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Plenary Speakers
Professor Zygmunt Bauman
Universities of Warsaw, Poland, and Leeds, UK
The Human Waste of Economic Progress
The production of 'human waste' - or more precisely, wasted lives, the superfluous populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts - is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. 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 modernisation, they were treated by modernising 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 modernisation has reached the furthest lands on 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 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 'immigarnts' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing role played by diffus 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda. This paper 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.
Biographical Note
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world's leading sociologists and a prolific author. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and the University of Warsaw. His recent books include Globalisation: The Human Consequences, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Liquid Love, and Europe - An Unfinished Business. |
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XI World Congress of Rural Sociology