Upheaval and reinvention in celebrity interviews: Emotional reflexivity and the therapeutic self in late modernity

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas.

Iosif Brodski i Nikołaj Rubcow – o tożsamościowych kontekstach dwóch wierszy

The paper deals with two poems: “Ты поскачешь во мраке…” by Joseph Brodsky, and “Я буду скакать по следам задремавшей отчизны…” by Nikolay Rubtsov. Analyzing some features of these poems and comparing similarities in both poets’ biographies, the author states the significant difference between them. Rubtsov, in his opinion, has an identity typical for pre-modern subjectivity. It is conventional, stereotypical, and conservative, full of faith in idealized old Russian values. Brodsky’s self-defining is in this aspect close to late modernity. It is liquid, all the time in movement, never convinced about self-identity.

Three Questions about Spirituality

Using the concepts of developed in the volume, this chapter concludes the book by addressing three important questions about spirituality. Our approach foregrounds how spirituality is shaped by the interplay of context and practice and influenced by the distribution of material resources. On the question of the meaning of spirituality, we advance an explicitly relational approach that identifies the polysemous nature of “spirituality.” On the question of spirituality’s influence, we highlight the social mechanisms through which spirituality is likely to influence individual and public outcomes. Regarding the future of spirituality, we argue that spirituality, in both supernatural and secular forms, will endure for the foreseeable future because the conditions of late modernity will continue to create a demand for it.

Introducing society

Public libraries have a societal duty to promote the peaceful coexistence between population and are therefore involved in integration work. However, the question is whether the integration perspective is suitable for addressing current issues or if other perspectives are more adequate. To study this, I conducted a literature review of published articles on Scandinavian public libraries’ integration work, six semi-structured interviews with male asylum seekers and an email interview with the chief operations officer at three asylum reception centres in Denmark. Using a lifelong learning perspective, I was able to consider the six asylum seekers’ experiences with integration in new ways. It became evident how integration is an ambiguous concept, and how the integration process does not constitute temporary phases but rather initiates lifelong learning processes, just like the activities native Danes conducts in their efforts to handle their lives in late modernity. The lifelong learning perspective probably cannot replace the integration perspective, but it may help us understand which activities are appropriate for public libraries to engage in. The public libraries’ task is not to assimilate, but to promote new citizens’ opportunities for peaceful coexistence by facilitating people’s participation in society.

Authoritarianism and Resistance

We tie together and explicate the political implications of the trends discussed in previous chapters. For Fromm, sadomasochistic desires are bred from modern alienation, and these desires can fuel authoritarian social movements. For Foucault, modern authoritarianism (and genocide) is fed by the idea that the state needs to protect the normal majority from the abnormal minority (biopolitics). Giddens says in ‘late modernity’ people distrust experts, long for authenticity, lose concern with morality and fixate on avoiding risk. With the rise of global social networks, there is also a lot of reaction against globalisation. Facing porous national boundaries, many people push back against multiculturalism, seeing it as a threat to their social order. Providing examples from different countries, we describe how in other, more direct ways, social media plays into authoritarian populist ends that subvert liberal democracy. We suggest that when political leaders use Twitter and Facebook they too can project spectacular selves, and post messages that make them appear more authentic and connected to ‘the people’. At the same time, social media also offers new channels and tools for protest, activism, and anti-authoritarianism. The ‘agitation games’ of authoritarian political figures inspire their own opposition as part of their method of inspiring their own movements. Authoritarianism is a growing reality, but so is anti-authoritarianism.

Price Paid by Common Mass due to Cultural Clashes among our Societies

A society may be classified as traditional, modern or post-modern. Traditional society lays emphasis on religion and magic in behavioural norms and values, implying connection yawning acquaintances with a authentic or illusory past. It broadly accepts rituals, sacrifices and holy feasts. Modernity is considerable break with traditional society. Modern society focuses on science and cause. Post-modern society or late modernity, concentrate on decisive consciousness and is anxious about the destructive belongings of practical science on nature, environment and humanity.

Crises and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization

COVID-19 has illuminated and exacerbated inequities, yet, as a crisis, it is not exceptional in its effect on education. We start this critical essay by situating the crisis in its historical, economic, and political contexts, illustrating how crisis and violence intersect as structural conditions of late modernity, capitalism, and their education systems. Situating the current crisis contextually lays the foundation to analyse how it has been interpreted through three sets of policy imaginaries, characterised by the notions of learning loss and building back better and by solutions primarily based on techno-education. These concepts reflect and are reflective of the international aid and development paradigm during the pandemic. Building on this analysis, we present, in the final section, an alternative radical vision that calls on a sociology of possibilities and pedagogies of hope that we see to be central to a new people-centred education imaginary to disrupt current inequalities and provide a new way of doing rather than a return to a business-as-usual approach in and through education.

From individuals to emotional drones: Technology-driven change in the collective conditioning of intimacy

Spatial media has received impetus in recent studies, arguing that its function as a mediator of meaning and enabler of intimacy are critical in late modernity. We suggest that spatial media not only liquefies key institutions of modernity but also replaces them. We conducted interviews with men who use spatial media to realize intimacy. In our analysis, we reference the fictional Star Trek universe to illustrate how spatial media may function as an institution. In the figure of the Borg, human-tech borders are eliminated, control is exerted through collective decisions, and bodies are assimilated into an expanding beehive-like community. Similarly, spatial media enables the liquefaction of human-tech borders, the creation of new sets of rules and hierarchies, and the assimilation of intimacy practices. We thereby conclude that digital media not only drive a process of liquefaction but also the forging of new institutional structures that condition the realization of intimacy.

Worldmaking in Sri Lankan Heritage Design: The Case of Travel Writers

This article develops an analytical model to examine how heritage tourism mobilities are designed by travel writers. Using Sri Lanka as an example, we thematise professional activity in heritage tourism through a blend of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity in late modernity and Keith Hollinshead’s ‘worldmaking authority/agency’ to understand the factors driving tourist design. Our model replaces Jensen’s focus on ‘design’ as a fixed creative property with ‘designing’ as creativity in motion, here collaborative and solidary, there conflictual and endorsing creative inequalities. Our theoretical blend informs the organisation of Sri Lankan heritage tourist professionals into three active categories: ‘communicatives’ (with an emphasis on developing closed-communal solidarity), ‘autonomous’ (with an emphasis on virtual reconstitutions of community beyond geographical fixity that may support tourist entrepreneurialism), and ‘meta-reflexives’ (with an emphasis on bringing tourist markets and communities in a dialogue beneficial for the latter) This typology accommodates disparate worldmaking vistas and forms of tourist design agency that then feed back into authorial tourist scripts, promoted by institutions, organisations and even communities. Thus, agency develops both self-reflexively and through negotiations with independently existing authorial forces driving tourist design managed by the nation state and its own biographical records. Keywords: agency, designing mobilities, reflexivity, heritage tourism, worldmaking