Event Details

In the leading weeks to our Annual John Urry Lecture, we would like to invite you all to attend a Reading Group each week focusing on the latest book written by our JU Lecture speaker Harmut Rosa, titled Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World.

Each week will focus on different chapters from Resonance and will be held at 12pm in the Mobslab (B37, Bowland North).

We look forward to seeing you there and getting ready for our Annual Lecture – of which you are able to register for your free ticket here.

“The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yetthis acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. Ifacceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in thismajor new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot bemeasured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness;instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world.Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosadescribes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship tothe world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinctworldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action –family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as latemodern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult asmodernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distortedrelationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows,all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisisof democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed interms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Buildingon his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major newcontribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relationto the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today.This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest tostudents and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.”