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INEQUALITY, POWER AND GOVERNANCE IN THE GLOBAL AGE

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One of the most troubling aspects of the "global age" is the supposed decline of the nation state as the principle of internal and external order. This means that the dimensions of inequality, power and governance - which in modern societies are typically tied to nation state boundaries, and thus are supposed to be processed at the national level - can no longer be grasped from nationally shaped perspectives.

Thus, the question is: How can we think about these issues from a cosmopolitan perspective?

Keynote Speaker: Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett writes about cities, labor, and culture. In the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work; he also taught occasionally at Harvard. In the mid 1990s, as the work world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Mr. Sennett began a project charting its personal consequences for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character (dt.: Der flexible Mensch, 1998) is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality (dt.: Respekt im Zeitalter der Ungleichheit, 2002) charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state; a third, The Culture of the New Capitalism (dt.: Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus, 2006) provides an over-view of change. Most recently, Mr. Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman (dt.: HandWerk, 2008). He currently teaches sociology at New York University and at the London School of Economics.

Discussants: Angela Mc Robbie, Anja Weiß, Ulrich Beck

Chair: Michael Heinlein

Literature:

• Bauman, Z. (1992) Moderne und Ambivalenz : das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. Junius, Hamburg.
• Bauman, Z. (2003) Flüchtige Moderne. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.
• Bauman, Z. (2008) Art of Life. Polity Press, London.
• McRobbie, A. (2005) The Uses of Cultural Studies: A Textbook. Sage, London.
• McRobbie, A. (2008) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Sage, London.
• McRobbie, A. (2009) Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industry. Forthcoming.
• Sennett, R. (1998) Der flexible Mensch : die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus. Berlin-Verl, Berlin.
• Sennett, R. (2006) The culture of the new capitalism. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Conn. [u.a.].
• Sennett, R. (2008) HandWerk. Berlin Verlag, Berlin
• Weiß, A. (2001) Rassismus wider Willen. Ein anderer Blick auf eine Struktur sozialer Ungleichheit. Vs Verlag, Wiesbaden.
• Weiß, A. (2005) The transnationalization of social inequality. Conceptualising social positions on a world scale. Current Sociology 53, 4, 707-728.
• Weiß, A. (2008) Transnationalisierung sozialer Ungleichheit. (herausgegeben mit Peter Berger) Vs Verlag, Wiesbaden.
• Weiß, A. (2009) Kulturelles Kapital in der Migration: Hochqualifizierte Einwanderer und Einwanderinnen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt.(herausgegeben mit A.-M. Nohl, K. Schittenhelm und O. Schmidtke.) Vs Verlag, Wiesbaden.

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