Global Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

The Past, Present, and Future of Cross-Cultural Management Education: The Educators' Perspective

In a series of interviews with leading cross-cultural management (CCM) educators, we examine the state of the CCM field within business education. We invited eight prominent scholars and executive educators to consider the following main questions: What is the role of cross-cultural management in business curricula? What challenges do we face teaching this material? How can we create an engaged learning environment with the diverse audiences we encounter in our classrooms, and what theoretical frameworks best support these efforts? Last, what is the future of cross-cultural management education? What changes and challenges can we expect? The learnings that emerged from our interviews are grouped around three main themes: the content of what we teach, our understanding of audiences with whom we work and their evolving expectations of cross-cultural management education, and the role, preparation, background and assumptions of the educators. This series of interviews contributes to highlight current trends in cross-cultural management education: a shift in content from knowledge to conditions of knowledge creation, a transition from monocultural audiences toward biculturals and global cosmopolitans, and finally, educators' changing responsibility from providing knowledge to developing and honing responsible, tolerant, and resilient global citizens.

Global justice, cosmopolitanism and moral path dependency

The article explains the essential features of a theory of global justice that combines justice for individuals with justice for political communities. It holds that arguing within the justificatory framework of cosmopolitanism is compatible with a conditional justification of states that are basically just. The justification rests on an argument I will name ‘the moral path dependency argument’. The article follows its normative consequences into the fields of a justly ordered community of legitimate states and of cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice. Thus, it reconciles the latter with claims to political autonomy of particular communities and with the fact of reasonable disagreement between them.

Sport in Malaysia: National Imperatives and Western Seductions

Professional sport has been radically altered by global capitalism, expanding from its once highly localized origins into an increasingly internationalized, mediatized, and commoditized cultural form. Like other commodities, sport has branched out from saturated domestic markets in the West. The rapid development of Asian economies has witnessed a wave of economic and cultural modernization, and the subsequent emergence of middle-class consumption has seen internationally recognizable commodity signs like the English Premier League (EPL) desired for their symbolic link to global cosmopolitanism. This paper addresses the Malaysian context, where the nation-building process has been problematized by the complex racial, cultural and religious make-up of its population. It analyses the obstructive tension between local sporting developmental agenda and the orchestrated intrusion of global (predominantly Western) sports commodities.

Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda

Through reviewing the UK Coalition Government’s reconfiguration of the security–development nexus, this paper tracks a move away from the ‘securitisation of development’, toward the ‘developmentisation of security’. It demonstrates how discourses of capacity building from the bottom-up have replaced the assertions of global cosmopolitanism of the Blair years. We argue that the Coalition is attempting to portray this as a ‘post-interventionist’ approach, in an attempt to resolve the crisis of faith in legal accountability, moral responsibility and political responsibility inherited from the previous administration, and respond to their legacy of international interventions. Rather than emphasise the agency of liberators, the UK Coalition therefore now cultivates the image of a chaotic world, populated by vulnerable subjects in need of empowerment, where instrumental interventions are less certain. Thus, reconfiguring the intervention/non-intervention binary, more recent engagements in Libya, Afghanistan and the Arab Spring have been framed by and retreated into facilitating the resilience of non-Western subjects.

Cosmopolitan sexual citizenship and the project of queer world-making at the Sydney 2002 Gay Games

Using the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games as a case study, in this article I analyse sexual citizenship through the lens of global cosmopolitanism. I begin by arguing that at these Games an idealised sexual citizen was produced through neoliberal discourses of freedom, rights, choice and cosmopolitanism. At events of this kind, these individualising practices function as new and important forms of ‘political’ action. I then argue that the idealised cosmopolitan sexual citizen is presumed to be a white, western citizen-subject who has access to ‘difference’ through urban living, global travel and through personal investments in the project of global queer world-making. Finally, I illustrate how becoming a cosmopolitan sexual citizen involves a set of consumptive practices that fetishise and Other non-white bodies and lives. At large global gay and lesbian events like the Gay Games, local histories and bodies are mediated as sites of consumption that affirm sexual citizens’ status as global cosmopolitan citizens and define the parameters of an imagined queer world.

