Public Lecture
Recorded Thursday 10th October
While there is general agreement we are embarking on a far-reaching social and economic transformation implicating new technologies, there is little agreement about how to understand it. In this lecture I use an historical-sociology that is sensitive to time and inequalities of wealth, status and symbolic knowledge, to talk about the co-evolution of human consciousness-technology. It is argued that we are entering a ‘Techno-Axial Age’ marked by new personal and collective relations enabling radical and novel cognitive and productive practices. While the recent history of financialization and the rise of the ‘gig economy’ highlights capitalism’s capacity to reinvent itself without changing in fundamental ways, the evolution of a new kind of capital e.g. ‘surveillance capital’ points beyond the traditional labour-capital relationship. This then suggests answers to related questions: Does work have a future? How do we educate? Does capitalism as we know it have a future?
Speaker:
Professor Judith Bessant has written extensively on youth related issues and her two most recent books are Bessant, J., Farthing, L and Watts, R (2017) The precarious generation: a political economy of young people, London, Taylor Francis, and The Great Transformation: History for a Techno-Human Future (2018), London, Routledge.
Brought to you by The Childhood and Youth Research Network and The Social Futures Research Hub.
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