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Exploring disjuncture: elite students’ use of cosmopolitanism
Abstract
This paper addresses current debates around elites, education and cosmopolitanism. It studies disjuncture (and interaction) between cosmopolitan practices and aspirations on the basis of 24 interviews with international students at a British elite university. Specifically, the article discusses four cases of elite students’ use of cosmopolitanism by drawing on Ann Swidler’s concepts of ‘strategies of action’ and her distinction between ‘unsettled’ and ‘settled’ lives. The case studies demonstrate that individuals, who find themselves in an unsettled phase of their life, may mobilise cosmopolitanism either to set themselves new life goals or to closely examine their lives. In settled lives, cosmopolitanism may be integrated in established strategies of action but it may also be used to (rhetorically) defend a stable orientation. This typology of four different ways of using cosmopolitanism complements previous research by exploring in depth the various forms in which ambivalences of students’ engagements with cosmopolitanism may arise.
... Likewise, it has been indicated that the cosmopolitanism of youth may encompass an understanding of citizenship as rights and responsibilities directed towards a global community (Hoikkala, 2009). Moreover, Fangen (2007) has shown in her study of young adult Somalis in Norway that notions of responsibility as global citizens may become specifically salient in the transition to adulthood (see also Piwoni, 2018). ...
... The data I am drawing on in my study derives from an interview project conducted with 20 international and 4 British students at a highly ranked, elite international university in Great Britain (see also Piwoni, 2018). The university is highly academically selective. ...
This article addresses debates on the relationship between elite cosmopolitanism and localism through the study of young elite cosmopolitans’ rationales in the context of talking about their future lives. Drawing on interviews with 24 students at an elite university, the article delineates three types of cosmopolitan meaning-making. Students embracing the first type talked about their cosmopolitanism in terms of individually chosen actions. They said they did not feel obliged to their nation but to their family; most of them had sought a career abroad. Students embracing the idea of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (second type) stated that they wanted to make their home country a better place, not least because of their family’s mediating influence. They said they wanted to return home, as did those students who combined a sense of solidarity with humans around the globe with a longing for familiarity (third type). Implications for cosmopolitanism and youth studies are discussed.
... In a globalised world where students are free to pursue study overseas there has been rapid growth in competition between the global middle class (GMC) for educational experiences that confer social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990(Bourdieu , 1999 and secure access to elite employment opportunities. In the contemporary era of globalisation, cosmopolitanism has been recognised as a form of cultural capital and a social practice that can be reproduced through international student mobility (ISM) and is valued in elite careers (Igarashi and Saito 2014;Nicolopoulou et al. 2016;Piwoni 2020). Cosmopolitanism is in its broadest sense conceptualised in this paper as an openness to the foreign and others (Beck 2006). ...
In this paper, I develop the idea of cosmopolitan stances – one ‘intellectual’ and the other ‘aesthetic’ – to examine conceptions of cosmopolitanism within a range of university strategies. Recent research into cosmopolitanism has adopted a Bourdieusian lens, understanding it as cultural capital, which acts as a locus of stratification in the global system. By examining the strategies in 11 London-based universities, this paper sought to identify which cosmopolitan stances are mobilised. Following a thematic analysis this paper argues that those stances privileged by the global middle class are often implicit and generated incidentally as a function of other initiatives such as inclusivity and diversity, global citizenship, placement opportunities and graduate attributes/outcomes.
Social and geopolitical disruptions triggered by the COVID‐19 crisis have raised crucial questions about the shifting meaning of race, citizenship, and nationality for transborder migrants amidst receding globalization, hardening borders, and geopolitical tensions. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Chinese international students have viewed and negotiated their ambiguous racial and ethnonational position between nations during the global pandemic. Drawing on 16 student interviews at one upstate New York campus between 2019 and 2021, we argue that Chinese international students have occupied a liminal space between nations that shapes their understanding of race and racism through a distinctly geopolitical lens. Double‐edged exclusion and discrimination from both the US and China during the global pandemic have heightened their sense of social dislocation and withdrawal from nationalist politics in both countries. In the process, they have not so much surrendered the cosmopolitan ideals that motivated their migration but rather, reimagined them while maintaining a delicate balance between global cosmopolitan ideals and ethnonationalist loyalties. Our findings provide insights into the future political trajectory of Chinese transborder migrants amid tense US–China relations and help to explain the contradictions of diasporic Chinese worldviews on current affairs.