American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination Sigrid Anderson Cordell American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination. By Stephanie Hawkins. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. $55.00, $22.50. It is not surprising that the place of National Geographic in political, cultural, and print history has been the focus of much critical attention in recent years. The magazine sheds light on the history of photography and ethnography, the ways in which American identity was constructed in relation to ideas of the exotic, and the mainstream packaging of foreign cultures. Scholarly interest in National Geographic also coincides with interest in U.S. imperialism, critical race and gender studies, and the history of periodicals. Stephanie Hawkins’ American Iconographic thus enters an established field of scholarly work on the magazine that includes Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’ Reading National Geographic (1993) and Tamar Rothenberg’s Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888–1945 (2007). Hawkins’ work builds on previous studies by examining both the archive of unpublished readers’ letters to the magazine and the ways in which it was parodied throughout popular culture, an approach that illuminates the slippage between National Geographic’s message and how readers responded to it by resisting, endorsing, and/or reworking it. Overall, this is a useful study, and it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ways in which National Geographic became both a staple in American homes and a target of critique and parody. Hawkins begins her analysis of the magazine’s place in American culture by unpacking its iconic status, paying particular attention to the ways in which its visual icons circulate across borders, commodifying images while inviting global activism. For Hawkins, the haunting cover photograph of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl shown on the cover in 1985 and “found” again by a National Geographic team in 2002, is a key moment for understanding how these images enter the “mediascape,” inviting sympathy and allowing readers to participate in a global civic culture. In Hawkins’ reading, National Geographic is both a creator of icons and an icon of its own. In tracing the history of how the magazine came to play a central role in creating iconic images, Hawkins points to its first photograph in 1896, “Zulu Bride and Bridegroom.” Through this image and others like it, Hawkins places [End Page 216] National Geographic in the context of American pedagogical theory as educators sought to teach Americans how to read visual images. Locating the Zulu bride and bridegroom in a “universal” discourse of marriage and the family, the magazine used images such as this one to “domesticate the more estranging aspects of cultural and racial difference” (28). In this way, National Geographic used images to inaugurate its educational mission, and Hawkins traces how this mission was in line with a progressive educational shift toward using visual imagery in the classroom. This discussion of how the magazine participated in educating its readers usefully sets up Hawkins’ subsequent analysis of how later generations of readers read back against the magazine’s more obviously propagandistic and nationalistic images, as when it endorsed Fascist nationalism. Hawkins does not view the magazine’s readers as passive consumers but rather examines how they responded to, resisted, and appropriated the magazine’s text and images. As Hawkins demonstrates, readers of National Geographic have been extremely savvy about identifying and critiquing the magazine’s political and nationalist biases, even as the magazine sought to balance its interest in patriotism with its emphasis on fostering a global cosmopolitanism. As Hawkins points out, readers saw through these attempts at the “manufacture of consent” much more than was previously assumed, and her examination of the archive of readers’ letters is particularly useful in demonstrating how readers recognized and objected to the magazine’s polemical leanings. One of the most compelling sections in Hawkins’ work comes in her analysis of what she terms the “jungle housekeeping” motif in the magazine. Hawkins here refers to accounts that appeared periodically in the magazine detailing a married couple’s attempts to set up house in an exotic, undeveloped landscape, most frequently an out...

