Pathways to Cosmopolitanism: Perspectives From Asia

Date: 24-26 June 2009
Location: Hanson Room, Humanities Bridgeford Street, and Board Room, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, UK

• Hosted by the Research Institute of Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC), University of Manchester, UK, and co-organised with the FASS Global Cities and Migration Research Clusters, National University of Singapore

As a universal moral ideal and a form of cultural disposition, cosmopolitanism has been widely debated in academic literatures. More recently, there has also been a revival of the term in the social sciences and humanities that has spawned a wide range of work. In this scholarship, cosmopolitanism has often been described as a ‘specific attitude and a set of skills [that] allows the understanding and negotiation of cultural diversity” (Young et al., 2006:1688).  This approach to understanding cosmopolitanism is particularly relevant in the context of globalizing cities with increasing density and diversity of population where cosmopolitanism represents more than just an abstract moral disposition or philosophical mindset, but also a set of pragmatic skills to live in, and with, differences in the city.
 
Yet, how is cosmopolitanism actually lived and experienced in everyday life and urban spaces by diverse groups of social actors? How might everyday cosmopolitanism depart from and even challenge conventional notions and/or celebratory accounts of cosmopolitanism often proffered by the state and market forces? Moreover, as so much of the research and conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism is written through the ‘Western city’ and western philosophical canon, what relevance can these approaches have to the urban cultural experiences of those in Asian cities? Do Asian cities present alternative modes of cosmopolitanism? Or, do they problematise the very universal claims inherent to the term?

These issues and questions formed the basis of a collaborative research initiative between the Research Institute of Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS (and in particular the FASS Global Cities and Migration Research Clusters). A collaborative PhD programme on Pathways to Cosmopolitanism has been established, and doctoral students intending to work in the area of ‘Cities and Cosmopolitan Cultures’ can apply to it.

In parallel with the establishment of the collaborative exchange PhD programme, a dialogue on the research area was initiated, commencing first in November 2007 when the Director of the Research Institute of Cosmopolitan Cultures, Professor Nina Glick Schiller visited FASS to conduct a roundtable session on City Scales and Cosmopolitan Cultues. This was further concretised in May 2008 when Professor Glick Schiller led a Manchester team to NUS to engage FASS scholars in discussion at the Workshop on Perspectives on City Scales and Cosmopolitan Cultures, 12-14 May 2008.

At the May workshop, members of the FASS Cities and Migration Research Clusters – including the PIs and collaborators listed in this proposal – presented initial research ideas and engaged Manchester colleagues in fruitful discussion. During the May 2008 workshop, the group collectively identified and outlined several key ideas and strategic research thrusts.
 
In this context, the workshop in June 2009 set out to build upon the earlier work done. As part of the larger and long-term collaborative effort that will bring together scholars and researchers from Singapore and Manchester, the workshop served as an important platform for researchers to engage in a fruitful dialogue and debate on diverse conceptions and practices of cosmopolitanism. The ideas discussed at the June 2009 workshop is currently being developed into a research project and articles that will be published in a special issue of an internationally refereed journal.

In total, six papers were presented by academics from NUS, each examining different but related aspects of cosmopolitan cultures in diverse locations, ranging from philosophical theorizing to more grounded research on cosmopolitan encounters in cities. A common strand that runs through the papers is the critical stance that they adopt by theorizing cosmopolitan cities and cultures from the vantage point of ‘Asia’. By doing so, a wider aim of this project is to avoid the uncritical adoption of particular ‘paradigmatic’ cities or spaces as exemplary centres of cosmopolitan cultures, but rather to examine a diverse range of places, contextual tensions, histories, contingencies and potentialities that shape cities and their critical engagement with the ‘Other’.

For a copy of the event programme, you may download it here.

Event photos

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