A growing number of studies on students’ intercultural interactions and learning in higher education contexts have placed cosmopolitanism and agency at the centre of conceptual and empirical inquiry. The concept of ‘cosmopolitan agency’ has been proposed as a hallmark of intercultural relationships, such as friendships, between international and domestic university students, which are found difficult to develop in many countries. However, the literature has not established the conditions necessary for the (non-)emergence of this student agency. This paper fills this knowledge gap by presenting an ecological and person-in-context conceptual framework of cosmopolitan agency in intercultural student interactions on campus and beyond. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature (e.g. higher education, psychology, sociology, cosmopolitanism, urban and disability studies), the paper submits a theoretical proposal that cosmopolitan agency (as present practice) emerges at the dynamic experiential interface between cosmopolitan capital (as an individual resource built on past experience) and affordances in convivial proximity (as the environment triggering future projection). This proposal is elaborated through the empirical illustration of four (i.e. amicable, critical, latent and inactive) states of cosmopolitan agency that manifest different forms of intercultural interactions. The paper is expected to advance theoretical inquiry into the issues of power, privilege, morality and reflexivity in students’ engagement in intercultural interactions, and to support a third option for interactions between passive presence and fully-fledged relationships. The directions for future conceptual and empirical research that are ultimately expected to serve for the improvement of student experience are also provided.
This study focuses on analyzing the acculturation of Chinese international students in Canada, emphasizing students' post-graduation settlement in China, Canada, or in other countries. Chinese international students commonly experience a multilayered acculturative adjustment when they are challenged by a new culture. In this process, they develop an identity negotiation that impacts their settlement into a new country. This study mobilizes four notions of acculturation (e.g., assimilation, integration, marginalization, and separation), to evaluate Chinese international students’ identity negotiation after university. This research uses 17 semi-structured interviews to understand how participants' identities were negotiated through their acculturative adjustment. First, the findings highlight the importance of career factors and family values in participants' settlement decisions. Second, the balance between Chinese identity and Canadian identity has some impact on student’s migration plans.
The valorization of humanity and diversity are ongoing global processes that pose new challenges to nationalism and the mono cultural narrative once favored in schools and universities. This paper focuses on an exploratory analysis of textbooks, indicating a growth of cosmopolitan and multicultural emphases. Students are increasingly exposed to world issues and international initiatives calling for greater global citizenship consciousness. Students are also further exposed to a depiction of their own societies as ones filled with validated diversity along many dimensions.
Recently there has been a shift in the discourses of university policy from internationalisation towards the contested concept of global citizenship. This paper explores ways of challenging the current interpretation of international education policy through the concept of global citizenship drawing on the discussion forums of two cohorts of participants in an online course. The participants’ responses illustrate ways they are rethinking the purpose of international higher education and the relevance of the concept of global citizenship. Whilst most participants whole-heartedly endorsed a more holistic view of higher education, several issues were raised, especially the fit of the ideal of global citizenship with a capitalist society and the Western heritage of the concept, which were perceived to be troublesome issues. Resistance to the inclusion of education for global citizenship was anticipated from institutions and disciplines, both heavily invested in the status quo. The academics’ personal beliefs about higher education, and their willingness and potential to design and deliver curriculum for global citizenship were also prominent. Although universities are beginning to include the term global citizen in their policy documents the extent to which this might influence the goals and curricula of higher education is yet to be realised.
This article explores the complex relationship between transnational elites and civil society through examining the contrasting orientations of two cohorts of ‘elite graduates’ from Paris and Oxford. Both cohorts believe their privileged status has been earned through hard work and ability. But they are also aware that they have benefited from advantages not available to all. Perhaps because of this, they express the need to ‘give something back’. However, the means through which they seek to discharge their social responsibilities are very different. While the Oxford graduates seek to ‘give something back’ through volunteering and third sector engagement, the Paris graduates will ‘give something back’ through public service. The article discusses how the contrasting relationship between the state, civil society and the education system in these two countries may shape dispositions, and speculates on the extent to which these elite recruits’ commitment to ‘give something back’ will make a difference.
In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. We then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities.
Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques.
The literature on cosmopolitanism has mushroomed in the past decade or more as attempts are made to theorise new patterns of mobility, interactions between previously distant social groups and the emergence of institutions to manage these processes. In this paper, I build on the arguments of those who have emphasised the strategic aspects and temporal dimensions of cosmopolitan expressions and practices, by focusing on the resources and constraints that different actors operate with, or under, and, as a result, the varying commitments they have to different ‘others’. Using this type of grounded approach, a number of Illustrative examples from a study of social identities in England are then analysed and used to theorise cosmopolitanism, as a perspective that is periodically articulated, in relation to specific needs, contexts or prompts, rather than being an inherent property of particular individuals, groups or situations.