Cosmopolitan or ethnically identified selves? Institutional expectations and the negotiated identities of international students

The identities of young people, including students, are influenced by their institutional contexts. In central Melbourne over the past decade, international students largely from Southeast Asia have been presented with the expectations of universities in which they are enrolled and churches with which many are affiliated. But the subject positions offered to students by universities and churches diverge: universities expect of their students cross-cultural interaction and a forming global cosmopolitanism, whilst churches expect devoutness to be exhibited through close interaction amongst international students, often in national and ethnically specific groupings. Drawing from lengthy interviews with students and institutional service providers, this paper finds that the influence of religious organisations on the social forming of students is more direct and effective than the influence of universities. The churches draw their student members tightly and persuasively into ethnically identified groups, whose members enact a sociality almost entirely conducted in relation to those churches. The universities, in contrast, are less directive and insistent about their expectations of cosmopolitan interactions. Students whose sociality seems compliant with university statements are those whose plans to be cosmopolitan were developed independently of university expectations.

Diversity, distribution and biogeographical origins of Plasmodium parasites from the New Zealand bellbird (Anthornis melanura)

Understanding the origin of invasive parasites and ecological transmission barriers on the distribution of mosquito-borne pathogens is enriched by molecular phylogenetic approaches now that large databases are becoming available. Here we assess the biogeographical relationships among haemosporidian blood parasites and an avian host, the New Zealand bellbird (Meliphagidae, Anthornis melanura). Four Plasmodium haplotypes were identified among 93 infected bellbirds (693 screened) using nested PCR of a mitochondrial DNA cytochrome b gene fragment. The most common lineage, LIN1 (11%), is confined to northern New Zealand and falls within a known clade of Plasmodium (subgenus Novyella) sp. infecting Australian meliphagids. LIN1 differs within that clade by 4 9% sequence divergence suggestive of an endemic lineage to New Zealand. The most widespread lineage, LIN2 (2%), is an exact match with a global cosmopolitan (P. elongatum GRW06). Two rare lineages, LIN3 and LIN4 are less abundant, geographically restricted within New Zealand and have <1% sequence divergence with P. (Novyella) sp. (AFTRU08) and P. relictum (LINOLI01) documented from Africa. For the first time, we provide invaluable information on possible rates of entry of invading parasites in New Zealand and their distribution from temperate to cold environments.

Asserting nationalism in a cosmopolitan world: globalized Indian cultures in Yash Raj Films

Yash Raj Films is one of India's most successful film production studios with a massive global market. The influence of a powerful Indian diaspora provides film directors from the Bollywood stable of Yash Chopra (Yash Raj Films) with a wealth of international settings. These settings in turn provide a site for an assertive Indian nationalism based upon the adoption of cosmopolitan lifestyles. This paper examines three recent films, Khabi Kushi Khabhie Gham, Khabie Alvida Naa Kehna, and Salaam Namaste!, to see how London, New York, and Melbourne are reconfigured as cities in which Indian émigrés make their mark – they are successful in their careers (mostly) and comfortable in their new surroundings. Such films are suggestive of a new ‘global cinema’ in which the geographical confines of national cinema are being stretched. Drawing on a tripartite thematic framework, we explore the visual geographies, the heightened consumption patterns, and the sense of global cosmopolitanism presented in these films. And while the underlying sentiment is that one always sees ‘home’ (i.e., India) as an idealized paradise, the new cosmopolitanism adopted by Indian émigrés in these films serves to highlight the ease with which Indian nationals can find success in global environments.

Kabul cosmopolitan: Geopolitical empire from the planner’s viewpoint

This article uses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical lens to explore both the urbanism and the ethics of planning in Kabul. The Cosmopolis arguments of Sandercock is synthesized with the political argument of Mouffe to articulate a concept of agonistic cosmopolitanism in contrast to a concept of globalizing cosmopolitanism. The practices that shape urban life in Kabul resemble what Simone describes as worlding processes in cities of sub-Saharan Africa. Under such adverse conditions, Kabulis demonstrate vital aspects of agonistic pluralism. Conversely, a transnational community in Kabul embodies a less critical, presumptively global cosmopolitanism through the production of a Global Village that encourages socially disruptive land speculation. The value of a more critical, agonistic understanding is then demonstrated through the analysis of an unexpected discrepancy in planning ideals between the national and local planning agencies in Kabul. This analysis suggests a new ethical task for urban planners: to challenge geopolitical empire through a cosmopolitan ethic that embraces the substantive conflicts which come with actual recognition and political inclusion of the Other.

