Zygmunt Bauman: On what it means to be included

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.