The cosmopolitan has re-emerged as a popular figure within the social sciences, primarily as a means of addressing (the potential for) new forms of experience and sociability in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. Investigations into practical or everyday cosmopolitanism have been useful in grounding some of the more theoretical of these debates but problems remain in terms of both defining and operationalizing the concept. The first section of the paper briefly addresses some key theoretical debates. In the second section, attention is focused on methodological issues, with regard to both data collection and interpretation. In particular, I suggest a move beyond labelling people and practices as cosmopolitan and, instead, emphasize the contradictory and rhetorical aspects of these engagements, drawing on empirical data. In this way, the temporal, conditional and often fragile aspects of such ‘cosmopolitan’ practices can be foregrounded.
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge, and hubs connecting multiple institutional domains. Bringing these lines of scholarship together facilitates new theoretical insights and research questions.
The paper is a broad, comparative investigation of shifts in the educational rhetoric and policy of three countries over the past two decades. Using England, Canada and the United States as case studies, I argue that the spirit of multiculturalism in education has shifted from a concern with the formation of tolerant and democratic national citizens who can work with and through difference, to a more strategic use of diversity for competitive advantage in the global marketplace. This shift is directly linked with and helps to facilitate the entrenchment of neoliberalism as it supports a privatization agenda, reduces the costs of social reproduction for the government, and aids in the constitution of subjects oriented to individual survival and/or success in the global economy.
This article evaluates cosmopolitan theory by exploring how parents perceive cosmopolitanism. Interviews with parents whose children attend an internationalized form of education revealed that parents viewed cosmopolitanism as a form of cultural and social capital, rather than feelings of global connectedness or curiosity in the Other. Dedicated cosmopolitan parents were distinguished from pragmatic cosmopolitans.The former taught their children to explore the world and to take a global perspective on their course of life, while the latter thought that globalizing processes required cosmopolitan competencies. Analyses of survey data showed that parents' inclination to provide children with cosmopolitan capital was related to their own cosmopolitan capital and their level of ambitions, but not to their social class position. The article concludes that cosmopolitanism should be viewed as an expression of agency, which is acted out when people are forced to deal with processes of globalization.
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002) 869-897
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
—Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Robert Burns (1820)
—Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000)
On September 11, terrorists crashing jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon struck a blow against cosmopolitanism—perhaps more successfully than against their obvious symbolic targets, the unequal structures of global capitalism and political power. They precipitated a renewal of state-centered politics and a "war on terrorism" seeking military rather than law enforcement solutions to crime. Moved by Wahabbi Islamic Puritanism and sheltered by Afghanistan's Taliban, they seemed to exemplify a simplistic opposition between backward traditionalists and Western modernism. That Muslims had long been stereotyped as the bad other to globalization only made it easier for Westerners to accept this dubious framing of the events, and made it harder for them to see a clash between different modernist projects, to miss the evidently popular message that "technology can be our weapon too."
One need be no friend to terrorism to be sorry that the dominant response to the terrorist attacks has been framed as a matter of war rather than crime, an attack on America rather than an attack on humanity. What could have been an occasion for renewing the drive to establish an international criminal court and multilateral institutions needed for law enforcement quickly became an occasion for America to demonstrate its power and its allies to fall in line with the "war on terrorism." Militarism gained and civil society lost not only on September 11 but in the response that followed. This was true domestically as well as internationally, as the United States and other administrations moved to sweep aside protections for the rights of citizens and immigrants alike and strengthen the state in pursuit of "security."
In this context, the cosmopolitan ideals articulated during the 1990s seem all the more attractive but their realization much less immanent. It is important not only to mourn this, but to ask in what ways the cosmopolitan vision itself was limited—overoptimistic, perhaps, more attentive to certain prominent dimensions of globalization than to equally important others. In the wake of the cold war, it seemed to many political theorists and public actors that the moment had finally arrived not just for Kantian perpetual peace but for cosmopolitanism to extend beyond mere tolerance to the creation of a shared global democracy. It seemed easy to denigrate states as old-fashioned authorities of waning influence and to extol the virtues of international civil society. It was perhaps a weakness of this perspective that the myriad dimensions of globalization all seemed evidence of the need for a more cosmopolitan order, and therefore the tensions among them were insufficiently examined. Likewise, the cosmopolitanism of democratic activists was not always clearly distinct from that of global corporate leaders, though the latter would exempt corporate property from democratic control. Just as protesters against the World Trade Organization (WTO) often portrayed themselves as "antiglobalization," even though they formed a global social movement, advocates of cosmopolitan institutions often sounded simply proglobalization rather than sufficiently discriminating among its forms.
