About us
The Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) responds to a world in which global restructuring and growing inequalities are fueling religious and ethnic conflicts and growing national anxieties, as well as movements for social justice, reconciliation, interconnection, and the development of common perspectives.
RICC provides a framework for scholars at Manchester University to collaborate with international researchers through the examination of the distinctive features of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Providing the context for an ongoing and open debate about the meaning and significance of this term, both historically and for contemporary culture, lies at the heart of the aim of this Institute.
RICC brings together academic staff from the schools which have invested in this initiative - the School of Social Sciences, the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures - and works closely with other interested schools in the Faculty of Humanities, such as the School of Environment and Development, and the Manchester Business School.
Objectives
RICC recognises the importance of studying the complex genealogies of cosmopolitanism as a cultural and political discourse. There is a strong commitment to unravelling the global forbears and precedents of cosmopolitanisms, so that current developments are understood in their proper context. The aim of this Institute is to provide the context for an ongoing and open debate about the meaning and significance of cosmopolitanism, both historically and for contemporary culture. Research and teaching activities will include high profile international events featuring leading scholars from the field, as well as conferences, summer schools, postgraduate courses, reading groups and more informal workshops.
Our research activities respond to the specificities of the current moment: to a world characterised by an unprecedented global rescaling and an accelerated speed and intensification of transnational modes of communication. At a time when the so-called war on terror is fought across national boundaries and when terms such as fanaticism and terrorism are mobilised in the name of remapping globalised geopolitical affiliations, urgent research agendas on the contested meanings of cosmopolitan cultures have emerged. As growing inequalities are fuelling religious and ethnic conflicts and increasing national anxieties, on the one hand, movements for social justice, reconciliation, interconnection and the development of common values are emerging on the other.
The tension between local affiliations and universal imperatives (between polis and cosmos) that arguably lies at the heart of cosmopolitan discourse will be the focus for our research. We seek to offer a framework for understanding the circumstances and patterns of human mobility, settlement and exclusion, the nature of urbanity, the changing meaning of community, emotional ties and belonging, the linkages between cities and cosmopolitan imaginaries, the ongoing modes of global interconnection and trans-border citizenship and exile, and the forms of transnational images, film, literatures, media, information, and communication technologies. Anchoring debates about the transformation of gendered, sexualised and racialised subjects within particular institutional locations and social relations, our goal is to understand and develop knowledge that combines local and transnational perspectives.
