In his second book review as a Global Justice Academy Student Ambassador, James Gacek considers Zygmunt Bauman’s Strangers at Our Door and the popular panic that often surrounds mass migration.
Zygmunt Bauman’s (2016) book, Strangers at Our Door, provides a significant contribution to a growing discussion which counters the illusory panics of mass migration. Bauman explores the origins, contours and the impact of ‘moral panic’ seemingly spreading across Western, liberal democracies, and dissects the present-day ‘migration panic.’ Such migration panic, he contends, is witnessed within anxiety-driven and fear-suffused debates percolating within Western societies. While moral panic is not a new concept—one in which articulates that some malevolent force of ‘evil’ threatens a society’s well-being, coupled with the anxieties ostensibly overwhelming felt within such societies (c.f. Cohen, 1972)—what is new is the feeling of fear spreading among an ever-growing number of people within Western nations.
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This summer, the Global Justice Academy ran its first Summer School in conjunction with the School of Political Sciences, and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. GJA Co-Director, Dr Mathias Thaler, reflects on the success of the three-day course, and plans to revise the Summer School for 2016. Dr Thaler also reports on initial forays into establishing a ‘Democracy Lab’ at the University of Edinburgh, following the launch of his new honours course on democratic theory.
