Notion Of Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

Understanding the Strengthening Cultural-Cosmopolitanism Spirit of Nahdlatul Ulama

The foundations of Islamic philosophy and faith, which go beyond the two primary sources of the Qur'an and Hadith and emphasize the value of Sunni tradition and ijma (ulama consensus), are fundamental to traditional-cultural identity of Nahdlatul Ulama's (NU). In addition, NU is renowned for having adapted the ideas of Abu Al-Hasan Al-Asy'ari, Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and Junayd Al-Baghdadi, as well as in terms of fiqh, or legal practice, mainly referring to Imam al-Shafi'i, representing Islamic conservatism and cultural traditionalism. This cultural traditionalism initially appears to run counter to the notion of NU's cosmopolitanism advanced by a number of its key figures, in particular Gus Dur. This cosmopolitan notion assumes a contemporary, inclusive belief structure and the segregation of religion from public life. Therefore, it is crucial to consider how the traditionalist-cultural movement founded by NU can coexist with a discourse on world beliefs that is becoming more cosmopolitan and assumes a space that is more open to all peoples. This article focuses on the discourse of cosmopolitanism and how NU, as one of the largest mass organizations in Indonesia, responds to this discourse with its approach and cultural background.

Academic citizenship and a world in crisis

In this paper I consider how the university might contribute to a regenerated commons. I discuss the problems of global citizenship as a heuristic, putting in its place, Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism to describe the Global Humanities bachelor program at my own higher education institution—Roskilde University in Denmark. I then consider the academic citizen as one participating in a space of dialogue and exchange where differences are recognized and the world is read through the lens of pluralism rather than over-confident and singular commitments to social justice, human rights or some idealized commons that threatens yet another dominant/dominating worldview. I end the paper with a reflection on the theme of hopelessness—viewing universities as central to creating academic citizens geared to the logic of deficit-thinking, endless development and abstract progress. Rather than trying to overcome hopelessness, we might be better advised to embrace it as one aspect of a broad and inclusive humanistic imagination; one where there are many knowledges but where most will not be encountered, and where there are no simple solutions

Localising cosmopolitanism in place talk: Semiotic landscape as stance object

Abstract Sociolinguistic research has begun to critique the generalised view of cosmopolitanism as indexed by the use of global and non-local languages and urge us to explore its variety and complexity as situated and dialogical practices. This article answers this call by examining how cosmopolitanism is localised in place talk. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study of language, space, and cosmopolitanism in Shanghai, the analysis focuses on how participants evoke, compare, and evaluate the semiotic landscapes of this Chinese megalopolis. While competing notions of cosmopolitanism emerge during the research interviews, stances taken towards them also perform divergent relationships to the city. This article thus demonstrates how, instead of being a binary opposition, cosmopolitan landscape is discursively reappropriated for the construction of local identities. It contributes to our understanding of how cosmopolitanism is reterritorialised in urban space. (Cosmopolitanism, semiotic landscape, stance, place talk, place-identity, Shanghai)*

Art, democratic commonality, and the production of knowledges

ABSTRACT In this paper, we are juxtaposing the notions of cosmopolitanism and koinopolitanism, to sketch a theoretical perspective in which local productions of knowledge, as a binding force of local communities, can meet more abstract regimes of knowing and more global concerns of democratic elites. We see this issue as politically significant in light of the current problems with democracy which we interpreted as resulting, among other factors, form the lack of connections between those regimes of knowing. The crucial part of our argument is that socially engaged art is capable of effectively building such connections, and we analyze community-based artistic interventions by Agnieszka Wołodźko in this perspective.

Disentangling the local context—imagined communities and researchers’ sense of belonging

Abstract It is generally agreed that researchers’ ‘local context’ matters to the successful implementation of research integrity policies. However, it often remains unclear what the relevant local context is. Is it the institutions and immediate working surroundings of researchers? Or, do we need to pay more attention to researchers’ epistemic communities if we want to understand their ‘local context’? In this paper, we examine this question by using the International Research Integrity Survey with more than 60,000 respondents. Survey responses indicate that academics identify with both their geographical local units (‘polis’) and their more transnational epistemic or scholarly communities (‘cosmos’). Identification with scholarly communities tends to be strongest. We embed the survey results in the academic literature by proposing a theoretical understanding of academics’ ‘local context’ based on Beck’s notion of cosmopolitanism and Durkheim’s concept of solidarity. We conclude with considerations on how to successfully implement research integrity policies.

