Seminar "Theory of Modernity"

On Tuesday 8 October, Professor Trevor Hogan, a sociologist from La Trobe University presented a research paper to staff and students in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. Prof Hogan is a regular visitor to TDTU and Ho Chi Minh City and had been here earlier this year to speak about Asian cities. In this instance, he spoke about a related project of his to do with the Hungarian theorist Agnes Heller's Theory of Modernity. The first question put in this paper is a very general and yet confronting one, Are we all moderns now? It may seem that this would be an easy question to answer, but the complexities of perspective and position in relation to knowledge meant we needed to consider interests and contexts. Most importantly, does the cosmopolitan assumptions of much modernity discussion, for example, the modern technological urban developed self-understanding we might have, does this perhaps indicate continued effects of European thought projecting its ways of seeing onto Asian societies? The challenge in Agnes Heller's work - or at least in her 1999 book A Theory of Modernity - is to think through the different components that make up modernist thinking - the technical, social and political elements of modernity. At the end of his talk prof Hogan described three postgraduate theses projects that had used heller to help them see their story more adequately - each were considered innovative and important, and indeed perhaps could illustrate something for the way we will think of research supervision here, a project of helping candidates find how best to tell the story of their research question. As we have come to expect from him Prof Hogan left us thinking of new ways to do what we do as researchers and teachers, and as such we would look forward to his next visit to us (as yet we do not know when).

Here are some pictures from the seminar