BAUMAN’S COMPASS: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF HOPE - In his most recent work, Bauman has employed the metaphor of ‘liquidity’to capture the dramatic social changes taking place in our everyday lives. In this way, he seeks to convey the increasing absence of solid structures that once provided the foundations for human societies.This new ‘liquid modern’ world of ours, like all liquids, cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything seems to change – the fashions we follow,the events that catch our attention,the things we dream of and the things we fear.Not only are both powerful politicians and financiers deemed to be far beyond our reach, but there is also a fleeting and fluid quality to the immediate social settings in which we act out our identity-politics and seek new forms of human togetherness. For Bauman,these dramatic social changes call for a radical rethinking of the concepts that we use to narrate contemporary human experience. In this‘liquid modern’ period of his work, Bauman has offered one of the most significant interpretations of human societies in the twenty-first century.

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