An affective and posthumanist cosmopolitan hospitality

This conceptual article argues for revisiting and revising notions of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in light of the increasingly interconnected local to global domain of contemporary tourism. We briefly trace the contributions of three key philosophers in modernity who have contributed to the theorization of these concepts: Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. We then note some shortcomings of these approaches for contemporary problems of cosmopolitan hospitality and argue that Gilles Deleuze's conceptual apparatus enables a novel theorization to overcome the limitations of current approaches. This is done through an affective and posthumanist perspective, which introduces a new ethical understanding of cosmopolitan hospitality, dissolves problematic conceptual dualisms, and puts the focus on relational encounters, beyond spatiality.

Brazil on the World Stage: Carlos Gomes’s Colombo, the First Republic, and Brazil’s Cosmopolitan Desires

In 1892, in the shadow of the tumultuous fall of the Brazilian monarchy and the rise of the First Republic just three years earlier, composer Carlos Gomes premiered his new piece Colombo in Rio de Janeiro. Intended for the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, Colombo hagiographically narrates the story of Christopher Columbus and his supposed heroic journey of discovery to the “New World”. However, the piece’s disastrous reception in Rio led to it being left out of the Exposition and in the shadows of the composer’s oeuvre. In this article, I examine the history of Gomes’s Colombo within the context of the nation-building project of Brazil’s First Republic. Interrogating the piece alongside the other forms of cultural production that represented Brazil at the Exposition, I argue that Colombo reveals the uncomfortable and tense mediations between the national and non-national, as necessitated by Brazil’s search for a place within the cosmopolitan modernity of the fin-de-siècle world order. The article traces the construction of an exported image of “Brazil” and the universal, cosmopolitan notion of “Brazilianness” that the composition represents and, in doing so, seeks to nuance the oppositions between periphery/metropole and nationalist/cosmopolitan on which the nineteenth-century nation-state was based.

The Voiceless Citizens in James Kelman’s Translated Accounts

The purpose of this paper is to underline James Kelman’s voiceless working class figures in a cosmopolitan world, arguing that the peripheral and unprivileged part of Scotland is the very factor that reconstructs the modern diverse reality of Scottish culture. This article discusses Kelman’s Translated Accounts and shows how the peripheral live under a state of oppression deprived from their individual freedom and individuality where fear and anxiety hunt his characters. Translated Accounts is a novel about two unnamed group, but they represent two poles: the privileged and the periphery. Though the novel depicts unknown characters and setting, one might immediately make the connection between the unfair living condition of the Scottish working class individual and these hidden figures. Interestingly, Kelman’s choose to make his characters and setting anonymous is to add a cosmopolitan notion that the oppression of the periphery is still all over the world.

Sensing, imagining, doing Europe: Europeanisation in the boundary work of welcome cultures

ABSTRACT In the article, we shed light on and problematize the everyday sensing, imagining, and doing of Europe in the boundary work of welcome cultures. By relating the practices and performances of the welcome cultures to a long tradition of thought problematizing European identity around the notion of cosmopolitanism, we read welcoming activities as openings for imagining and doing an inclusive Europe in a space apart from and beyond the institutional violence of exclusive borders. It is our argument that through the everyday activities of welcoming, ‘other Europes’ emerge, heterotopia, materialized as ‘elsewheres’ articulated in resistance to and as well as mirroring and mimicking the EU and state bordering. We thereby illuminate how European welcome cultures open for renegotiating and reimagining the boundaries and contours of what it means to be European, and this is sensed, imagined and performed in the everyday practices.

Small Nations Writ Large: Notions of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Scotland and Flanders

Compares relations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Scotland and Belgium, through the Scottish critic William Sharp's response to the "Belgian Renascence," to the magazine La Jeune Belgique, to Flemish authors writing in French (notably the playwrights Van Lerberghe and Maeterlinck, the novelist Eekhoud, and the poet Verhaeren), contrasting that movement with the later pro-Dutch-language magazine Van Nu en Straks, and illustrating how the local and global overlapped in the rivalling cosmopolitanism of fin-de-siècle Belgium and the late-19th-century avant-garde.

