Performing cosmopolitanism : The context and object framing of cosmopolitan openness

Cosmopolitanism is about the extension of the moral and political horizons of people, societies, organizations and institutions. Over the past 25 years there has been considerable interest in cosmopolitan thought across the human social sciences.

The second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies is an enlarged, revised and updated version of the first edition. It consists of 50 chapters across a broader range of topics in the social and human sciences. Eighteen entirely new chapters cover topics that have become increasingly prominent in cosmopolitan scholarship in recent years, such as sexualities, public space, the Kantian legacy, the commons, internet, generations, care and heritage.

This chapter addresses the question of how to conceptualise cosmopolitanism for empirical research and focuses on the notion of openness as a principal discourse of contemporary cosmopolitanism studies. It explores the application of performative and qualitative approaches to researching cosmopolitanism as a form of openness to cultural difference. The chapter specifies cosmopolitanism through traditional social scientific models deploying a variable-centred model of inquiry and discusses the additional relevance of a performative theory. It argues that a performative approach is well suited to exploring cosmopolitanism as an emergent, relational dimension of social life rather than a stable feature of identities or social types. Cosmopolitanism can be conceptualised as a flexible, available set of cultural practices and outlooks which are selectively mobilised depending on social and cultural contexts. Accordingly, the idea of cultural 'openness' has been a fountainhead for general conceptions of cosmopolitanness as an outlook or, disposition.

© 2019 Gerard Delanty.