Author of more than 60 books, Bauman introduced the influential metaphor of liquid modernity—a way of understanding a world in which everything has become temporary, unstable, and in flux. His legacy continues to shape critical thought on society, politics, culture, identity, and the future.
🧠 Key topics for discussion:
– Critical theory today
– Globalization and the crisis of the state
– Ethics in consumer society
– Identity, retrotopia, and memory
– (Post-)Marxism and utopia
– Feminist and gender theory
– Media, technology, education, and more
🎤 Keynote speakers:
▪️ Prof. Izabela Wagner, PhD — Professor of Sociology and Anthropology of Migration at the Université Paris Cité, and member of the URMIS research center (Paris). She is the author of the first comprehensive academic biography of Bauman, Bauman: A Biography (Polity, 2020), and editor of his previously unpublished autobiographical writings, My Life in Fragments (Polity, 2023).
▪️ Dr. Jack Palmer, PhD — Director of the Bauman Institute and Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. His research spans historical sociology, critical theory, and cultural memory. He is the author of Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), which received honorable mention for the 2024 Bronisław Malinowski Award.
▪️ Dr. hab. Dariusz Brzeziński, dr hab. — Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2022) and Utopian Thinking in the Social Theory of Zygmunt Bauman (Scholar Press, 2015, in Polish). He is currently co-editing The Routledge International Handbook on Zygmunt Bauman (forthcoming).
📍 Venue: European Humanities University, Vilnius
📅 Dates: June 13–14, 2025 🌐 Conference languages: Belarusian, Russian, English
Join the conversation on what matters most — the future of critical thinking!