On Everyday Natures and Enchanted Landscapes: Worldmaking Practices and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Guatemala’s Western Highlands

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how different meanings attached to social and natural landscapes in Guatemala’s Western Highlands inspire a sense of cosmopolitan imagination among those who are potentially less mobile and rooted in their own environment. I show how different manifestations of rooted cosmopolitanism in Chicabal and Santa Cruz la Laguna are mediated by residents’ engagements with these landscapes and how diverging human-environment relations shape cosmopolitan worldviews as they intersect with and encounter tourism dynamics. The landscapes in which these processes take form are described as dynamic realms of encounter between both local and global and human and nonhuman actors. By looking into the potentialities of rooted cosmopolitanism mediated by ideas of global connectedness, I seek to extend the notion of cosmopolitanism beyond tourists alone and, instead, examine how such interactions bring worldmaking practices of Maya inhabitants and nonhuman actors into the equation.

Georgia Makhlouf : l’écriture comme métaphore du cosmopolitisme

The main objective of this article is the critical study of the first three works of the Franco-Lebanese writer, Georgia Makhlouf. This author is framed in the so-called Francophone Xenographies, a theoretical concept based on the study of a wide corpus that includes numerous literary voices arising from imposed or voluntary displacement and that turns to French as a means of expression and as a symbolic host land. The structural, discursive, and thematic axes of each of the three selected texts will be studied, in order to show the recurrence and relevance of the notion of cosmopolitanism as the thematic mosaic around which the writer’s identity and literary geography is built.

A cosmopolitan bubble? Constructions of locality at an international school in China

The notion of cosmopolitanism captures the duality of the global world. On one hand, it represents an inclusive orientation towards the cultural Other, while on the other, it has become a form of cultural capital that is owned by the global elite and frequently used to demarcate social distinctions. This article, based on ethnographic research in an international school in China, introduces the concretization of this paradox. The article shows how teachers and students in a gated school – in which local students, by Chinese law, were not permitted to study – used different practices to signify invented Chineseness as legitimate and non-legitimate. This process is explored by deciphering practices of boundary-making that produced a unique bubble. Based on three mechanisms of boundary-making and groupness, I show how a cultural process of identification and differentiation challenges previous empirical assumptions of selective boundaries in reference to the locale. Instead, the presence of ambiguous perceptions of Chinese locality in school suggest the existence of elastic, continuous and unfixed boundaries.

Cosmopolitan Geopolitics

ABSTRACT Whether addressing violent ethno-nationalism, xenophobic bigotry, or religious intolerance, scholars and educators invoke cosmopolitan notions of a shared planet and common humanity as a means of rising above difference. Cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political orientation places an imperative on seeking out, welcoming, and learning from cultural others. As such, cosmopolitanism involves a process of reducing the social and physical proximity between ‘them’ and ‘us’ carried out in the belief in shared commonalities held by a universal ‘we.’ However, a priori assumptions about who and what constitutes that ‘we’ at the heart of cosmopolitanism are necessarily partial, situated, and subjective. In this special section, authors consider the tensions, paradoxes, and potentials of cosmopolitanism in diverse settings and from diverse perspectives. Specifically, these papers examine the formation of youthful, cosmopolitan subjectivities and youth involvement in the creation of cosmopolitan spaces, from South-South global volunteering and international missionary trips to the anti-nationalist hip-hop scene in Sarajevo and efforts to enact a civic cosmopolitanism in Beirut. Situated in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts and centering the political subjectivities of young people and their hopeful efforts to bring about a better world, these papers examine the spatial-temporal politics of cosmopolitanism and the tension inherent in creating necessarily bounded spaces grounded in cosmopolitan openness. This introduction frames this examination of grounded and contested cosmopolitanisms as an immanent process of world-building guided by a transcendent worldviews. This framing emphasizes cosmopolitanism as a universal moral outlook and the need to create caring pluriversal worlds capable of accommodating multiple worldviews.

Towards Cosmopolitanism in German Academia?: Shedding Light on Colonial Underpinnings of Communication Research in a Globalized World

Coloniality is a notion that has been key in many disciplines for addressing power rela-tions and their embeddedness in continuous colonial hierarchies. This essay contributes to the re-flections on the notion of cosmopolitanism in German academia, focusing on Communication Stud-ies as a starting point. The possibility to develop research at a university in the Global North is usually presented by the hosting countries as a door to productive exchanges among colleagues from differ-ent backgrounds. Nevertheless, many hierarchies and pre-established concepts on knowledge pro-duction produce forms of epistemic silencing and other forms of violence and limits in these ex-changes. The present essay proposes a process of dialogue with decolonial theories to trace roots on the meaning of cosmopolitanism, its borders and possibilities.

