Abstract
Although Zygmunt Bauman has written very little directly about education, his underpinning ideas
on the transition from solid to liquid modernity, the mechanisms of social exclusion, the Other
and the stranger have had a significant impact on education research. Taking his starting point
from a questionable secular reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s contribution to ethics, Bauman’s
account of social exclusion has become well respected. The social forces described by Bauman
are always external to the individual in Bauman’s social analysis of suffering in that it places no
emphasis on the culpability of other human agents as the cause of the Other’s suffering. This
article identifies this underemphasis on human agency as a flaw in Bauman’s analysis and evaluates
Bauman’s largely ignored and problematic understanding of inclusion, in which social inclusion and
exclusion are based on the same mechanisms and identified as two sides of the same coin central
for maintaining social solidarity.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 124-129 |
Journal | Power and Education |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 23 May 2016 |
Keywords
- Agency
- Inclusion
- Levinas
- Bauman
- Adiaphoria
- "Agentic" state