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Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty
... Of course, many open educators also act in support of stronger forms of cosmopolitanism, and some might deny that they are any sort of cosmopolitan. However, weak cosmopolitanism might be realised in many different ways (Pogge, 2008). In the example of open licences contributing towards a global commons, this may be understood as a moral duty rather than an action taken out of self-interest. ...
Who is open education for, and where might it ultimately lead us? This paper examines social and political dimensions of open education with a focus on the concept of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics. After providing an outline of open education, I proceed by critically examining the commonly held policy position that ‘publicly funded should mean openly licenced’, arguing that it implies a form of ‘weak’ moral cosmopolitanism. I describe ‘global citizenship’ and show its relevance to coordination in the efforts of open education through a commons supported by open licences. Tensions are surfaced between the universalist perspectives of cosmopolitanism and the recent emphasis on political issues such as social justice, decolonization, equity, diversity and inclusion in open education research. To address these, I explore a concept of openness as ‘counter-enclosure’ and argue for the relevance of a cosmopolitical perspective on open education. I draw on Leonelli’s (2023) distinction between openness as sharing and openness as judicious connection in the context of open science. I use this as the basis of a framework which describes a cosmopolitical perspective on open education. The discussion considers this framework in relation to recent developments in the commons: notably generative artificial intelligence which challenges long established notions of copyright and commoning. I suggest that positioning openness as an active practice of resisting privatisation - rather than merely a commitment to transparency or accessibility - open education functions as a site of political contestation rather than passive inclusion in neoliberal economies of knowledge.
... Przekroczeniem prostego odrzucenia państwa narodowego jako warunku obywatelstwa ma być idea obywatelstwa transnarodowego -przynależności do więcej niż jednej wspólnot obywatelskich 52 . Stąd również rozumienie obywatelstwa jako dynamicznego i kontekstualnie określonego związku z różnymi wspólnotami: od dzielnicy po całą ludzkość 53 . Właśnie rozwój Unii Europejskiej i wykształcona w ten sposób kategoria obywatelstwa "europejskiego" dawać ma możliwość oparcia obywatelstwa na takiej płynnej tożsamości 54 . ...
The article concerns the understanding of citizenship as the social practice of filing claims for the legal status of a citizen, which is increasingly more common in contemporary political and legal thought. This idea implies that the criteria for granting civil rights are separated from the will of members of the political community that guarantees these rights: until now citizenship was understood as an attitude of commitment to a specific political community or as a legal status ensuring membership in this community, based on clear criteria and enabling protection of private interests. The new concept of citizenship can be found particularly in post-structuralist Marxism, the liberalism of equality and the political thought of the so-called ‘new social movements’: feminism, environmentalism and the queer movement. These trends call for deep transformations in the understanding of basic political ideas, including the idea of civic rights and civic community. At present, the status of a citizen and the related rights cease to be based on a criterion other than filing civil rights claims by an individual or a group of individuals. This concept has been described by Engin Isin and Carl Stychin. In this way, by separating citizenship from the will of a specific political community and its legal order, and thus reducing it to the practice of filing claims, the content of the idea of citizenship, which so far enabled the development of political bonds and the protection of individual interests, disappears.
... In two of her books, we witness a stance that draws its power from the positive consequences of globalization: observation, lack of judgement, and exchange of cultural information. Today's cosmopolitanism is situated on the axis of international education ) and cultural creativity (Pogge 1992, Held 2013. But the paradox is that the world has never been so unified and at the same time so divided ; this affirmation comprises the duality of contemporary cosmopolitanism: on the one hand, we experience the coexistence of local and global culture, and on the other hand, we sustain the preservation of local values despite our natural curiosity for the Other . ...
Section 1. Caitlin Doughty’s Cosmopolitanism in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and From There To Eternity: Cultural Conversation and Death Acceptance 1. Introduction This chapter is influenced by the cultural side of Caitlin Doughty’s discourse. And because we cannot separate it from the literary side, this section will provide explanations as to the way Doughty uses cosmopolitanism in two of her books, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity. Understanding the author’s attitude towards death is essential to comprehend what she wants to transmit to her readers. In the twenty-first century, cosmopolitanism acquires global proportions, especially in the context of present cultural and political changes (Pagden 1977; Beck 2012). To discuss death acceptance and phobia, we must look at cosmopolitanism from a certain angle: that of duality between local and general and, more precisely, that of conversation, as presented by Appiah (2006) and Jeffers (2013). This section aims to highlight the connection between the cosmopolitan attitude towards death and death practices and how Caitlin Doughty (2015, 2017) presents it as an essential element in the process of death acceptance with the help of cultural conversation. In two of her books, we witness a stance that draws its power from the positive consequences of globalization: observation, lack of judgement, and exchange of cultural information. Today’s cosmopolitanism is situated on the axis of international education (Gunesch 2004) and cultural creativity (Pogge 1992, Held 2013). But the paradox is that the world has never been so unified and at the same time so divided (Boia 2000); this affirmation comprises the duality of contemporary cosmopolitanism: on the one hand, we experience the coexistence of local and global culture, and on the other hand, we sustain the preservation of local values despite our natural curiosity for the Other (Appiah 2006). This duality plays a massive part in understanding the death rituals of other cultures without expressing any judgement when some might appear absurd to us. When we are locked in our own cultural bubble, everything outside of it is odd. When we pop it, it takes time to adjust to the novelty of something never encountered before in the modern world, such as choosing to be buried in a piece of cloth under a tree. These are the times we are living right now: of self-awareness, discovery, and bubble popping.
