Magdelena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco (eds), Cosmopolitanism in Practice

摘要

The conceptual differentiation between locals and cosmopolitans first made by Robert Merton remains the basis of one way of thinking about cosmopolitanism. It is of course more than an elastic social category, for cosmopolitanism is also prescriptive, marking out certain desired or idealized values, perspectives, outlooks, identities. The chapters in this collection explore these through empirically grounded research. The first section looks at how mobility and interconnectivity shape the cosmopolitan identities of particular groups, and suggests that cosmopolitanism is best conceived as a form of imagination developed in transnational contexts rather than a necessary feature of mobile people. The next section deals with the changing meanings of cosmopolitanism and the historical grounding of past and present cosmopolitanisms. The focus is on how the cosmopolitan imagination functions as a cultural resource in and over time, and the discursive framing of cosmopolitan memory.