JB Centenary Programme: Thinking Displacement

Displacement is a keyword of our times 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 to be increasingly dislocated by the relentless speed of information and the instrumentalization of knowledge by market and security imperatives. The power of critical thought is also damaged by deliberate assaults on academic freedom: the persecution of scholars, 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 reality today, as thinkers are forced from familiar places and deprived of the environments that sustain critical exchange.

This theme speaks powerfully to the life and work of Zygmunt and 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 modes of belonging sought by those who navigate life between worlds.

Launching in Spring 2026, Thinking Displacement is a programme of the Bauman Institute, timed to coincide with the centenary of Janina Bauman’s birth and to mark forty years since the publications of her acclaimed memoirs Winter in the Morning, which recounts her experiences as a teenager in the Warsaw ghetto, and A Dream of Belonging,  her vivid retelling of the Bauman family’s 1968 expulsion and their establishment of a home in Leeds.

Running from 2026 to 2030, it will generate new research, publications, and public-facing projects. It will also form the foundation for our inaugural Bauman Memorial Conversations in 2026, consisting of three webinars: on displaced ecologies; on the persecution and displacement of gypsy communities; and on the dehumanisation of refugees and the persistence of the concentrationary universe. Through these conversations, the programme honours the Bauman legacy while confronting the inhuman conditions of our time. It asks what it means to think, write, and act from a position of displacement, and how such thinking might illuminate new possibilities for belonging in an age of profound instability.