering of the ‘Jew’: expressions of allosemitism in a world-creating process. (shrink)

In contrast to other approaches, `modernity' in this article is not dealt with as a historical concept but as a normative-aesthetic term and as a mythical narrative in the sense of Nietzsche's `eternal recurrence of the same'. Paradoxically, there still exists a semantic shift between different historical concepts of modernity beginning in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present confusions about `postmodernity'. However, the aesthetical bias of the discourse of modernity prevents any serious interpretation which is able (...) to refer these semantic shifts directly to some clear and incontestable socio-structural facts and developments. In its contemporary sociological form this discourse overlaps on the contrary with some main trends in aesthetic theory and practice: the exchangeability between `old' and `new' and the permanent suspension of the boundaries between `art' and `life'. Consequently, aesthetics as well as sociology are describing modernity as a cultural system which is `playing' with its own fundamental differentiations between `in' and `out' or self-reference and other-reference. (shrink)

This article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand, and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racism is treated as an individual attitude born of (...) prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. (shrink)

The concept of liquid modernity proposed by Zygmunt Bauman suggests a rapidly changing order that undermines all notions of durability. It implies a sense of rootlessness to all forms of social construction. In the field of development, such a concept challenges the meaning of modernization as an effort to establish long lasting structures. By applying this concept to development, it is possible to address the nuances of social change in terms of the interplay between the solid and liquid aspects of (...) modernization. (shrink)

. Being after time: Towards a politics of melancholy. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 305-319.

Zygmunt Bauman’s entire body of work has been dedicated to exploring sociological issues. However, problems of moral philosophy have come to play an increasingly crucial role for his understanding of social life in later works. In particular, the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s moral philosophy has shaped Bauman’s thinking. Løgstrup argued that there is an unconditional imperative in the ethical demand to take care of the Other, and this imperative cannot be superseded, rationalized, calculated, or strategically managed. Bauman is right (...) in telling us that the personal ethics is the point of departure for a moral judgement. In this context it is very relevant to integrate Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s considerations. However, this perspective cannot stand alone. It is necessary to move forward to a form of Habermasian communicative ethics that can transmit the substantial moral judgement from a spontaneous communal perspective to a pragmatic societal perspective expressed in political terms. In other words, both perspectives are essential: on the one hand Bauman’s, Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s substantial phenomenological perspective, on the other hand Habermas’ pragmatic communicative perspective. Therefore, it would be more fruitful to consider these two perspectives as complementary instead of as in opposition, as is mostly done. They are both needed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the philosophy underpinning the non-mainstream body modification practices of `Modern Primitives'. This subculture seeks inspiration in the body modification techniques and bodily rituals of so-called `primitive societies'. Establishing their prioritization of body, sexuality, community and spirituality as analytical links, the author shows that these self-perceived radical opponents of Western modernity nonetheless remain captured in its foundational discursive assumptions. The author argues that the movement's enthusiastic turn towards `primitivism' represents a particular identity strategy within the late modern (...) condition. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis, the author argues that the primitivist discourse originated as an ideology within colonialism and has informed the construction of the Western self-image. Modern Primitives' notion of `primitivism' is seen as a postcolonial legacy of this tradition of `othering', which inevitably reproduces stereotypes of racialized people. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Zygmunt Bauman has published a series of books that sketch out a postmodern turn in society, theory, culture, ethics and politics. Changes in contemporary society and culture, Bauman argues, require new modes of thought, morality and politics to appropriately respond to the new social conditions. This requires a reconfiguration of critical social theory and new tasks for a postmodern sociology. Bauman thus poses fundamental challenges to contemporary social theory and provides an original and provocative post-modern version (...) of the sociological imagination, developing sketches of the fundamental social and cultural changes of our time, and the ways that theory and politics must be changed to creatively map and democratically respond to these questions. Bauman's critical reflections on modern theory and society, and his postmodern turn, require serious critical responses to his challenges to conventional wisdom and practice. In my study, I sketch out what I consider to be important in Bauman's recent work, what I see as problematical, and how Bauman's project — that is also my own — might be advanced. While my focus might appear to be predominantly critical, I attempt to generate a constructive dialogue with his thought that will advance our mutual interests and perhaps help illuminate some interesting contemporary topics and debates. (shrink)

