Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2010. / Thesis directed by Jackie Smith for the Department of Sociology. "April 2010." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-66).

The ways in which individuals navigate the globe today complicates previous conceptualizations of migration and mobility. Once such mode of contemporary movement which challenges scholars is known as "birth tourism." This research considers birth tourism to be a form of "lifestyle migration," which I label aspirational migration. By analyzing the motivations which drive many parents to give birth abroad, I shed light on the complex and risky process, which involves a host of players, including family, friends, and a global birth tourism infrastructure. Through this drawn-out process, which begins well before the decision to give birth abroad and continues into the distant future, I argue that birth tourists and their foreign-born children become aspirational migrants and acquire cosmopolitan capital.

This thesis examines the media-foreign policy nexus through a specific focus on the moral framing of conflict and interventionism within British media and policy discourses. While morality has been identified as a frequently used frame through which we may understand issues, there has been little extant discussion of the nature of morality embedded within media texts, or how it may shape understanding and policy-making. This research contributes to this void through forwarding cosmopolitan morality framing as a new theoretical framework. Consideration is given to how appeals to a cosmopolitan moral consciousness can resonate and build support for or legitimise particular foreign policies. The thesis further explores how cosmopolitan morality framing may work simultaneously to perpetuate uneven relations through constructed ‘othering’. Ontologically, the research adopts a social constructivist foundation and hermeneutical methodology, utilising frame analysis from the broader interpretivist tradition of discourse analysis as well as a holistic conceptualisation of the media. Data collection is spread across both traditional ‘mainstream’ and ‘new’ media, comprising print, online and social media sources. The sources examined include the British daily newspapers, The Guardian and The Times, the digital news site BBC News Online, and the global social media outlet Twitter. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) provides a regional focus to the research, with three recent conflicts in Libya, Syria and Iraq utilised as empirical case studies. The research focuses on specific ten day periods within each conflict to produce a snapshot of media frames and policy reaction. These periods include; the advance of pro-Gaddafi forces on Benghazi, Libya (9-19 March 2011), the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta, Syria (21-31 August 2013), and the siege of Sinjar by Islamic State forces in Iraq (3-13 August 2014). The research finds that notions of cosmopolitan morality are embedded within media/policy discourses to varying degrees, but are extremely significant when coupled with the cognitive and temporal capacity to impede crisis escalation.

This thesis explores the themes of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism through the prism of ‘care' – a term which is used here in reference to Hannah Arendt's notion of ‘care for the world'. It presents both a theory of a ‘caring forgiveness' and a ‘caring cosmopolitanism,' two world-centric theories of political action conceptualized from a reconsideration of Jacques Derrida's and Arendt's respective bodies of thought. Additionally, this thesis illustrates how a caring forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are practices that introduce new beginnings into the public realm of the political, effectively allowing people(s) to negotiate the temporal gap between past and future by facilitating their nonviolent and non-instrumental transition through time. Although there is a tendency in (global) politics to react violently as a means of re-establishing hierarchical dynamics of power in the (international) political arena, a caring forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are two forms of praxis which cultivate new action instead of perpetuating – in an automatic manner – pernicious cycles of violence. Accordingly, forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are worldly practices that can be said to care for the doing of political action in a manner that does not merely react to past occurrences of (violent) wrongdoing. This thesis consequently demonstrates how forgiveness and cosmopolitanism ‘care for the world' by ensuring that political actors continue to possess the capacity to initiate new action(s) and to develop freely new plot lines in the ever unfolding meta-narrative of human history.

This thesis fills a gap in the political philosophy of liberalism by elaborating the conceptions of the human subject implicit in a central ideal of liberalism. The essence of that ideal is that fortuitous facts about an individual – one’s race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation – ought not to determine one’s life chances. This ideal, I maintain, presupposes a philosophical anthropology. Tacit but essential in this presupposition is that contingency and vulnerability are ineliminable features of the human condition. One of the central aspirations of liberalism is to construct a world in which fortuitous facts about an individual do not determine the individual’s prospects of having a flourishing and dignified life. This thesis argues that a close scrutiny of leading theories of liberal justice reveals that the indisputable fact of human vulnerability is regularly depicted as peripheral. I contend that the marginal depiction of vulnerability in liberalism constitutes a basic problem in the philosophical anthropology implicit in liberalism. I demonstrate this claim by analysing three broad models of philosophical anthropology that can be uncovered in liberal theories and that are the subjects of this study: the Economic Model, as exemplified in Rawls among others, the Sociological Model, exemplified in Will Kymlicka and theorists focusing on cultural concerns, and the Integrationist Model, occurring in at least two somewhat contrasting versions, one by Martha Nussbaum and one by Kwame Anthony Appiah. I argue that the Economic and Sociological Models are in some ways inconsistent with the motifs of contingency and human vulnerability. Unlike the two other models, the Integrationist Model, I argue, is compatible with the motifs of the ideal of liberalism insofar as this Model portrays human beings as vulnerable subjects, as a consequence of universal features of humanity but also of specific features associated with a legitimate degree of local rootedness and partiality. The thesis thus argues by way of the Integrationist Model that liberal cosmopolitanism furnishes liberalism with a matching philosophical anthropology. The overall aim of the thesis is to counter the tendency in an array of liberal theorists to ignore or deny the need for an underlying philosophical anthropology and ultimately to elaborate the essentials of the requisite conception.

