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.

No description available.

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.

The contemporary media landscape invites us to experience a belonging to various distant places, mourn the victims of faraway disasters, expose ourselves to foreign cultures and engage in political issues in places far from our local context of living. In other words, we are invited to become citizens of the world – cosmopolitans. But are we? And if so, how is such cosmopolitanism expressed in a given society, under what social conditions, and in relation to what media practices? Contemporary social theory depicts a global or cosmopolitan mode of orienting in the world as paradigmatic of social life in global modernity. To date, little is known about the structural realities of such orientations. Against this backdrop, the aim of the present study is to understand the potentially “cosmopolitan” character of peoples’ outlooks and practices, and the societal conditions in which they can be identified. On the one hand, the aim of the study is to contribute to the largely theoretical accounts of the “cosmopolitan” character of social life in present times, andon the other, to understand the specific role of various media practices in the process generally described as “cosmopolitanization”. Results yielded by a national survey deployed in Sweden (n = 1 025) show that the distribution of various cosmopolitan dispositions abides by logics of social stratification. In tandem with previous research, cosmopolitanism – when studied “from below” – has a tendency to emerge in more privileged spheres of society. Being “connected” and simply living in a potentially global media landscape does not nullify this pattern. Contrary to significant parts of popular and scholarly conviction, the media is no uniform, all-encompassing environment operating as a force of cosmopolitanization across all social strata. The results of this study point towards a “mediatized cosmopolitanism” that is impossible to disentangle from social context and the power dynamics pertaining to that context. / Det samtida medielandskapet tillåter oss att känna tillhörigheter till en mängd olika platser, sörja offer för katastrofer i fjärran länder, exponera oss för främmande kulturella uttryck och engagera oss i politiska frågor rörande platser långt bortom vårt lokala sammanhang. Vi tycks med andra ord bli inbjuda att bli världsmedborgare – kosmopoliter. Men är vi det? Hur uttrycks i sådana fall kosmopolitismen i ett givet samhälle - under vilka förhållanden och i relation till vilka mediepraktiker? Samtida samhällsvetenskaplig teori framställer ett globalt-, eller kosmopolitiskt förhållningsssätt som paradigmatiskt för det sociala livet i den globala moderniteten. Dock finns inte tillräckligt underlag för att förstå den strukturella verkligheten kring sådana förhållningssätt. Mot den bakgrunden är syftet med föreliggande studie att förstå den potentiellt sett ”kosmopolitiska” karaktären på människors förhållningssätt och praktiker och de förhållanden i vilka sådana orienteringar kommer till uttryck. Således är syftet å ena sidan att bidra empiriskt till teoretiska beskrivningar av vår kosmopolitiska samtid. Å andra sidan söker studien också förstå den specifika rollen av olika mediepraktiker i relation till den process som beskrivits som ”kosmopolitaniseringen”. Resultat från en nationell enkätundersökning i Sverige (n = 1 025) visar på en social stratifiering av kosmopolitiska orienteringar. I linje med tidigare forskning påvisar föreliggande studie att kosmopolitism studerad “underifrån” har en tendens att framförallt komma till uttryck i mer priviligierade samhällssfärer. Att vara “sammanlänkad” och helt enkelt leva i ett potentiellt sett globalt medielandskap motverkar inte den tendensen. I motsats till både populära och akademiska utsagor utgör inte medierna en unison och allomfattande miljö som sätter igång en process av kosmopolitanisering i alla samhällets skikt. Studiens resultat pekar istället mot en ”medialiserad kosmopolitism” som är omöjlig att förstå utan att ta hänsyn till sitt sociala sammanhang och de maktförhållanden som råder i det sammanhanget.