The promise of scientific and technological innovation – particularly in fields such as nanotechnology – is increasingly set against what has been articulated as a deficit in public trust in both the new technologies and regulatory mechanisms. Whilst the development of new technology is cast as providing contributions to both quality of life and national competitiveness, what has been termed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ is seen as threatening the vitality of this process. However in contrast to the risk debates that dominated (...) the technological controversies of the late 1990s the vitality of technological innovation is now cast as vulnerable to lack of public confidence and trust in the regulatory and governance structures upon which such innovation depends. In order to address this deficit in public trust, science policy has increasingly turned to the social sciences, suggesting that public values might be incorporated into the development of nanotechnology at an early stage. Public ambivalence therefore constitutes the problem addressed by the increasingly central role that public engagement and participation play in contemporary science policy. Although the recent proliferation of public engagement activities is premised on the need to address this ambivalence through direct engagement, we re-interpret ambivalence as an engaged – rather than passive – mode of relating to technological determinism. Whilst the move toward forms of direct public engagement might be regarded as symptomatic of the emergence of affective mode of governance we interpret public ambivalence as a nested set of enthusiasms and anxieties. Accordingly we suggest that public engagement might be re-thought, utilising ambivalence as a creative resource, rather than as the problem. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the role of strangers in the social division of labor that is otherwise a key concept in sociological theory. Partly drawing upon Simmel, this article develops a general framework for analyzing the "uses" of "the stranger" throughout history. Four major domains in which strangers have often been employed are identified: (1) circulation (of goods, money, and information); (2) arbitration; (3) management of secret/sacred domains; and (4) "dirty jobs." The article also explores how these activities (...) relate to the characteristics of stranger-relations. It is suggested that such an inquiry, in addition to helping us to understand how the presence of strangers in a society affects the processes of social differentiation, might equip us with a conceptual framework often lacking from purely political and ethical considerations of stranger-relations. (shrink)

This article deals with cross-cultural ethics. It discusses the grid-group model and is ethical implications. We try to show how cross-cultural ethics remain possible under this paradigm of ethical relativism. We discuss the theory of discourse and apply it to intercultural communication. Finally we offer some rules for (an ethical) intercultural discourse, which also may be interpreted as metanorms for cross-cultural interaction.

It is by now well known that the modern category of religion has evolved as part of a certain trajectory of Western history. Among its many aspects, this trajectory is about how religion became part of a definitive relationship with the category of the secular – a relationship that implies an understanding of religion as something distinct – and ideally # – from other categories such as science, politics, and law. The place of the category of religion as part of (...) this semantic as well as institutional landscape of separations makes it relevant to probe the possible consequences for sociology, if we are, as some scholars have argued, living in contexts which are increasingly post-secular. What happens, then, to the object – as well as the self-identity – of the study of religion? This article discusses some of the possible epistemological shifts inherent in the idea of a movement from secular to post-secular and it will reflect upon the possible avenues they open up for the sociological study of religion. (shrink)

A distinctive characteristic of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony is its insistence on the denial of an essence or ground of the subject. This element of their theory is derived from their notion of antagonism, in which a relation with a ground is brought into question by revealing its contingency. This article argues that the political dimension of this argument makes sense only in the context of Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of modernity. However, the universalizing of modernity as the (...) form of hegemony reduces the ontological notion of antagonism to a dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction. This article examines two key moves in this process: first, the reduction of the subject to Lacan’s account of the subject; and second, the reduction of modernity to an ontotheologicalpolitical structure derived from Lefort as the support of the hegemonic subject. From this the article examines Laclau’s response to the exhaustion of political modernity in the figure of complexity, from which antagonism is evacuated through the hegemony of the category of myth. Finally, the article discusses a nonhegemonic approach to antagonism derived from the work of Foucault, Wolin and Rancière. (shrink)

This article seeks to defend and develop a stakeholder pragmatism advanced in some of the work by Edward Freeman and colleagues. By positioning stakeholder pragmatism more in line with the democratic and ethical base in American pragmatism (as developed by William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty), the article sets forth a fallibilistic stakeholder pragmatism that seeks to be more useful to companies by expanding the ways in which value is and can be created in a contingent world. A dialogue (...) between a defence company and peace and arbitration society is used to illustrate the main plot of this article. (shrink)

After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more ‘liquid’ and ‘lighter’ than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman’s insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the ‘Mercurian’ culture of diasporic Jewish life.

