Anthony Elliott is Executive Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia, where he is Research Professor of Sociology and Dean of External Engagement. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Senior Member of King’s College Cambridge, and SuperGlobal Professor of Sociology (Visiting) at Keio University, Japan. He is the author and editor of more than forty books, and his recent publications include The Culture of AI: Everyday life and the digital revolution (2019), Concepts of the Self (2020, 4th Edition), and Reinvention (2021, 2nd Edition).
Few academics, policy analysts or politicians can see any humour in climate change. It is as if the doomsday prediction that our civilisation will one day self-destruct as a consequence of global warming has already, perversely, closed down the possibilities for lighter, more creative responses to one of the most urgent issues of our time. To acknowledge a humorous side to catastrophe is not, howe ... (read more)
It is remarkable how death has loomed so large in the social sciences over the past couple of decades. From mangled bodies to mediated mass killings, from the medicalisation of dying to the ‘snuff’ movies of hardcore porn: death obsesses the sociological imagination.
If among students of society, death has become an immensely fashionable topic, its broader social consequences remain, oddly, a ... (read more)
A spectre is haunting the globe – the spectre of cosmopolitanism. You might discern it in the call by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, for a new kind of European justice, replete with regional police force (Europol) and magistracy (Eurojust). You might glean it from the global spread of human rights movements, protesting the suffering of children and civilians in, say, ... (read more)
With the possible exception of Jean Baudrillard or Anthony Giddens, it is difficult to think of a contemporary sociologist who has rivalled the international intellectual standing, as well as global fame, of the late Zygmunt Bauman. In his subtle, worldly intelligence, his interdisciplinary engagement, and his poetic cast of mind, Bauman stands out as one of the most influential social thinkers of ... (read more)
It is now approaching eighty-five years since Freud published his seminal book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). A foundational work of psychoanalytic cultural criticism, Freud’s focus was repression and its cultural consequences. He argued that sexual repression, and its associated guilt, had become the fundamental problem of modern societies. Freud understood society as a kind of trade ... (read more)
