Politics is now seen to go all the way down, and our teaching and research must recognise it. While we are defined by what we consume, politics will in part roll out of a bag of shopping. Identity and gender also have political consequences, as do the contagion of Aids and the booming global birth-rate. As never before, the personal can be importantly global. From binaries to balance .
Word problems can become world problems.
Western thought has been characterised by a tendency to set up binary oppositions between concepts, such as that between 'facts' and 'values' or 'men' and 'women'. Things are defined by what they are not. This is not a secure basis on which to explore the politics of co-existence, globally. We should not give way to the assumption that we have to choose between cosmopolitanism or communitarianism, for example, or between globalisation or fragmentation. From foundations to anchorages .