The 'Cosmopolitan Play' is used as a metaphor to reflect the multiple contexts and ways that people act and play with the 'other' in the contemporary global era. The study expands the cosmopolitan perspective by questioning a widely held assumption in much of the existing literature that cosmopolitanism and a 'cosmopolitan stance' (Hannerz 1990) - an openness and willingness to engage with the 'other' - is associated with mobile people. This assumption has led to three dimensions being mainly ignored in the literature, these are: 1) a 'middle group' of movers that are neither mobile elites nor displaced people, 2) the significance of non-movers, and 3) temporality. Rather than defining the cosmopolitan stance as an elite identity, in this study it is seen as the reflexive contestation of essentialised identities formed around social boundaries such as those based on nationality, social class, ethnicity, religion and so forth (Jones 2007). Hence, the overarching research question posed is how may someone evolve a cosmopolitan stance? To answer this, a biographical network approach was developed to analyse in tandem the life stories and ego-networks of 28 non-elite young (aged 23-35) British and Spanish movers and non-movers living in Madrid and Manchester in terms of their cosmopolitan conviviality - the extent and quality of personal relationships initiated and maintained through face-to-face social interaction with others that are objectively different. The approach follows three axes of investigation: convivial horizons (x), people's social interactions across national boundaries; convivial depths (y), people's social interactions across social class, ethnic, religious and other social boundaries, within and across national boundaries; and convivial paths (z), the wider biographical contexts of people's interactions. The study's findings lend support to the critique of equating mobility with cosmopolitanism (Glick Schiller et al. 2011), yet they show that mobility inside and outside national boundaries together with subsequent settlement is influential for whether people not only transcend social boundaries, but also contest them. Additionally, while nationality, class, gender and so forth shape the parameters of people's cosmopolitan conviviality and the articulation thereof, they were not seen as decisive in the openness and willingness of people to engage with the 'other'. Instead, a life path that demanded the negotiation of uncertainty and unfamiliarity from an early age due to either familial problems or difficulties of fitting in at school or the wider 'home' environment was influential in the evolution of a more cosmopolitan convivial stance. The intersection of each axis culminates in a three dimensional view which shows how someone evolves one of four broad but distinctive convivial spheres and stances: national, metropolitan, trans-national and cosmopolitan. The theoretical underpinnings of the biographical network approach enable more complexity and detail of the cosmopolitan play to be captured, which in turn enhances the cosmopolitan perspective. The study illustrates how methods can be mixed in a qualitatively driven way (Mason 2006), and demonstrates the added value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in network analysis (Crossley 2010, Edwards 2010, Hollstein 2011).

Cosmopolitanism, a philosophy and ethical system that focuses on the sameness of humanity as a characteristic of identification, could hold a wealth of answers for normative political questions. What new type of political life would be possible if the individual internalizes cosmopolitan sentiment, and could an internalization of cosmopolitanism result in positive institutional change? This work explores the history of and theoretical arguments for and against cosmopolitanism to propose a concise and useable definition. Additionally, by comparing the individual cosmopolitan sentiment within nations against those nations’ international actions, such as ratification of human rights declarations and approval of non-compulsory jurisdiction, it searches for the connection between the cosmopolitan individual and a state’s cosmopolitan vision in the political world.

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The central question of my dissertation is “How can we play for our wellbeing?” followed by sub-questions, including “Why is play important to human-being?” “How shall we characterize the notion of play?” “How could play benefit philosophy, art, and education?” I investigate the questions through philosophical research that draws upon the existing literature in the fields of Hermeneutics, Cosmopolitanism, and the philosophies of education about play, philosophy, and education. I argue that play is a joyful aspect of experience that can potentially teach us an aesthetic manner of embracing differences and possibilities, especially concerning our individual growth and engagement in social interactions. To show this, I propose that play orients the player into seeing, thinking, and being differently towards a larger harmony or a fuller being. The player will be driven to respect others and accommodate differences with wonder and hospitality. Meantime, the educative play with its playful spirit can enhance the culture of justice and beauty essential to building a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable human inhabitation.

In 1922 Carl Van Doren noticed that a revolt from the village was taking place in modern American writing, especially when it came to the midwestern United States. According to Van Doren, where James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington’s local color humor made the small-town Midwest the celebrated center of American values in the late nineteenth century, writers like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis used modern literary techniques like realism and symbolism to make the region a peripheral site of resistance to the forces of urban-industrialization and globalization that were reshaping U.S. culture and society in the early twentieth century. Since the 1920s, this assessment of the Midwest’s cultural parochialism has reinforced conceptions of the region’s political provincialism, which emerged thanks to regional politicians’ like Minnesota governor Joseph Burnquist and senator Frank B. Kellogg’s efforts to privilege domestic issues and local concerns over foreign affairs. As a result of this parochial reputation, the region has been largely overlooked in studies of U.S. literary modernism, which is typically associated with metropolitan centers and transnational exchange. By attending to Cather and Lewis’s representations of the transnational communities and economies that structured the Midwest’s growth in the Progressive era, this dissertation rejects assumptions about the region’s perennial parochialism to emphasize its historical cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it shows how Cather and Lewis mobilized the region’s history of migration, settlement, and urbanization to critique the failures of U.S. political progressivism, and asserts the midwestern hinterland’s participation in the development of U.S. literary modernism. Specifically, I argue that by representing the relationships between immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens in the modern Midwest’s social and cultural institutions, Cather and Lewis subvert the progressive themes and consensus-building impulses of literary realism to critique the rise of U.S. commercial capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism.