Critical Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

Human resources and induction in public policy: Advancing critical cosmopolitan aims

This paper focuses on the role of public policy in human resources and induction programs to increase the number of Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (TOCIT). To that end, we provide an overview of the public policy landscape, followed by an exemplar that provides a vision of possibilities currently being enacted. We end by advancing specific public policy recommendations and their implications.

Critique and Critical Social Work: a meta-theoretical perspective

It is self-evident that critique lies at the heart of Critical Social Work. Even so, more attention should be given to clarifying the meaning of this form of evaluation, particularly when it is applied in the social sciences and social professions. More precisely, it is necessary to explain the meta-theoretical conceptualisation of critique and, crucially, note its different expressions. Through gaining such clarity, the contention is that Critical Social Work sharpens its appreciation of social injustice and how to tackle it. This article describes and augments one meta-theoretical conception of critique involving a typology delineating interconnected forms of evaluation. The indelible bond between this paradigmatic outline of critique, critical theory and Critical Social Work is subsequently considered, highlighting some possibilities for social transformation. Adopting these precepts, by way of conclusion, leads to a critical cosmopolitan orientation within Critical Social Work, making it relevant to the pressing challenges of today’s world.

Grassroots policymaking in practice: including heritage languages in the critical connections project through agency, activism, and alternative voices

ABSTRACT This article examines the Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project through the lens of Language Policy and Planning (LPP) and considers the situation of heritage language learning within the policy on language education. We present our project as grassroots policymaking in practice and demonstrate how, through deep and meaningful collaboration, researchers, teachers, parents/carers, and students can exercise bottom-up agency to address key issues in learning languages and developing multilingual literacy. Our interdisciplinary approach embeds interculturality within all stages of the language learning process creating spaces that foster empathy, activist citizenship, and possibilities for a more sustainable future. We interrogate our Critical Connections Project and argue that this approach to LPP provides an alternative model of interculturally oriented critical cosmopolitan education which validates multilingual identities. We show how digital technology, virtual communities, and a growing concern for social justice have shaped the project and discuss how we adopted a critical ethnographic approach. In looking at purposes, principles and means in our project, the digital stories themselves are analysed and presented as vibrant data. To conclude, we engage specifically with the implications of our research for heritage languages and LPP. Finally, we make a series of recommendations for heritage language planning and policy.

The Gray Panther Movement as a Model for Intergenerational Approaches and Late-Life Activism: A Critical Cosmopolitan Perspective

ABSTRACT While the practical benefits of intergenerational approaches are known, it remains undertheorized. To broaden knowledge and inform sustainable intergenerational programming, the discourse requires a firmer theoretical base. This conceptual article proposes that critical cosmopolitan theory holds promise as a theoretical framework. The utility of critical cosmopolitan theory is considered by unpacking the intergenerational workings of the Gray Panther movement. This article highlights the promise of critical cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework and considers the Gray Panthers as a model for sustainable intergenerational model. This preliminary theoretical application can usefully contribute to the study of gerontology and intergenerational education.

Welcoming refugee children with a moral, rather than merely legal, right to education: Ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education

In this paper, we argue for the moral and not merely the legal right to education for refugee children. National education in many countries is challenged by refugee flows and influx of displaced people. However, there is a tendency to think of refugee flows as isolated events rather than parts of the dynamics of a world society that national education systems needs to respond responsibly to and build capacity for. Consequently, there is a gap between the legal right to education for refugee children and its practical realization, and granting refugee children access to national education systems is becoming part of the problem and not only a solution to the de-territorializing and cosmopolitan challenges of refugee flows and displaced people. We argue that education for children of refugees’ need to meet with a cosmopolitan design of education in order to respond responsibly to the right to education for refugee children. In the first part, we discuss the legal right to education for refugee children, and moral challenges with regard to its practical realization in nation-centred school systems and schools. In the second part, we discuss de-territorializing effects of refugees in education by reviewing research on refugee education, refugee children’s experiences of education and by discussing refugee education in Sweden as a case. In the final part, we discuss ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education. We argue for a moral commitment to the education of refugee children in order for us to respond responsibly to their legal and moral rights and situation, but also to the legal and moral rights, and situations of those affected in host countries. We also argue for the importance of critical cosmopolitan imagination in education that does not restrict education to norms of national loyalty and national integration, or to economic norms of competitiveness and effectiveness.

Global Flows and Critical Cosmopolitanism: A Longitudinal Case Study

In this longitudinal case study, Catherine Compton-Lilly and Margaret R. Hawkins explore one immigrant youth’s engagement with transglobal activities and flows of information and his emerging awareness of the world. Contending that transglobal flows create learning opportunities that are rarely available to children raised in mononational and monocultural spaces, the authors add to scholarship that highlights the knowledge, awareness, understandings, and literacies that children in transglobal families bring to class rooms. Specifically, they examine twelve years of longitudinal data following the youth’s development of a critical cosmopolitan stance and then apply a transliteracies framework to analyze complementary facets of emergence, uptake, resonance, and scale implicated in transglobal relations and comparisons. The article closes with recommendations for educational practice.

A conversation with Timothy Brennan

ABSTRACT This interview was conducted in 2022 as part of a series of wide-ranging conversations via email with the prominent American public intellectual and activist Timothy Brennan, whose literary and cultural criticism, secular humanism, and critique of cosmopolitanism have from the late 1980s onwards influenced perceptions of postcolonial studies and “World Literature”. Preoccupied with the intellectual and philosophical praxis, dynamics, malignity, and drawbacks of metropolitan cosmopolitanism, “World Literature”, and world system, Brennan here grapples robustly and critically with the literary and intellectual history of Marxism, Hegel, modernity, and ecocriticism. He also explores digital literature; Ibn Khaldun’s secular affiliations; Edward Said’s places of mind; modernity; and world system in the US empire, the UK, India, Asia, and elsewhere. He maps out an original and thought-provoking analysis of antinomian and anti-colonial genealogy of cultural studies, modernity, pedagogy, secular humanism, and the role of the intellectual in academia and beyond.

Enacting Critical Cosmopolitanism in Suburban Preservice Teacher Education through Crafting a Pedagogical Third-Space of Ethics

This paper explores critical cosmopolitan literacies as a framework to engage teacher preparation program candidates in re-conceptualizing about their work as active thinkers, ethical decision makers, and agentive global actors. The purpose of the study is to elucidate how preservice teachers, in a secondary literacy teacher education program, respond to ethics-oriented education in addressing complex and controversial sociopolitical issues, such as the dialectics of freedom, human rights, and growing racism in the neoliberal globalized context. The third space theory of ethics is used to interpret participant student teachers’ intellectual epistemology based on their engagement with literary and nonliterary works, as well as multicultural media products. Data consist of observations, discussions, focus-group interviews, reflective journals, and course evaluations. This study contributes to our understanding of how critical cosmopolitan literacies is situated in the intercultural dialogue pertaining to ethical and equitable decision-making as a promising professional enterprise in the preparation of literacy educators as global advocates for equity and social justice.

De los debates globales a las prácticas locales: pedagogías emergentes para el fomento de la interculturalidad en el aula de español para adultos migrantes

ABSTRACT Recent theoretical debates in the field of intercultural language education reveal a “cosmopolitan turn”, which implies a glocal, critical, and transformative perspective of interculturality as praxis. This article explores the promotion and development of interculturality from a critical cosmopolitan perspective and reports on the results of an empirical study carried out in a Spanish language classroom for adult migrants in Barcelona through a didactic intervention based on emergent pedagogies. The results enrich the conception of a “cosmopolitan agenda” for language teaching and contribute to bridging the methodological gap between global theoretical debates and local practices of intercultural language education.

"We Are All Getting Liberal Now": The Cosmopolitan Critique of British Liberalism in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

"We Are All Getting Liberal Now": The Cosmopolitan Critique of British Liberalism in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

Indian Servitude(s) in Imperial London: Tanika Gupta’s The Empress

Abstract Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.

A virtual exchange experience: Preparing pre-service teachers for cultural diversity

This study examines the experiences of 36 pre-service teachers from a large university in the midwestern U.S who participated in a 3-week virtual exchange with peers in Turkey. Drawing from a critical cosmopolitanism framework, we center these experiences to analyze the feelings, perspectives, assumptions, and growth engendered through the virtual exchange. Data was collected through journals and interpretation developed from an iterative content analysis. Findings suggested that pre-service teachers, and their Turkish peers, used a range of digital tools to lead to educational outcomes, including intercultural and personal discoveries, as well as a professional orientation to global interactions. These outcomes also indicated broader tensions that emerged, including some deficit-oriented perceptions of their peers. We argue that future virtual exchanges might benefit from a critical cosmopolitan approach based on emerging linguistic, intercultural, and intrapersonal dimensions which may counter hegemonic power positions and attitudes.