In a sense, the noncosmopolitan side of globalization struck back on September 11. Migrants whose visions of their home cultures were more conservative and ideological than the originals figured prominently. Indeed, most of the terrorists were Arabs who had spent considerable time studying in the West—even at seemingly cosmopolitan Oxford, in the case of Osama bin Laden. A dark side to globalization was brought to light: criminal activity and flows of weapons, people, ideas, money, and drugs that challenged state authority but...
This paper explores the thesis that models of post-national societies and global citizenship are on the rise and that these models have important educational implications. We examine changing portraits of citizens, states, and societies in school textbooks around the world. We find that in general, textbooks are increasingly more student-centered, more environmentalist in focus, and contain more human rights emphases, but are only modestly more likely to stress diversity. This is particularly true for social studies and civics textbooks in comparison to history textbooks. We further find these changing emphases co-vary with each other: textbooks that emphasize student empowerment and active learning are also more likely to stress human rights and an ecological approach to the environment. What these global trends and cross-national findings suggest is that students are increasingly exposed to a world that involves the reframing of local matters as global issues, the activation of global or transnational citizenship, and the construction of the environment as globally interconnected. Changes in the institutional content of higher education parallel the changes in the intended curricula of lower schooling. We discuss these developments as linked to the universalistic authority of science and education. We also discuss these developments as a challenge to solely nationalist models and ideologies.
Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status, yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why. Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America's most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent-what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it-that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents. Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.
This study contributes to the growing research on everyday cosmopolitanism in diverse societies. We employ a cosmopolitan encounters framework to explore the reflexive openness people perform and the ethical reasoning they draw on to get along with each other. In particular, we look beyond pleasurable cosmopolitan pursuits to consider encounters that cause frictions or require notable efforts to bridge differences as an occasion for cosmopolitan conviviality. Based on qualitative interviews conducted in Australia, we aim to sharpen the demarcation between cosmopolitan encounters and those in which diversity is strategically negotiated by enacting practices of civility. We argue that cosmopolitanism emerges from interactions in encounters between individuals when they reflect on their positionality within unequal power relationships and their actions are guided by a cosmopolitan ethics. The ethical framework we propose is grounded in reflexive acts of sharing going beyond notions of giving and performing hospitality within a host/guest dyad.
How does cosmopolitanism emerge in regions characterised by diversity and difference? This article examines the ways parents living in Silicon Valley, California seek to realise, maintain and manage ‘cultural and political multiplicities’ in their efforts to create cosmopolitan environments and sociality for their children and families. Grappling with the tension between cultivating academic achievement and cosmopolitan sociability, I explore how parents create opportunities for cosmopolitanism experiences and spaces, moving away from schooling towards education through international travel and philanthropy. The article reflects upon the challenges parents face as they attempt to realise their good intentions, ideas and attitudes to facilitate cosmopolitan sociability in a region where diversity is located in everyday interactions and encounters. I conclude by drawing connections between changing practices and how structural constraints influence parents’ approaches to cultivating cosmopolitanism over time.
Recent scholarly conceptualisations of cosmopolitanism have often distinguished between mundane practices on the one hand and a conscious assertion of an ethical project on the other hand. But this kind of distinction may be less a matter of the simple presence or absence of a particular kind of consciousness than of the degree of self-awareness as well as of the consonance or disjuncture between this consciousness and what can actually be realised in practice. In this article I take up some of these questions of degree and disjuncture to reflect on the interaction between aspirations and circumscribed experiences occurring among two sets of Canadian travellers: (i) consultants whose specialisation in international projects involves frequent stays abroad, and (ii) young adults who have taken up opportunities for an extended stay abroad afforded by university exchanges or working holidaymakers programs.
Within the interdisciplinary literature on cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction stands out as a recurring motif. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists, this distinction between aspiration and practice is often rendered ambiguous across the diverse expressions of cosmopolitanism that they encounter ‘on the ground’. This special issue therefore brings together five contributions from anthropologists who are reporting on encounters and aspirations that reveal different forms of spatial mobility, scales of commitment or risk, and are often transient, ambivalent and precarious. These are circumstances in which cosmopolitanism emerges as uneven and partial rather than as a comprehensive or unequivocal transformation of practice and outlook.
Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.
This study aims to understand Korean students’ motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in‐depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research‐centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push–pull model of transnational higher education choice‐making, this study situates Korean students’ aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge‐degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students’ qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students’ aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously.
