Hypermodernity

Abstract: Albeit the divergences on the debate about development in Africa, it is indubitable that the continent remains underdeveloped after five decades of development efforts. To understand this impasse, it is necessary to trace Africa's encounter with Europe to the period of early modernity. This paper first outlines the theory of modernity and Enlightenment. Next, it traces the genealogy of the idea of development as modernity and how the African development process gets entangled in it. Zeroing in on the current idea of late or hypermodernity, the author dismisses the idea that there is something new in the globalization-backed neoliberal development paradigm. He then addresses the complex question of how the impasse of modernity can be transcended, arguing that Africa needs to construct its own modernity, different from that of the West. [ASC Leiden abstract]

Abstract: The article discusses the repercussions that the debate around the overcoming of modernity and the supposed coming of postmodernity has brought to education as a field of knowledge, and more particularly to the research in this field. A critical discussion is made of the thesis that we live in postmodernity, placing emphasis on this statement in the sphere of social thinking, especially for understanding that such expression does not have the strength and intensity of a philosophical concept, resulting devoid of meaning. It is stressed that of the first uses of that expression in the field of philosophy, by Lyotard, was as an adjective, and not as a noun, which is significantly different. Moving beyond the debate about the end of modernity or otherwise, the notion of hypermodernity proposed by Lipovetsky is adopted as a way of characterizing the contemporary world and trying to understand its implications. Notwithstanding that, the author recognizes the important contributions of the thesis that affirms postmodernity, especially in its epistemological and political aspects, in so far as it represents a shift of the focus of analysis. The text characterizes the current debate as the tension between two images of the thought that are not at all new, but that have gained special attention in contemporaneity, defending that we must accept this tension in what it brings in terms of a creative possibility, without paralyzing the thought.

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to pursue the path of construction of what we know as the notion of person, which we relate to the existence of concepts such as subjectivity and identity. This path entails a trail of transdisciplinary reflection, in which the authors seek to break traditional barriers in several areas of knowledge, try to deal with men and their modern conundrums in the historic context of the late modernity, here treated as hypermodernity. In this society which is seen, built and introduced as globalized, the authors put the focus on the means of the construction of new identities in multicultural contexts, in which new possibilities of being in the world coexist with new forms of social tension and resistance.