The Show Must Go On

Exploration of the migration history of the community of Cabanaconde, in Peru’s southern highlands, and the impact of transnational migration on the fiesta system calls attention to the role of the fiesta in strengthening migrants’ ties to the networks they draw on to migrate and adapt to their new settings in the United States. It also suggests that the transnationalization of the fiesta contributes to an emerging division of villagers into those who have access to migrant networks and those who do not. By serving as a public showcase for Cabaneños’ positions in migrant networks, the fiesta not only intensifies economic and social divisions within the community but also underpins the exclusiveness of those networks and reminds them and their fellow villagers of their new social status as both transnational villagers and global cosmopolitans.

Global Citizenship and Cosmopolitanism

Global Citizenship and Cosmopolitanism

Global sport: Where Wembley Way meets Bollywood Boulevard

As sport has circulated around the globe, its practice and expression have both replicated its established (and substantially Western-dominated) power formation, and to varying degrees challenged and modified it. The growing popularity of these sports-entertainment cultures reflects emergent media and leisure economies combining global aspirational cosmopolitanism with local cultural identities and histories. These multiple modes of cultural adaptation are evident in various Asian contexts in relation to the English Premier League (EPL) (and association football (soccer) in general), and hybridized local forms of global sport such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket and the J-League (Japanese professional soccer). This article examines, in reference to these cases, the ways in which global sport culture is constrained by its historical inheritance yet also making new, multi-faceted cultural histories. It argues that the trajectory of sport's global cultural development is not subject to a simple logic of adoption and imitation, but is created out of multiple, intersecting correspondences – and non-correspondences – between histories, sites and social formations. The cultural complexion of sport – not least in the vibrantly performative sphere of fandom – is undergoing profound, culturally adaptive change, and analytical frameworks foregrounding sporting cultural importation and pale imitation require a concomitant re-consideration and adaptation.

The South, the Nation, and Global Cosmopolitanism

Revisionary theories of regionalism have burgeoned in recent years, including works by such scholars as Richard Gray and Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., who have questioned prevailing assumptions about the South, challenging our notion of the region as disconnected from everywhere else. Leigh Anne Duck’s impressive interdisciplinary examination of the “ideological functioning” (2) of seeing the South as a national aberra­ tion is a noteworthy contribution to this larger conversation. Seeking to interrogate this old view of an insular South steeped in tradition and racism, Duck’s book explores the ways in which the complicated circuits connecting modernism, nationalism, and the South have bolstered seg­ regation and racism. Duck uncovers associations among the South, modernity, and global cosmopolitanism through her analysis of film, popular and experimental modernist literature, reviews, and other primary sources. Her method, which is formalist, historicist, and psychoanalytic, allows her to explore how the partition between the South and the nation has been socially constructed as well as how it might have been individually experienced. By drawing on psychoanalytic theory, she investigates how individual de­ sires and anxieties intersect with broader ideological and historical trends. In my estimation, this approach constitutes a real strength of her study because it resists the usual critical rift between historicist and psychoana­ lytic approaches and permits her to illustrate “the profound interactions between psychology and social life” (10). Although her book covers the period from the 1920s through the 1950s, she identifies the 30s and 40s as decades in which experimental and progressive writers negotiated over­ lapping regional, national, and global discourses in an especially dynamic

Global Consciousness and Cosmopolitanism in Appendice by Lina Saneh

Global Consciousness and Cosmopolitanism in <i>Appendice</i> by Lina Saneh

Cosmopolitanism, global social justice and gender equality in education

This article attempts to locate approaches to understanding gender, education and notions of the international within debates on global social justice and cosmopolitanism. It looks at the work of three feminist scholars (Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill and Iris Young) on this theme, draws out some ways in which they engage critiques of cosmopolitanism and considers some of the implications of their work for thinking about gender equality and comparative education. Two examples of work on gender equality in education at global level are assessed: the attempt to introduce gender dimensions into assessments of global financing for Education for All through the Fast Track Initiative and improved forms of monitoring of gender equality in education at national and international levels. The difficulties encountered and some of the implications for understanding discussions of cosmopolitanism are outlined, together with a case for strengthening and supporting work on gender and global social justice that takes participation and ethical reflection as a central concern.

(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

Beck's cosmopolitan politics

This article evaluates Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitan global politics. I argue that areas where Beck sees bases for communal and cosmopolitan politics are structured by power, inequality and conflict. Beck has a conflict perspective on local responses to globalization but this is not carried through to his global politics. There are issues that need to be tackled at a global level but I argue that this will have to be done on the basis of conflicting interests, power and nation-states as much as through global cosmopolitanism and co-operation.

Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Ric Knowles Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia. By Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo. Studies in International Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. x + 245. $74.95 cloth. Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo's Performance and Cosmopolitics investigates the relationship between "the new cosmopolitanism" and performance, exploring the mechanics of cosmopolitanism within the social, cultural, and political landscape of Australia. "New cosmopolitanism" attempts to move beyond both the Western, elitist aura of the old cosmopolitan model, and beyond old models of the multi-, inter, and cross-cultural in a number of ways and with a number of investments. On the one hand, there is the sophisticated global cosmopolitanism that is seen as politically necessary to bolster economic globalization, replace multiculturalism as a strategy of "ethnoracial management" (17), and evade multiculturalism's aura of social engineering. As Hugh Mackay says, "cosmopolitanism sounds like something we achieved, not something that was imposed on us" (qtd. on 17). This is old white cosmopolitanism refashioned for the new age, an aesthetic and consumer cosmopolitanism that transcends xenophobic nationalisms, but that, like "white multiculturalism" (Ghassan Hage, qtd. on 87), celebrates the aestheticization, reification, and commodification of cultural difference for the well-heeled. On the other hand, there is a recent array of "critical cosmopolitanism[s]" (Paul Rabinow, qtd. on 4) emerging out of the US academy and intended to address the failures of multiculturalism. Gilbert and Lo cite James Clifford's "discrepant cosmopolitanism," Mitchell Cohen's "rooted cosmopolitanism," Benita Parry's "post-colonial cosmopolitanism," and Pnina Werbner's "working-class cosmopolitanism," all of which carve out "middle-path alternatives between ethnocentric nationalism and particularistic multiculturalism" as cosmopolitanisms "from below" (5). Gilbert and Lo classify these new cosmopolitanisms into three types: moral (rooted in the Kantian idea of a "universal community" and hospitality); political (rooted in transnational governance and notions of cosmopolitan democracy); and cultural (rooted in a disposition of openness to divergent cultures and a practice of navigating across cultural boundaries). Arguing that cosmopolitanism "is increasingly gaining purchase as a form of sociocultural capital" (10), and pointing out "the ways in which specific ideological positions unravel at the point of embodiment" (such as in performance) (12), they set out to examine how, in practice rather than theory, the sociocultural capital of these new cosmopolitanisms circulate within a wide range of Australian performance-cultural practices and sites—both intra- and internationally. Their central contribution is to argue that "there is, inevitably, a politics to the practice of cosmopolitanism—a cosmopolitics that is caught up in hybrid spaces, entangled histories, and complex human corporeographies" (11, emphasis in original). The book can be divided into two parts. The first, in four chapters, functions as a survey of Australian cross-cultural performance, focusing on representations of and by Aboriginal and Asian experience and performance forms, and analyzing the central motifs and problematics of cross-cultural praxis in Australasia. Gilbert and Lo begin, in chapter 1, with familiar postcolonial analyses of representations of, and very occasionally by but rarely for, Aboriginals and Asians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performances, which were largely "anti-cosmopolitan" in their support of a white settler invader nation in the making. The best parts of this chapter are those where cracks and anxieties show through, as in the 1909 "Asian invasion" play White Australia, where excessive focus on "extreme whiteness" is seen to betray whiteness as a construct, unconsciously making it visible, marked, and therefore vulnerable. But the book comes into its own when it surveys the contemporary scene in chapters 2–4: "Indigenizing Australian Theatre," "Asianizing Australian Theatre," and "Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival." These chapters expose many of the hypocrisies of political and economic opportunism in Australia's new turn to its Aboriginal cultures and to Asia. They also celebrate many of the successes of evolving Aboriginal, Asian, and cross-cultural performance cultures. But they are most effective because they locate the analyses within specific national and global social, cultural, and political contexts, and because they offer nuanced analyses of complex negotiations across different stakes and scripts as assimilation, co-optation, codification, and exoticization trade off against new...

