996013 Culture in Motion: Optics, Methods, and Impacts (S) (SoSe 2010)

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama told an adoring crowd of more than 250,000 gathered in Berlin’s Tiergarten that he was speaking to them as a citizen of the United States and as a citizen of the world. But what does it really mean to be a global citizen? Where do the values come from that global citizens embrace? To what extent do national artistic and cultural institutions—in part established to create national citizens—now see themselves as creating cosmopolitans too?

Contemporary globalization has reawakened hopes of increased humanitarianism and global citizenship. Recent discussions of cosmopolitanism recognize that although local distinctions will persist, they will hopefully be tempered by general ethical constraints. In other words, every contemporary cosmopolitan is rooted somewhere in some way, cobbling out his or her own combination of universal and particularistic ethnic, national, and religious elements.

Cosmopolitanism today is no longer the exclusive province of elites. Labor migrants, sojourners, religious believers, and refugees are also open to the world, although they interact with it differently than their professional counterparts. In fact, in today’s world, cosmopolitanism is a necessity not a choice. Because we are so connected to one another, risks and opportunities frequently cross borders. Everyone must be a cosmopolitan because everyone is affected.

But cosmopolitanism needs to go beyond an ethical orientation or cultural propensity. It needs to produce participatory institutions that reflect and respond to contemporary global integration and that operate across and beyond the boundaries of the nation state. If cosmopolitans are citizens of the world, what kind of world polity are they members of? What are the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship? How can we begin to imagine a community that extends beyond national borders and where do the elements come from with which to create it? Where does the discursive and institutional backdrop come from that makes it possible to imagine, if not begin to put into place, a social contract fulfilled beyond the borders of the nation state?

This seminar will explore analytical frames and methods for understanding the cultural imaginaries and social fields that are the potential repositories of global citizenship creation. We will explore how the migration of people enables and is enabled by the migration of ideas, objects, and practices.