O cosmopolitismo assenta no princípio liberal do igualitarismo moral, ou seja, na noção da igual dignidade moral de cada ser humano. Simultaneamente, o liberalismo, enquanto movimento histórico e político, concretiza-se no Estado enquanto agente e representante de comunidades políticas que exercem o seu poder soberano dentro das fronteiras nacionais. Os Estados funcionam, portanto, com base na exclusão dos não cidadãos. O igualitarismo moral questiona, no entanto, o “significado moral” das fronteiras e, consequentemente, a diferença entre nacionais e estrangeiros. Neste artigo, analisa-se este “dilema liberal”, considerando-se as argumentações de quem defende o “direito de excluir” e concluindo-se que pode haver um interesse legítimo em proteger “bens” nacionais, materiais e imateriais, e que esse interesse justifica o controlo do acesso ao território nacional, mas não fundamenta o “direito de excluir”.
Section 1. Digital Death: Expanding The Death-Positive Narrative Online 1. Introduction Undoubtedly, the ways in which we communicate and receive information are undergoing a significant transformation. With the digital age in full swing, we can expect even more advancements in technology in the future. Content creators of all kinds have adapted to these changes and have learned how to take advantage of them to their benefit. Caitlin Doughty is an author who has embraced the opportunities that multimodality and digitalization offers. Her YouTube channel and podcast are excellent examples of how writers can transition their work into something more interactive and engaging for a younger audience that is accustomed to this mode of communication. By combining various elements such as the written word, illustrations, audio-visual components, and a robust digital community, Doughty has created a web of multimodal elements that are impossible to undo. Her passion for her work and ideas are evident in her death-positive manifestos, which form a crucial part of this community. Without her dedication, this community would not have been as well-defined as it is today. Multimodality is an unavoidable element that we ought to interact with during our digital age. It encompasses a wide range of modes used to transmit information, no matter the topic chosen by the digital creator. However, writers can also be creators and use their texts as inspiration to build extensions of their work for a more impactful encounter with the reader/viewer. One example is Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, and death positivity activist, who uses creative nonfiction to express her beliefs about the modern individual’s increasing death phobia and how we can fight it. She is not only a writer but also a YouTube creator. Her videos and her written discourse mirror each other perfectly, and readers/viewers take on these two roles interchangeably. This section aims to show in what ways the written text and the YouTube videos resemble, where the two intersect, and how they impact the readership/viewership regarding death positivity. The importance of this study can be seen in the way in which social media and digital modes are now used by activists to grow the popularity of cultural movements and to transmit their manifestos to a large mass of people.
Transvestite condition is one of the major markers in Salman Rushdie’s “The Golden House” set in the City of New York. As a genuine hub of cosmopolitan culture, there is myth that the City accommodates easy living for people irrespective of where they hail from or what class and gender they belong to. People coming from different parts of the globe forming a mixed set up in the socio-cultural pattern seem to have greater assimilative and accommodative space in cosmopolitan culture. However, such naïve expectation meets a serious jolt as the members of the Golden family arrive at the city to undo their traumatic past experiences relating to the deadly 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, but in vain. The situation turns out worst as D Golden’s transvestite condition comes up. This paper strives to study the cosmopolitan myth of accommodative behaviourism and find out whether the cosmopolitan society is still languishing under gender stereotyping that Rushdie strives to deconstruct in the novel
The concept of the person is ubiquitously used in international theory, most prominently to attribute a certain character to human beings and states. While it features in discussions of how best to analyze state behavior, as well as being essential in characterizing human beings and states as subjects of international law, it is also used to answer one of international theory’s core normative questions: who in the world of international relations deserves moral consideration? This article highlights a central problem with how this concept is used in normative international theory. It argues that, since it is used to ground the moral standing of both human beings and states, it becomes remarkably difficult to deny that they should be recognized as one another’s equals, which means that normative international theorists will also find it exceedingly challenging to defend the moral priority of one over the other. The main upshot of this argument is twofold. Demonstrating the flaws of the main attempts to escape this impasse, the article establishes a serious problem with one of the main conceptual tools in the toolkit of normative international theory. But since the normatively untenable state of the equality between human beings and states only follows from the dependence upon this concept, the article also showcases where an escape route should more plausibly begin. The article thus ends by suggesting how normative international theory can free itself from its dependence on the concept of the person.
This article updates Skolimowski's ecological humanism with the recent insights of Jonas, Sloterdijk, and Latour's environmental ethics. The first section details Jonas' reform of Kant's deontology with a call not to universalize, but to ecologize. Next, I introduce Sloterdijk's theory of general immunology as a basis for Skolimowski's ecohumanism. Ecological humanism attempts to address the demands of the twenty-first century anthropocenic crisis. By extension, Latour's ecological class consciousness is a response to the rise of green party movements and is treated in the third section. We cannot save the planet without working toward saving ourselves-we culprits on trial for continual mistreatment of Gaia. While eco-philosophy establishes eschatological meaning without the imperative of any messianic mission, restorative justice is at the heart of ecological humanism's reverential thinking. The focus on spiritual and ethical development establishes a reverential ethics through projects of healing, wherein the task of philosophy is to overcome attitudes of well-entrenched blindness.