Bleeding London and Re-Mapping It: Local Empire in a Global City

potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and objective reality. The literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifi able world. [...] But the ontology on which the image of man in modernist literature is based invalidates this principle. If CCS4_1_03_p11-30.indd 14 27/6/07 12:32:03 Bleeding London and Re-Mapping It 25 the ‘human condition’ – man as a solitary being, incapable of meaningful relationships – is identifi ed with reality itself, the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality becomes null and void. (24) Indeed, because Stuart has stopped time by textualizing the city – by spatializing it in textual fragments – his city becomes a not-whole (knothole?), a space of loss that needs a new identity. In come the Japanese and their solution, and Stuart lets himself go along for the ride. He has searched for authenticity, but then lost sight of what that might mean. His diary and his suicide are the culmination of a life of identifi cation with London, rather than an identifi cation with himself. The failure of Mick’s re-mapping is similarly a failure to reconcile historical reality with timeless images. His sixth and last victim, Robin Lawton, is a gay architect and habitue of London’s multi-ethnic and multicultural public toilet gay sex scene. Mick’s disbelief at what he sees in the public toilets is matched by his disbelief at Lawton’s fl at, a renovated warehouse or factory, with its exposed brick, concrete, large windows, and unusual furniture. Mick says ‘Only in London,’ to which Lawton replies, ‘No, not only in London. Also in New York, Barcelona, Milan’ (290). Moreover, Lawton, showing Mick his body heavily scarred from sexual adventures, informs Mick that he can accommodate anything, no matter how painful. It is ‘as though a diagram of sick desire had been doodled on his fl esh, turned into a map of scarred skin and torched nerve endings, a city of delicious pain’ (291–292). Mick is thus totally disarmed, not to mention struck by the realization that Lawton’s homosexuality makes him an unlikely member of the gang that raped Gabby. Lawton’s perversity, masochism, deliberate ugliness, and his physical weakness coupled with his passivity take the wind out of Mick’s sails and also represents a kind of London Mick cannot comprehend. It was easier when the codes were fi xed: when heterosexual, upper-middle class morality was being perverted by male heterosexual desires. In that case it was simple for Mick to attribute the gang rape to the pomposity and cruelty of London. But Lawton is neither pompous nor cruel. Rather, he is the global, sexual, and artistic cosmopolitan and no longer represents London for Mick. Mick realizes that he is no match for London, gives up, and heads home – to discover that he had been lured into his London escapade by a provincial criminal’s revenge plot. As if this weren’t enough, this revelation comes on top of complications that arise from his own sexual liaison with Judy. Not only does her re-mapping gender London feminine, she exposes Mick to Japanese restaurants, to her Japanese body, in eff ect to a London that has been re-mapped by ‘exotic’ immigrants and CCS4_1_03_p11-30.indd 15 27/6/07 12:32:03