Bauman Institute online conversation series explores displacement in an age of crisis

The Bauman Institute's inaugural Bauman Memorial Conversations brought together leading scholars to explore one of the defining themes of our time: displacement.

Thinking displacement in the twenty-first century

In 2026, the Bauman Institute launched the first Bauman Memorial Conversations, a new biennial series of public dialogues inspired by the legacy of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman. The inaugural series, ‘Thinking Displacement’, coincided with the centenary of Janina Bauman's birth and explored displacement in its human, ecological, political and intellectual dimensions.

The series was built around the idea that displacement has become a defining condition of contemporary life. It names not only the movement of people across borders, but also the unsettling of places, identities, memories and forms of belonging. Across themes as diverse as ecological destruction, anti-Gypsy persecution, asylum and detention, the conversations explored how displacement reshapes both individual lives and collective worlds. In doing so, they returned to concerns that lay at the heart of Janina Bauman's writing: the experience of living and searching for belonging in conditions of forced migration, and the struggle to remain human in inhuman circumstances.

Three conversations

The first conversation, ‘Displaced Ecologies’, brought together Alice Mah and Darya Tsymbalyuk to consider the relationship between environmental destruction and displacement. Drawing on recent books about ecological harm, industrial pollution and war in Ukraine, the discussion examined how environmental crises transform landscapes, communities and everyday life. It also reflected on the role of autobiography and personal narrative in bearing witness to ecological loss.

The second conversation, ‘How do you displace a Gypsy?’, featured historian Becky Taylor in dialogue with Bryan Cheyette. Focusing on the deliberate displacement of Gypsy and Traveller communities, including the destruction of long-established settlements such as Belvedere Marshes, the event explored questions of belonging, exclusion and state power. The discussion also connected with Janina Bauman's research on the historical persecution and invisibility of Roma communities in Europe.

The final conversation, ‘The Site of Rights and the Concentrationary Imaginary: Towards a Politics of Voice’, brought together David Herd and Griselda Pollock. Addressing contemporary asylum systems, detention regimes and the erosion of political voice, the dialogue asked what happens when people are denied not only rights, but the conditions necessary to voice them. The conversation returned to themes found throughout Janina Bauman's work: dignity, memory, testimony and the challenge of maintaining moral and personal integrity in circumstances of radical dehumanisation.

Recordings of all three events are now available to view online. 

The Bauman Memorial Conversations form part of the Bauman Institute's wider commitment to bringing social and critical theory into conversation with the urgent challenges of the present. Find out more about the Bauman Institute and upcoming events here.