A Cosmopolitan Sensibility draws our attention toward a total way of being and not just a form of communication. It calls for a heightened appreciation and capacity to respond sensitively to the plethora of complex social and cultural influences around us. And it calls urgently for greater care and compassion in our being with others in the complex multiverse of the 21st century.All of the contributors to this book share this sense of urgency for making our social worlds better and all of the authors find the idea of a cosmopolitan sensibility offers fresh ideas and new hopes for doing so. In each chapter, the authors explore a particular facet of this cosmopolitan sensibility that they find particularly compelling. What are the skills and mindsets called for with a cosmopolitan sensibility? How can we hold the ensuing incompleteness and complexity as we live into our differences? What does it take to foster this sensibility in young children, in families and in organizations? How can we create a stronger participatory democracy with such a sensibility? What changes in stories are called for to change conflict situations? How can an appreciation of a cosmopolitan sensibility help our servicemen and women move between military and non-military communities? And how can we sensibly go on in a relationally-responsive and reflexive manner to make better social worlds?

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.

This is a book about the power of the imagination to move persons from the Global South as they reinvent themselves. This ethnography focuses on Caribbean Rastafari who have undertaken a spiritual repatriation to Ethiopia over several decades particularly, though not exclusively, from Jamaica. Shelene Gomes traces the formation of a Rastafari community located in the multicultural Jamaica Safar or Jamaica neighbourhood in the Ethiopian city of Shashamane following a twentieth century grant of land from the former Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I. In presenting narratives of spiritual repatriation, everyday behaviours and ritualised events, Gomes provides an ethnographic account of Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Situated in the historical conditions of colonial West Indian plantations and the asymmetries of freedom and bondage within modernity, a recognition of global positionalities and local situatedness characterises this case of cosmopolitanism from the Global South. Shifting the centre of worldviews from Europe to Africa, Rastafari both challenge global disparities as well as reproduce hierarchies in the local space of the Jamaica Safar. In positioning Ethiopia as the spiritual birthplace of humanity, Rastafari also engage in ontological and epistemological reinvention. This spiritual repatriation, in its emic sense, foregrounds the Caribbeanist contribution to anthropology. Ethnographies of the Caribbean have been at the forefront of anthropological enquiries into global interconnections. This discussion of spiritual repatriation is both specific to the diasporic Caribbean and relevant to wider world-making processes and representations.

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Inspired by comparative law scholar Patrick Glenn's work, an international group of legal scholars explores the state of the discipline.

For centuries, across nations, dialogue between the domestic and the foreign has affected and transformed architecture. Today these dialogues have become highly intensified. The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture examines how these exchanges manifest themselves in contemporary architecture, in terms of its aesthetic potential and its practice, which, in turn, are impacted by broad economic, cultural and political issues. This book traces how diverse cultural encounters inevitably modify conventional categories, standards and codes of architecture, such as domestic identity, its political and economic representations and the negotiations with what is deemed foreign. Theoretical reflections by distinguished scholars are accompanied by interviews with some of the most influential architects practicing today, as well as stunning visual presentations by professional photographers.

Progressive politics has long been in crisis in the United States. As the radical Left realizes the dire consequences of defining themselves solely by what they are against, this collection challenges leading engaged academics and activists to show how radical politics can lead to a more fruitful democracy. Dealing with pressing issues of the day such as health care, race, immigration, religion, foreign policy, unions, feminism, liberalism, education, and the media, this edited volume looks at the prospects for a progressive turn in U.S. politics. In doing so, it hopes to inspire the radical imagination by showing where we can go from here. As technology continues to enable greater access to ideas around the world, the power of intellectuals is greater than ever. And given that the world is full of crushing poverty, sexism, uneven development, environmental degeneration, religious fanaticism, racism, and imperialism, the need for intellectuals to inspire the radical imagination by championing principles of economic and social justice, democracy, and universality is also greater than ever. However, political visions are required to guide that struggle. This is the aim of this book.