Theoretical commentaries on AI often operate as a metadiscourse on the way in which science represents itself to a wider public. The sciences and humanities do the same kind of work but in different fields that encourage them to talk about their work differently: science refers to a natural world that does not talk back, and the humanities refer continually to a world with communicative people in it. This paper suggests that much AI commentary is misconceived because it models itself (...) on the way that science represents itself, rather than on the actual practice of science.AI theorists have become increasingly worried about the lack of evaluation in AI, the lack of reflexivity, and the lack of contact with society. Frequently these writers turn to concepts of tacit knowledge to work through these worries. In doing so they are recognising the problem of AI's second-order representation of science and trying to deal with it. However, this recognition of a problem with the representations of science simply turns back to the legitimation crisis of Western politics where many commentators use science precisely as a ‘model’ for western political institutions. They do so because science is one of the few areas of knowledge where it has been legitimate to use plausible methodology for representation that allows for arbitrary designations of authority as well as parallel systems of different authority. However, the plausible rejects any control on reflexivity, assumes an ethnocentric club culture and does not address social context.It is in this sense that the problems of legitimation in political liberalism are similar to those of legitimation in sciences, both are rooted in their uses of representation. AI's link with the representation of science places it in the heart of this debate about legitimacy. This paper suggests that AI does need to learn about reflexivity and that it might well do so by looking at the recent work on experimentation and representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation by historians of science, and by looking to the debates about representation within the humanities. However, reflexivity may not be enough. Devising rules of thumb for the appropriate halting of reflexivity, is also needed to address social context and take action. (shrink)

The poor might always be with us but neither in ways that we imagine them nor in circumstances of their own choosing. Poverty (and its subject class, the poor) has been a persistent presence in the modern social sciences - both as ethical shadow and methodological stimulus. Throughout his self-described career as `professional storyteller of the contemporary human condition', Bauman's hermeneutical, dialectical and anthropological foci and modus operandi are impressively consistent, none more so than in his reflections on the problem (...) of poverty. An important stimulant to Bauman's ruminations on the new poor has been the work of Jeremy Seabrook and not only because Seabrook's primary foci have been the symbiotic and dialectical relationships in the production of poverty and wealth in his chronicles of the poor in contemporary capitalism, in Europe and Asia. Indeed, it is arguable that Seabrook's own vocation as freelance journalist is emblematic of the kind of sociology Bauman exhorts the salaried members of the academy to embrace for now. This article traces the lineaments of the biographical parallels, intellectual resonances and methodological (or at least epistemological) affinities shared between Seabrook and Bauman so as to tease out what a sociology of the new poor looks like in the hands of Bauman after Seabrook. (shrink)

The article takes on a less developed aspect of the sociology of the stranger: the normalized non-relations people in urban settings establish in their effort to stay strangers for one another. How is their “civil inattention”accomplished in practice? What is the social orderliness of “asocial” relations? In order to answer these questions the article uses the elevator as a sociological research instrument allowing for a highly detailed investigation in structural problems of public encounters: bodily navigation, contact avoidance, feigned preoccupation, and (...) the blocking of the automatism by which co-present bodies start interactions. The setting used for the investigation also raises questions about how the artifact and the bodies present are integrated into the interaction order. The “heteromobile” of the elevator offers specific sociotechnical scripts for interaction. While the human actors work hard at doing nothing, their bodies seem to take over their agency. The specific challenge of elevator riding for the enactment of indifference is the vanishing of actors: undoing presence. (shrink)

The centrality of Lévinasian ethics to Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological vision has been affirmed by a number of writers. However, the way in which Bauman attempts to think through the implications of this ethical framework for political decision-making on a global scale has been seen as highly problematic. In recent years, Bauman has arguably begun to veer towards what can be seen as a more ‘legislative’ position, prioritizing what Lévinas calls archic issues relating to government, foundation and sovereignty, and arguably jettisoning (...) his earlier commitment to socialism as the ‘active utopia’. It is the aim of this article to track this move in Bauman's thought, first of all locating structural continuities between his earliest English-language books written during the 1970s with those of the 1990s. It is shown that while much of the same terminology is carried over into his 1990s work, Bauman moves away from affirming the dynamics of human history and the almost ontological necessity of utopia, towards a sociologically suspect individual moral impulse which exists outside distinct social and historical formations. The sheer enthusiasm with which Bauman took hold of this idea had the result of completely frustrating the movement back to social formations. As such, it is argued that as Bauman moved towards theorizing the individual in ‘liquid modernity’ or consumer society, he developed a highly problematic concept of the individual which relies on the sociologically deterministic understandings of the human being which he was attempting to move away from before and during his engagement with Lévinas. (shrink)

