In this episode of the the Monnet Conversations, Ingrid Biese, Sven Kesselring and Thesis Eleven founder Peter Beilharz join Anthony Elliott to discuss the contributions of Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck in the context of the global pandemic.
by Simon Marginson
The Covid-19 pandemic is instructive for social theory. It is like a gigantic experiment. It is not a controlled experiment, but a universal condition that enables differentiation on the basis of time and space, both geographical and discursive. It is possible to compare society before and during the pandemic, and also to compare the political and social evolutions and manifestations of society-under-pandemic-conditions in different nations and regions.
Online International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe: In memory of Ágnes Heller
November 14 and 15, 2020
Sichuan University
The virtual platform HPS.CESEE and Thesis Eleven warmly invite you to a public global book talk on the biography of Zygmunt Bauman. Natalia Aleksiun (Jena/New York) and Peter Beilharz (Melbourne) will join Izabela Wagner (Warsaw) to discuss her newly published biography of Zygmunt Bauman: Bauman. A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press 2020).
by Tawana Kupe (Pretoria)
Drawing from both traditions, universities are trying understand how it was that science largely missed the signs of Covid’s coming, and so fulfil their obligation to secure the long-term future of humanity on this planet.
But they know, too, that the university must rise to the immediate challenges of global health, education and economic crises; job losses; poverty; and the overriding sense of uncertainty and insecurity. These all existed pre-Covid, of course, but the pandemic has aggravated each with knock-on effects.
An online workshop on “Living in Crisis” organized by the TASA Social Theory thematic group and Thesis Eleven.
Speakers: Deborah Lupton, Craig Calhoun, Peter Vale and Peter Beilharz
Andrew Simon Gilbert
The Crisis Paradigm: Description and Prescription in Social and Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Reviewed by J.F. Dorahy
by Alonso Casanueva Baptista
The secretariat of public education in Mexico – the institution in charge of the standardized schooling practices there – organized for the current semester to take place via radio, internet, but most importantly, television. From August 24th to the end of the school year (July 2021), thirty million Mexican students will enrol in school whilst relying on technologies that usually do not play a central role in their formal learning experiences. The written word will be overtaken by waves, signals, and connections.
by Timothy Andrews
In the current pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Virginia Woolf’s audience in Between the Acts. Forced into our homes as a result of lockdown measures, a mirror is held up to us so that we can see the intimacy of our lives under the stark light of history unfolding in the present. Like Woolf’s audience, we too are on the cusp of a new era.
Stuart Elden
Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016)
Ben Golder Foucault and the Politics of Rights (Stanford University Press, 2015)
Reviewed by Mitchell Dean
