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Faced with a rise of populism seemingly in all corners of the globe, the need to facilitate meaningful communication between different world-views and to resist the closing down of dialogue is pressing. In this paper, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's sociological method has always been concerned with this problem and that a better appreciation of his writings on hermeneutics provides us with a vital strategy for resisting fundamentalist thinking in today's dark times. To begin, I briefly explore the relationship between hermeneutics and fundamentalism before moving on to elaborate Bauman's method of sociological hermeneutics. In the final section of the paper, I assess the implications that Bauman's method has for the discipline of sociology at a time when the certainty of things is the most avid of dreams dreamed by people harassed and oppressed by the uncertainty of liquid modern life, apparently whatever the human consequences.

In this article, I examine the narrative-media nexus as it relates to pandemics. Communications feature in global public health efforts to address the emergence of a pandemic, an event typically marked by the proliferation of news stories. Pandemics are also a perennial subject of film, television, literature and online games and pandemic narratives travel across and blend the genres of science fiction, alien invasion and zombie horror. Underlining this genre-blending, public health communication on pandemics has appropriated the figure of the zombie to encourage interest in preparation for pandemic threats. Drawing on examples from public communications and popular culture in dialogue with interviews and focus groups conducted with health professionals and members of the general public, I advance an account of the transmediated knowledge and meanings of pandemic narrative. I examine how pandemics become objects of knowledge in narrative, the ways in which narrative is appropriated to communicate a pandemic's temporal and affective qualities, and how, in the circumstances of an actual outbreak, publics are invited to consider themselves as the ideal, "alert, but not alarmed" subjects of the pandemic storyworld.

Zygmunt Bauman tells us that liquid modernity is an age of both chances and dangers. It is a paradoxical age in which our attempts 'to relate' to each other are thwarted by the threat of 'being related', our hope for collective security and togetherness at odds with our desire for individual freedom and choice. As such, it is an age in which we prefer to roam freely in virtual networks, choosing when and how to connect with others. Facilitating this form of liquid life is the growing consumption and usage of new communications technology. As the starting point for a new programme of research at the Bauman Institute, this article provides a critical evaluation of the role of new technology in liquid modernity with a particular focus upon its impact upon our perception of time. Presented here as two dialectical relationships, I argue that the professed capacity of new technology to 'connect people' and to 'save time' actually result in their opposites, namely: a curiously 'hurried life' in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which, for all of our frenetic productivity, we are perhaps becoming more and more 'interpassive', running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process.

This paper explores the relation between internet technologies and social change with reference to the narratives of ordinary internet-users living in Melbourne, Australia. The argument developed here draws attention to the interviewee's imaginaries of being-in-the-world under internet-related change; imaginaries which are, at times, marked by a language of emotional and bodily transition. This framing of life with the internet suggests that its technologies are not merely the means by which people gain access to information, advice, services and social interaction; they appear to mobilise questions of being and at the same time offer themselves as the means for establishing 'beingness', to borrow a term from Valerie Walkerdine (2010) . This emphasis on being in accounts of internet-related change also suggests the exercise of narrative subjectification through internet technologies or, in other terms, the internet-related 'technologisation' of narrative practices.

Using qualitative interviews with gay men with HIV and with reference to identity, expertise and HIV medical technologies, this article contributes to debate concerning the concept of risk reflexivity. Since the mid 1990s, people with HIV in the affluent, global North have had access to HIV treatment that substantially improves health. Recent research has expressed fears that, by satisfying hopes for effective treatment among affected citizens, HIV prevention will be undermined. This paradoxical idea has sharpened focus on how users apply knowledge regarding the effects of treatment on the risk of HIV transmission through sexual practice. This article argues that the concept of risk reflexivity has value because it draws attention to the limitations of extant assumptions about the users of HIV medical technologies. But this concept requires development in terms of the positioning of the person with HIV in risk reflexivity and the related mobilization of blame.

An ABCFour Cornersteam investigates allegations about the role of the International Red Cross and the British military in a massacre in the Southern Highlands of Irian Jaya during May 1996. The story of what happened has never been told before. Caption: Australian journalist Mark Davis and Kelly Kwalik in West Papua (Irian Jaya). Image: ABC Four Corners See the video at Engage Media