A Pedagogical Framework for Critical Cosmopolitan Literacies

ABSTRACT Understanding global perspectives and international cultures is important because of increasing global mobility, digital connections, and national chauvinism. As students engage with diverse others in schools and online, they need global, critical, and ethical understandings of language, literacy, and culture. From a critical cosmopolitan lens, language and literacy educators guide students to develop a cosmopolitan worldview; dismantle hierarchies through reading, writing, and thinking; and take action for justice worldwide. The purpose of this article is to converge cosmopolitanism, critical pedagogy, and teacher perceptions to construct a framework for teaching critical cosmopolitan literacies. The findings suggest five dimensions of critical cosmopolitan literacies: proximal stance, reflexive stance, reciprocal stance, responsive stance, and praxis. Overall, participants held positive views of infusing cosmopolitan dispositions and global perspectives in their classrooms and reported success with integrating global literature, structuring discussions to promote empathy, and implementing inquiry to connect local and global issues.

"Allspace in a Notshall": Examining Bygmester HCE's Cosmopolitan City-Building in "Haveth Childers Everywhere"

Space and place in Finnegans Wake are often studied within a universalist framework where specific geographical locations get little emphasis and the idea of ever-expansive and international space becomes predominant. Analyzing HCE's city-building in "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (FW 536.28-554.10) presents the opportunity of bridging the longstanding gap in Joyce studies between localism and internationalism. In this essay, I argue that, in "Haveth Childers Everywhere," HCE essentially builds a cosmopolitan city by carefully curating local details from a wide range of cities all across the world. Applying the lens of cosmopolitanism and departing from the internationalist and universalist framework enable us to analyze how HCE's city-building preserves the cultural particularity of local details and acknowledges their cultural difference without subsuming them in a homogenizing grid. The critical cosmopolitanism of HCE's city rejects the hegemony of colonialism and exclusionary nationalism and explores the socio-cultural complexities of local details without invoking binaries of parochial/global, center/periphery, or superior/inferior. Analyzing the construction of HCE's city facilitates the understanding of how he creates the ideal receptacle for the still nascent national and cultural identity of the Wakean consciousness.

False friends: Leftist nationalism and the project of transnational solidarity

A growing number of left-wing scholars criticize practices of transnational solidarity. Pointing to the cooptation of “globalism” by neoliberal capitalism, these scholars utilize this critique to advance leftwing nationalism. In this article, I reconstruct symptomatic texts of this genre and identify the critique of (liberal) cosmopolitanism as the common denominator in their calls for nationalizing the Left. As a consequence of their opposition to cosmopolitanism, these authors reject freedom of movement or global justice activism. In order to examine whether the project of transnational solidarity is affected by this critique, I reconstruct its justifications in Critical Theory and postcolonial-feminist theory. Hauke Brunkhorst and Chandra Mohanty exemplarily theorize transnational solidarity in different ways, but each based on a substantial critique of liberal cosmopolitanism. By that, I show that a principled return to nationalism derived from a critique of cosmopolitanism is informed by coincidental evidence that rejects practices of transnational solidarity because of their alleged embeddedness in cosmopolitan reason. Drawing on La Via Campesina, I illustrate principles of a transnational solidarity project that is not justified with liberal cosmopolitan ideas. Their experiences challenge the nationalist/statist critique while not falling back into naïve and/or neoliberal cosmopolitanism.

“May the Circle Be Unbroken”: Looking at the Relations between Self, Other and the World from a Critical Cosmopolitan Outlook in Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the critical cosmopolitan discourse that permeates Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles so as to better understand the relations between self, other, and the world that are spotlighted in the text. In this young adult novel, Alvarez follows the self-discovery journey of Milly, a Latin American adoptee raised in Vermont, focusing on her evolution from an uncommitted girl to a critical reflective and socially responsible individual. This transformation begins when Pablo, a refugee from her birth country, settles in Vermont, which instills in the protagonist fears about her place in the world. To illustrate this evolution, this paper starts by examining the relation between strangers, embodiment, and place depicted in the first part of the novel. Thus, attention is paid to the anxieties triggered by Pablo’s status as stranger in the US. Drawing on critical cosmopolitan scholarship, this paper moves on to explore how Milly’s dialogical encounters with Pablo open a space of love and decoloniality that defies colonial structures, engendering in turn new ways of thinking about herself, others, and the world. Finally, this article argues that young adult novels like this enable the development of a young readership that can critically reflect upon social, cultural, and political issues.

