Thinking in dark times: Assessing the transdisciplinary legacies of Zygmunt Bauman

In 2018, the Bauman Institute and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH), both based at the University of Leeds (UK), initiated a transdisciplinary programme to assess the legacies of Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017), whose prolific writings we felt to be profoundly relevant to the multiple challenges of the 21st century. In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we are marking just over three years since the death of Zygmunt Bauman by bringing together some of the contributions to that programme in order to revisit, elaborate, and crucially to extend his intellectual archive. Taking Bauman’s revision of contemporary social realities as a point of departure, each of the participants in this special issue re-examine – critically but also generously – the many questions Bauman asked, tried to answer, and imbued on the way with new and sometimes shocking insights. This paper surveys those contributions by way of introducing the special issue.