Australian trade unions face the organizational and ethical challenge of advanced liberalism and its privileging of an enterprise culture, an ideological hegemony which unions, with their traditions of solidarity and collectivism, struggle to resist. While it has been argued that critical discourse studies offer a research methodology to develop politically engaged resistance strategies, CDS has not subjected the values and language of union mobilisation and class resistance to sufficient scrutiny. Employing discourse analysis to promote equality and workplace justice requires a (...) willingness to engage in a critical examination of what terms like class solidarity now mean in the context of enterprise culture. Foucault's stress on the power relationships embedded in discourse clarifies the history of solidarity and intensifies our critical analysis of the new discursive formations of enterprise culture which have stripped traditional union solidarity of its institutional basis and authority. Foucault's ethics, based in the notion of the care of the self, suggests that union claims to govern and represent the interests of their members can only be reinvigorated by applying the Socratic ideal of self-examination and self-transformation. (shrink)

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis (...) of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis. (shrink)

This essay presents racial literacy and racial dexterity as educational desiderata, especially for white students. Racial literacy is defined as the ability to recognize and interpret racial nuances in real social engagements. Racial dexterity is defined as the ability to engage successfully with diverse racial contexts. After defining racial literacy and racial dexterity, Kevin Harrelson analyzes these skills by contrasting them with racial naivety and racial anxiety. He argues that transitioning from naivety to literacy, and from anxiety to dexterity, requires (...) treating cross-racial interactions as key learning events. (shrink)

The education policy of Conservative governments in Britain since 1979 is sometimes said to be contradictory. It purports to empower the consumer, but legislation has given the lie to this, vesting ever greater powers in central government, less so in Scotland, the more so in England and Wales. In short, education policy contains mixed messages, or contradictions. But these contradictions to some extent express the tensions which have become apparent in an age of transition: that between the modern and the (...) postmodern, or between Fordist and 'disorganised' forms of capitalism. A new mode of regulation is being established within the agencies of the welfare state. It reveals an isomorphic structure - at the level of the pupil, the teacher, the parent and the school - whose purpose is the management of consent, and whose justification appeals to the culture of consumption. The analysis is illustrated mainly with reference to Scotland. (shrink)

Coming out, or the disclosure of a minority identity, features prominently across disciplines, including several subfields of sociological research. In the context of sexuality, theoretical arguments offer competing predictions. Some studies propose that coming out is increasingly an unremarkable life transition as the stigma associated with non-heterosexualities attenuates, while others posit entrenched discrimination. Rather than testing these theories or providing incremental evidence in support of one position, we use 52 in-depth interviews with recently-out individuals to explain how identity disclosures in (...) the present moment can validate plural possibilities. Our findings show that ambivalence is the core narrative which animates the contemporary coming out process. Respondents identify three interpretive frameworks that structure their experience of sexuality as at once incidental and central: generational differences, identity misrecognitions, and interfacing with institutions. We also detail a fourth theme, intersectionality, which shows the analytic limits of ambivalence in the coming out process. These patterns suggest more broadly that sexuality, like ethnicity, may provide symbolic resources—“distinguishing but not defining”—in the service of crafting a modern sexual self. (shrink)

An extraordinary horde of aberrant, deformed, and grotesque beings inhabits the writings collected in the Zhuangzi. Crippled, malformed, hideous, foolish, eccentric, and even outlawed individuals conquer the central place of philosophical narration, traditionally proscribed for them, and create one of the most important and intriguing voices echoing through the text. Yet, for all their undeniably significant presence, scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy have paid surprisingly little attention to the topic of monsters. Structured into three sections and adopting a critical, strictly (...) philosophical standpoint, this paper aims to draw attention to the crucial role played by monsters in the Zhuangzi. The first section underlines the essential characteristics of these monsters and, most particularly, their disruptive dimension together with the challenge they pose to philosophical thinking. The second section offers a detailed review of the recent bibliography on the Zhuangzi with regard to analysis of these aberrant figures. Finally, based on contributions in the work of Jacques Rancière, the third section highlights the political scope embodied by the monstrous beings of the Zhuangzi. (shrink)