Theoretical concepts of cosmopolitanism suggest new forms of societal and political organization.Yet these notions are overwhelmingly normative and hardly specify the ways in which cosmopolitanism is constructed from`below'.To what extent are people cosmopolitan and who are they? In following the debate on cosmopolitanization we offer a case study of Europe in which we provide grounding for `global' forms of identification. Using the recent Eurobarometer 64.2 (European Commission, 2005),`global belonging' is juxtaposed with attitudes and perceptions of the European Union, describing theoretically claimed openness and recognition of difference.We find that a considerable proportion of Europeans see themselves as what could be called cosmopolitan.These views are, however, socially stratified and do not necessarily go hand in hand with open-mindedness. To conclude, the social reality of cosmopolitanism is ambiguous: substantive European cosmopolitanism exists next to more banal forms, but forms of non-cosmopolitanism should not be underestimated.
Conceptions of the transition to adulthood were examined using data from 346 college students aged 18-23 and 140 21 - to 28-year-olds. Participants indicated the characteristics necessary for a person to be considered an adult on a questionnaire containing 40 possible criteria. In both studies, the top criteria endorsed emphasized aspects of individualism, including “accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions,”“decide on own beliefs and values independently of parents or other influences,” and “establish a relationship with parents as an equal adult.” In contrast, role transitions typically associated with research on the transition to adulthood, such as finishing education, entering the labor force, marriage, and parenthood, were rejected as criteria for adulthood by a large majority in both studies. The results suggest that the current generation of young people in American society conceptualizes the transition to adulthood in intangible, gradual, psychological, and individualistic terms.
This article explores the experiences and perspectives on citizenship in an international, global context of 30 Brazilian, Chinese, and Italian graduate students studying in the United States, with special emphasis on their understandings of the geographic reach of their personal and professional rights and responsibilities. International graduate students face critical choices about their own role in the world: as future leaders in their professions, as political actors, voters, taxpayers, activists, and as key players in local, national, and global economies, they must determine the types of work they will undertake and the kinds of social changes they will seek to effect, if any. (Contains 1 table and 13 footnotes.)
According to Žižek (1997) the logic of late capitalism offers opportunities for the incorporation of previously marginalised groups, whilst simultaneously dividing them at the same time. These possibilities for incorporation create divisions on the basis of gender, race, sexuality and class. Here, we examine how the capitalist desire for opening new markets for leisure consumption with new forms of branding, alongside the desire for the territorialisation of space by campaigning gay and lesbian groups, has led to the formation of a ‘gay space’ marketed as a cosmopolitan spectacle, in which the central issue becomes a matter of access and knowledge: who can use, consume and be consumed in gay space? We also ask what is the radical political impetus of sexual politics when commodified as cosmopolitan and incorporated spatially? The paper grounds the examination of the politics of cosmopolitanism within a specific locality drawing upon research undertaken on the contested use of space within Manchester's gay village. The paper is organised into four sections. The first examines competing definitions of cosmopolitanism, exploring how sexuality and class are framed as conceptual limits. The second describes how Manchester's gay village is imagined and branded as cosmopolitan. The third considers the navigation and negotiation of difference within this space. The final section evaluates the exclusions from cosmopolitan space and pursues the significance of this for arguments about incorporation in late capitalism.
In this essay, I respond to Vaisey’s arguments on culture and cognition, noting our points of agreement and disagreement and posing new ideas for future research.
Despite diverse understandings of cosmopolitanism, most authors agree that cosmopolitans espouse a broadly defined disposition of ‘openness’ toward others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non-local. It is argued that such an attitude is expressed by an emotional and ethical commitment towards universalism, selflessness, worldliness and communitarianism, and that such values should be identifiable in the practices, attitudes and identifications of individuals. By using data generated through qualitative focus group research, this paper extends the development of Lamont and Aksartova's (2002) category of ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’. The participants in this study saw themselves as beneficiaries of an increasingly interconnected world, and they generally expressed cosmopolitan sentiments by referring to easily accepted opportunities associated with globalisation (eg. travel, cuisine, music) rather than the more difficult aspects of openness such as showing hospitality to strangers, or accepting human interest ahead of perceived national interests. Their positive views were counterbalanced, however, by sentiments of ‘dilution of national culture’ and ‘culture loss’. We argue that cosmopolitanism is a set of structurally grounded, discursive resources available to social actors which is variably deployed to deal with issues like cultural diversity, the global, and otherness. Ironically these discourses, which are the basis of the everyday accounts we describe, mirror academic debates on globalisation, suggesting the immersion of theorists in these discursive webs of meaning that structure responses to things global.
Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.
- Schissler H.