Dr Jack Palmer receives Honorary Mention for book ‘Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (2023)’
Dr Jack Palmer has received an Honorary Mention for his book ‘Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile' in the 2024 Bronislaw Malinowski prize, awarded by PIASA.
A profoundly stimulating read that offers a fresh perspective on Bauman's life and work.
Dr Jack Palmer, Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy, has received an Honorary Mention for his book Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023), in the 2024 Bronislaw Malinowski prize, awarded by the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America.
A fresh perspective on Bauman's life and work
The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America Awards, inaugurated in 1995, honours distinguished scholars for their achievements. The panel commented that Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile is “a profoundly stimulating read that offers a fresh perspective on Bauman's life and work. By examining Bauman through a novel, global lens, Palmer successfully situates him within the broader discourse of global sociology while highlighting the significance of his Polishness and Jewishness. The book intricately explores Bauman's evolution, considering his experiences in the Soviet Union, Poland, Israel, and the UK. Palmer employs innovative intellectual frameworks, including decolonial and trans-imperial approaches, to reinterpret Bauman’s thoughts on modernity and post-modernism. This fresh reading not only sheds light on Bauman’s critical engagement with these concepts but also links his Polish perspective to global sociological debates. Palmer's work contextualizes Bauman within global sociology, thereby introducing both the Polish perspective and Poland itself into discussions surrounding modernity, identity, and communist heritage. This effort is crucial as it offers new insights into Bauman’s biography and the Polish intellectual landscape. Thus, Palmer's book represents a much-needed and successful attempt to inscribe Zygmunt Bauman in the global sociological discourse while fully recognizing his Polishness as an essential dimension of his identity and intellectual legacy. It stands as a fresh look at one of Poland's most prominent intellectuals, utilizing novel perspectives that enrich our understanding of his contributions to sociology.”
Bauman and the West: exile, culture, dialogue
Dr Jack Palmer’s book was generated as one of the significant outputs of the project ‘Bauman and the West: Exile, Culture, Dialogue’. This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, aimed to understand the role of the idea of the west in the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman. This project constituted an important intervention in an ongoing, more extensive discussion about Eurocentrism – defined as a recurring cognitive myopia in intellectuals and ideas emanating from Europe – in social and political thought.
Current and future projects
At present, Dr Jack Palmer is developing a larger project on the comparative sociology of intellectuals in exile across a range of contexts, wherein he seeks to theorise ‘exilic interventions’ as a specific mode of claim-making and an ‘exilic republic of letters’ as a transnational intellectual network.
About Dr Jack Palmer
Dr Jack Palmer rejoined the School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2024. He works at the intersections of historical sociology and social theory, with a particular interest in the ambiguous relationship between violence and the large-scale transformations of modern societies, and how this relationship is registered in intellectual and cultural forms. He published his first book Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide: Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective (Routledge, 2018) in 2018. He is also the current Director of the Bauman Institute, at the University of Leeds.
You can hear about Dr Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile in this interview.