Questioning Cosmopolitanism through the Biographical Trajectories of French Residents of Abu Dhabi and Dubai

Owing to their diverse populations and particular social configurations, the United Arab Emirates offer a unique urban context in which to question the notion of cosmopolitanism and its daily manifestations, since the main cities of the Emirates maximize occasions for intercultural interaction while maintaining major economic divisions and social hierarchies in most parts of daily life. While national and ethnic categories in the Emirates are often presented in the literature as being rigid, this paper argues that a biographical approach allows for a finer analysis of cosmopolitan situations. The French residents of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, relatively privileged migrants, position themselves along a wide spectrum of places and activities, raising different social and urban issues. Based on 26 months of participant observation in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and 12 in-depth interviews with French residents of the UAE, this paper shows that their forms of sociability, social practices, and international mobility work together to shape diverse and sometimes paradoxical forms of openness to national, ethnic, or social “others”.

Introduction: Ethnographic Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in the Gulf: State Narratives, Individual Trajectories and Transnational Connections

This introduction offers a general framework to this Special Section which aims to unpack the ambivalences of cosmopolitanism in the Gulf region. It argues that cosmopolitanism is a heuristic concept for the critical analysis of extreme urban diversity in non-Western, non-democratic contexts. Indeed, it acts as a tool for exploring the tensions between logics of exclusion –– underlined by policies that maintain foreign residents outside of the citizenry –– and logics of integration, triggered partly by the competition among global cities to attract talents. While this introduction outlines the many theoretical debates surrounding the notion of cosmopolitanism, the five articles adopt an empirically-grounded approach to display new interdisciplinary perspectives on cosmopolitanism in Gulf societies, based on two overarching observations. First, they deconstruct state narratives of cosmopolitanism as a normative political discourse, with its lexicon of tolerance, diversity and coexistence. Second, they advocate for an understanding of cosmopolitanism built upon the study of individual representations, trajectories, and practices rather than as an ideal of coexistence and openness to the other.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF COSMPOLITANISM IN THE CONTEXT OF WESTERN VIEW

This article describes that cosmopolitanism reflects the nature of capital, striving towards where the best conditions are created for it and it is possible to obtain the greatest benefit. In the history of industrially developed countries, a complex interaction of cosmopolitanism with the idea of a nation-state is traced. The elements of cosmopolitanism were also present in communist ideology. It is in the context of cosmopolitanism that his basic thesis of building a classless and stateless society on a global scale can be interpreted. In the USSR, where during the first decade of Soviet power the expectation of a world revolution was replaced by the predominance of political principles in politics, the concept of cosmopolitanism acquired a persistently negative meaning and was perceived as a bourgeois ideology. After World War II, the state periodically campaigned to combat "rootless cosmopolitanism" and adultery in the face of Western scientific and cultural achievements. Furthermore, we can point out that a different interpretation of cosmopolitanism has led to frictions of various kinds. In essence, it should have been one of the most important factors in solving world problems. In this research work, special attention is paid to the notion of cosmopolitanism in the context of the current situation in the world. An important problem is the place of the human being in the world as a matter of philosophy or the place of the human being in the system of state politics as a matter of political science.

Children of Chinese Migrants in Spain: Life Experiences and Cosmopolitan Identities

ABSTRACT This article is a case study that uses the notion of cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool to explore the life experiences and cultural identities of three children of Chinese migrants living in Spain. Based on life narrative interviews, the article demonstrates that cosmopolitan outlooks and practices emerge in the lives of the participants as a multilayered mechanism that involves, on the one hand, circumstances and conditions such as educational and socioeconomic background, and on the other, a creative strategy aimed at subverting power dynamics and asserting one’s place within society. It is in this regard that the cosmopolitanism of children of Chinese migrants in Spain can be seen as both given and created.

Legitimacy and Cosmopolitanism: Online Public Debates on (Corporate) Responsibility.

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy (Etter et al. in Bus Soc 57(1):60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate (ir)responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency.