Routledge International Handbook on Zygmunt Bauman

The Routledge International Handbook on Zygmunt Bauman is a major, state of the art collection dedicated to the work and ideas of one of the most renowned intellectuals of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

Bringing together eminent scholars in social sciences and humanities from all over the world, it presents and engages with the most important characteristics of Bauman’s work and life, the key themes of his oeuvre, the relationship between his ideas and intellectuals' innovations in social sciences and humanities, as well as the application of his work to the analyses of the most pressing contemporary challenges. The volume draws inspiration from significant advances in the understanding of Bauman’s biography and the development of his personal archive, as well as the ongoing project of translating Bauman’s Polish-language works into English. The handbook, moreover, is significantly international in scope, reflecting Bauman’s status as a global social thinker. The book critically interrogates the reception of Bauman’s ideas, including in regions which have been marginalised in Bauman studies. It will also foreground contemporary developments in the literature on Zygmunt Bauman and showcases the work of an emerging new generation of Bauman scholars who are engaging with and extending Bauman’s work in novel directions.

This important new volume will appeal to a new generation of readers who might find in Bauman a means of orienting themselves in the urgencies of the present conjuncture: climate change, digital society, economic crisis, intensification of migration flows, and more. It will therefore appeal to a wide international readership, including scholars and students of sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies, as well as historians, and literary and art scholars, and contemporary humanities and social sciences more broadly.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on social theory, emotions, death and dying, palliative care, crime, literary sociology and qualitative research methodology. He has written and published extensively on the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

Dariusz Brzeziński is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Department of Theoretical Sociology, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on contemporary social thought, sociology, anthropology, and the theory of culture. He has written and published extensively on Zygmunt Bauman’s writings.

Mark Davis is Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. He founded the Bauman Institute in 2010 and was its director until 2020. His wider work is interested in theoretical and empirical puzzles at the intersection of economy, democracy, consumerism and climate change. He has written and edited six volumes dedicated to Zygmunt Bauman’s work

Jack Palmer is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy and Director of the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds, UK. He works at the intersections of historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge, and has published on theories of modernity, Holocaust and genocide studies, and the sociology of intellectuals and ideas, especially on the life and work of Zygmunt Bauman.