Bauman Memorial Conversations, 2026: 'Thinking Displacement'

Displacement is a keyword of our times, an age of acute uncertainty and upheaval. It names the forced movement of millions in the shadow of mass violence, the evacuation of landscapes under the pressure of ecological breakdown and pollution, and the projection of hostility generated by abstract structures and processes onto figures ‘out of place’ - refugees, migrants, minorities, strangers.

The activity of thinking today seems itself increasingly dislocated by the relentless speed of information and the instrumentalisation of knowledge by market and security imperatives. It is further damaged by deliberate assaults on academic freedom, the criminalisation of dissent and the systematic destruction of institutions of learning. Long associated with the intellectual migrations of the twentieth century, exile remains a recurring fact of scholarly life today, as thinkers are forced from familiar places and deprived of the environments that sustain critical thought.

This theme speaks powerfully to the life and work of Zygmunt and, above all, Janina Bauman. Both experienced exile and its severing of ties of language, community, and place firsthand when, in 1968, they were forced to flee Poland. For Zygmunt, displacement became a prism through which to interpret the ambivalence of modernity; for Janina, the reckoning with experiences of displacement presaged autobiographical inquiry into the dehumanising power of cruelty and the fragile modes of belonging sought by those who navigate life between worlds.

Launching in Spring 2026, Thinking Displacement is the foundation for the inaugural Bauman Memorial Conversations, a biennial series of public dialogues hosted by the Bauman Institute. Timed to coincide with the centenary of Janina Bauman’s birth—and forty years since the publication of her Holocaust memoir Winter in the Morning and her account of the 1968 exile, A Dream of Belonging—the 2026 Conversations will explore displacement in its human, ecological and intellectual dimensions.

The series will feature three online conversations, each preceded by recorded interventions responding to themes prevalent Janina Bauman’s writings:

• Conversation 1 – Displaced Ecologies (March 25, 2026)
  Speakers: Alice Mah & Darya Tzymbalyuk | Host: Jack Palmer

• Conversation 2 – How do you Displace a Gypsy? (June 17, 2026)
  Speaker: Becky Taylor | Host: Bryan Cheyette
• Conversation 3 – Refuge, Rights, and the Concentrationary Universe (September 23, 2026)
  Speaker: David Herd | Host: Griselda Pollock

Through these conversations, the programme honours the Bauman legacy while confronting the inhuman conditions of our time. It asks what it means to think from a position of displacement, and how such thinking might illuminate new possibilities for belonging in an age of profound instability.