Chasing Butterflies Without a Net: Interpreting Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

In this article, I map current conceptions of cosmopolitanism and sketch distinctions between the concept and humanism and multiculturalism. The differences mirror what I take to be a central motif of cosmopolitanism: the capacity to fuse reflective openness to the new with reflective loyalty to the known. This motif invites a reconsideration of the meaning of culture as well as of the relations between home and the world.In recent years research on cosmopolitanism has proliferated. The research is wide-ranging in focus and centered in many disciplines and interdisciplinary constellations. It is often agonistic: scholars in this spiraling field have sought to respond to charges that the idea implies naive utopianism, political aloofness, uncritical universalism, moral rootlessness, disguised ethnocentrism, and elitist aestheticism. These criticisms mirror the view that cosmopolitanism aspires to be too many things to too many people, and thus collapses under the weight of its overweening grasp. Rather than shedding helpful light on human concerns, the criticism goes, the concept produces intellectual cacophony and obscurity. Better to stick, on the one hand, with well-known concepts such as humanism and multiculturalism or, on the other hand, with new postmodern vocabularies that criticize the possibility of mutual understanding.Contemporary scholarship has not dissolved critiques of cosmopolitanism. However, it has engaged them seriously. The literature illuminates weaknesses, stereotypes and caricatures that characterize many views of cosmopolitanism. It has also clarified differences between cosmopolitanism and other global ''isms'' such as humanism and multiculturalism, and it has also made plain its critical distance from the phenomena known as

Competencias sociales e inmigración desde una perspectiva intercultural

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The Process Matters: Moral Constraints on Cosmopolitan Education

“…() classify dialogue among the cosmopolitan ‘arts of living’ that ‘enable people to gain reflective distance from their values even while remaining attached to them’ (p. 590) echoing Todd. The distance is necessary to suspend judgement long enough to learn about and understand another and helps to produce ‘working criteria for reaching judgments reflective of everyone's input’ (Hansen, , p. 162). It is vital for cosmopolitan education that dialogue be a collaborative process of deliberation and growth rather than an adversarial process of conquest.…”

A Global Curriculum? Understanding Teaching and Learning in the United States, Taiwan, India, and Mexico

“…As teacher educators interested in the value of global education, we seek to foster the kind of transactional work needed to promote growth and meaning making in a global society. We argue for the need to ensure that all communities that make up schools are cosmopolitan communities (Appiah, 2006;Hansen, 2009;Nussbaum, 1997Nussbaum, /2009Pinar, 2009). Within the broader concept of global education, we have to seek to balance the student as a "being half hidden in a cloud of unknowing" (Huebner, 1975(Huebner, /1999 with the larger social aims of becoming critical citizens of the global society.…”