From “Trans-” and “Post-nationalism” to “Critical Cosmopolitanism”. Notes on the Controversy Over Nationalism in the Western Academy

This article provides an overview of theoretical efforts to overcome nation-centrism that have been undertaken in various fields of social science, including political science, cultural studies, social anthropology and macrosociology, migration studies, and social philosophy, from the 1990s. The opposition to nationalism, characteristic of the academic literature of that time, was conducted mainly on the epistemological plane; i.e., within the framework of polemics engaging “methodological nationalism”. The researchers who defended the positions of “transnationalism” and/or “post-nationalism” dissociated themselves from nation-centric perspectives to the extent that they hindered the productive analysis of transformations of social reality. However, there was an ideological and normative component to this dissociation. Nationalism was unacceptable for many scientists both as a methodology and also as a worldview. Since cosmopolitanism was the main opponent of the nationalist worldview, critics of nationalism were obliged to turn to its associated concepts. The problematic nature of such an appeal, however, lies in the fact that the cosmopolitan tradition of Western academic literature developed mainly within a liberal ideological fold. This led toward efforts to reset cosmopolitanism as an articulation of the left-leaning agenda. This present article focuses on “critical cosmopolitanism”. If the nationalist view sees the condition for the possibility of solidarity in the very fact of community, then the critical-cosmopolitan view is that solidarity can arise from a general disagreement with oppression (in whatever forms the latter may manifest itself). Community, therefore, does not precede solidarity, but is the result of the process of its formation. The author of the article analyses and revises the terms necessary to discuss the formation of solidarity and the fight against oppression, and offers an attempt to comprehend the possibility of a post-national world.

A Post-Western Jurisprudence: Critical Cosmopolitanism, The Plurality of Pluralism, and Post-Western Agency

A Post-Western Jurisprudence: Critical Cosmopolitanism, The Plurality of Pluralism, and Post-Western Agency

ZADIE SMITH'IN SWING TIME'ININ KOZMOPOLIT BIR OKUMASI: HAREKETLILIK ILE KENDINI ANLAMA VE KIMLIK DÖNÜŞÜMÜ ARASINDAKI İLIŞKININ İNCELENMESI

This article seeks to demonstrate the transformational aspect of self-understanding and identity by interrogating the relationship between cosmopolitanism and mobility in Zadie Smith’s fifth novel Swing Time (2016). The contemporary school of thought that focuses on the transformational nature of self-understanding and identity is critical cosmopolitanism (Delanty 2009). In his sociological approach to cosmopolitanism, Gerard Delanty suggests that self-understanding and identity, firmly embedded in the interaction of self and other, are of changing, processual, and relational nature. This article elaborates and explores how in Swing Time the unnamed narrator’s mobility helps to move her identity and self-understanding beyond the ascribed determination and allocation of static typologies such as race, ethnicity, family, and local environment towards a more processual and transformational understanding of these notions in patterns of continuity and change. It concludes by arguing against fixed and fragmented typologies suggesting that, from a cosmopolitan perspective, Swing Time’s narrator’s self-understanding and identity are not torn between the competing forces in relation to notions of fixedness, on the one hand, and fragmentation, on the other hand, but are in a developmental process of becoming better.

Attilâ İlhan’s Anti-Cosmopolitanism

Attilâ İlhan (1925-2005) was an active public intellectual and a prolific author who wrote poems, novels, essays, and screenplays. While his poetics are marked by his distinct romantic style, his novelistic writing follows a strong social realist line. With his enthusiasm for Atatürk’s national revolution, his interest in the Ottoman culture, and his Marxist formation, he emphasises the importance of a “national culture synthesis” in his essays. He builds this idea of “national culture synthesis” in opposition to the so-called universal values of cosmopolitanism. This article discusses İlhan’s anticosmopolitanism as such in the light of the current theories of critical cosmopolitanism. While İlhan argues against “compradorial cosmopolites” in his essays, his anticosmopolitanism is rather prominent in his novels as well. Set in major cities, the novels celebrate the diversity and dynamism of their cityscapes. However, his depiction of such diversity exposes the ambivalences underneath his anti-cosmopolitanism. The article first provides a parallel reading of two contemporaries, Attilâ İlhan and Frantz Fanon, on national consciousness and cosmopolitanism. Then it focuses on İlhan’s Zenciler Birbirine Benzemez as a case study. Finally, it extrapolates upon the problems of his anti-cosmopolitanism within his broader literary oeuvre.