After Lévinas

Hirst, Benjamin Adam

doi:10.1177/1368431013516056

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…In our models, both the sociologist Bauman and the anthropologist Fassin are categorized as postmodern scholars or thinkers. Bauman deployed the Levinasian other that summons society into responsibility to the victims of consumerism and globalization (Hirst, 2014). Fassin employs the Foucauldian critique of governmentality of the bureaucracies that victimizes the vulnerable people (Holbraad, 2017).…”

Section: Social Science Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical turn in the social sciences

Canceran

2023

Sociology Compass

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This paper discusses the ethical or moral turn of the social sciences, especially in sociology in the works of Zygmunt Bauman and in anthropology in the works of Didier Fassin.These scholars have embarked on relating morals or ethics to their particular area of specialization. We note that their contributions have highlighted the moral or ethical questions in their respective field works and empirical observations and have produced moral or ethical discourses or frameworks in their respective area or field. Ethics or morality (sometimes) morals is not just a theory but also practice in their respective disciplines and advocacies. This moral or ethical practice is translated into questioning our cognitive frameworks and political consequences of globalization or consumerism affecting some groups or individuals in contemporary world. We shall consider morality as human actions while ethics is the reflections on those actions.

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Section: Social Science Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical turn in the social sciences

Canceran

2023

Sociology Compass

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Khat-Chewing, Adiaphorisation and Morality: Rethinking Ethics in the Age of the Synopticon

Swain,

Lashua,

Spracklen

2024

Crit Crim

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In June 2014, the UK Government made khat (Catha edulis) a Class C drug under the UK Misuse of Drugs Act. Based on limited evidence, this decision went against the Government's own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and has divided members of the British–Somali diaspora, where khat is a popular form of recreation. The Government’s decision to ban khat highlights broader questions regarding how ethical legislation is implemented within post-industrial societies, exposing postcolonial power systems that ‘Other’ migrant groups through synoptic control. Based on qualitative interviews with members of the Somali diaspora and external agencies in Northern England, the research explores how this system fails to consider khat's complex moral position while framing users and those living within the diaspora as deviant.

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Liquid Modernity and the Holocaust

Brzeziński¹

2022

slh

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In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argued that the Holocaust had been by no means a negation of the civilising process, but was, on the contrary, its consequence. He claimed that the constitutive features of solid modernity, such as bureaucratic culture, the rise of instrumental rationality and the domination of blueprint utopia, were reflected in the genesis and course of the Holocaust. Bauman’s main aim in writing the book was to make fundamental changes in the problematization of modernity in the social sciences, and to highlight the need to develop norms, values and attitudes that were in opposition to modernity. An overview of these facts provides a starting point for my analysis of Bauman’s later analyses of the Holocaust. By focusing on two issues that he emphasised in the context of the genesis of the Holocaust, namely the mechanism of adiaphorization and the process of the social construction of “otherness”, I show how these phenomena materialize in liquid modernity. I identify their connections with a range of features of the liquid modern condition, including the development of individualism and consumer culture, the sense of insecurity and the “nostalgic turn”. I emphasise that, according to Bauman, both moral indifference and xenophobia are increasingly significant phenomena in contemporary society, which may entail pernicious – and currently barely foreseeable – consequences. I argue that the way Bauman wrote about both solid and liquid modernity was characterised by a dystopian poetics, which was a foundation for his utopian thought.

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After Lévinas

Cited by 8 publications

References 27 publications

Ethical turn in the social sciences

Ethical turn in the social sciences

Khat-Chewing, Adiaphorisation and Morality: Rethinking Ethics in the Age of the Synopticon

Liquid Modernity and the Holocaust

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