Research themes
RICC has six intersecting research themes.
1. Living Cosmopolitanism: Cities, Transnationalities and Migration
2. Injustice, Inequality and Violence: Rethinking Materialities
3. Mediating Cosmopolitanism: Film, Technology and Fantasy
4.
Imagining Otherness, Embodying Difference: Gender and Postcolonialism
5.
Genealogies of Cosmopolitanism: History, Literature and Memory
6. Belonging and Exclusion: Exile, Diaspora and Cultures of Citizenship
Each theme is outlined below:
1. Living Cosmopolitanism: Cities, Transnationalities and Migration
Is it possible to be simultaneously embedded in multiple localities and identities? How can one make sense of the experience of living across borders — physical, social, and psychological — both within and across nation-states? These are but two of the questions this research strand engages and explores by way of addressing the city as a space in which variations in cosmopolitan experiences, convivialities, sociabilities and aspirations come together, intersect, and even collide.
Inherent to the city is the notion of human mobility — bodies that cross borders, and borders that contain or exclude bodies. Migration flows across boundaries within as well as between nation-states, within and between boundaries of race, gender, culture, neighbourhood and class. How do we theorise these multiple encounters and intersecting pathways without limiting the investigation merely to the study of ethnic or racialised difference, or even that of multiculturalism? For there are invariably situations in which migrants are the source of cosmopolitan openness within a city, even as they may be disparaged and racialised as sources of foreign difference. How do migrants transform public spaces and public events to produce variants of a cosmopolitan aesthetic? Local, national or culturally rooted identities are not always in opposition to world openness. The core of our research centres on how these positionalities — whether as transnationalities, or multiplicities — operate in relation to each other.
2. Injustice, Inequality and Violence: Rethinking Materialities
The current consensus of understanding cosmopolitanism as a discourse that absorbs and 'rectifies' the unacceptable effects of globalisation is only one option in theorising cosmopolitanism. It would seem equally important to pose the question of the role played by actual conflicts and the idea of violence as potentiality in the construction of the discourse of cosmopolitanism. In other words, we need to ask: whether violence could be justifiable on humanitarian grounds; what are the limits of such justification; can war be the vehicle of growing cosmopolitan consciousness of the world; how do sociology and political theory, but also literature and cinema, relate to conflict as a complex form of exchange in the modern globalised world; are there universal human rights that are available in the exceptional state of conflict but not in the situation of normality and peace; is equality the unspoken pivotal value of cosmopolitanism, or is the recognition of a universal human nature entangled in the acceptance of not simply difference but also inequality? RICC wishes to facilitate research and discussion on these vital social and political implications of subscribing to cosmopolitanism. The embrace of the modern agenda of cosmopolitanism confronts us with the necessity to rethink the significance of class, gender, and race as conceptual tools. Rather than abandoning them (a trend that the prevalent strands of cosmopolitanism could easily encourage), we would need to lend them a new sophistication that considers their fruitfulness for cosmopolitanism.
3. Mediating Cosmopolitanism: Film, Technology and Fantasy
If the cosmopolitan project aspires to a form of openness to difference, or to ease with the unfamiliar, how is such a project dependant on a network of mediated forms? How do modes of cultural mediation — whether through film, television, digital media, mobile technology, and so on — facilitate our sense of connection, and alienation, to each other? Do new media forms generate new forms of cosmopolitanism?
This research strand explores how cosmopolitan ideals may be produced, and problematised, across film and media genres, as well as the politics of such production and consumption. Whose stories are being told, by whom, and for whom? How are they being told and to what end?
The other side of cosmopolitanism’s promise of global connectedness is the increasing ubiquity of surveillance cultures. These reflect, and produce, an intensification of anxieties about national, urban and personal security. Through various modes of urban observation — CCTV cameras, airport body scanners, and even genetic tracking — the cosmopolitan subject is, ironically, one whose movements are recorded and whose identity is endlessly catalogued. This desire for absolute safety and security is simultaneously haunted by fears of fraud, deception, illegal immigration and identity theft.
Our research critically interrogates the place of cultural mediation, with all its inherent tensions and contradictions, in the current production of cosmopolitan subjects, globalised spaces and transnational fantasies.
4. Imagining Otherness, Embodying Difference: Feminist, Queer and Postcolonial Encounters
Sexuality, reproduction, gendered and racialised bodies appear within the marketing of cosmopolitan desire and in various filmic representations including those about genetic engineering and cloning. RICC explores the tensions between narratives of openness and the construction of gendered aand sexualized difference. We explore the connections between the newly imagined corporeal interiority of genetic subjects and the reframing of cinematic cityscapes. Our interests include the the place of science and technology in the imagined futures of cosmopolitanism, in particular modes of coding bodies and urban spaces as dangerous and threatening or as secure and predictable. Also of interest are two figures that are repeatedly set in opposition to each other in the public debates about the war on terror and related discourses about modernity, cosmopolitanism and future world stability: the liberated Western woman (sometimes the feminist) versus the veiled Muslim woman. Our goal is to offer a critical examination of how media and political discourses mobilise an instrumentalist view of feminism to place gender and sexuality at the heart of a highly problematic evaluation of civilisation, democracy and a cosmopolitan worldview.
5. Genealogies of Cosmopolitanism: History, Literature and Memory
In spite of its aspirations towards universality, cosmopolitan theories, ideas and aspirations may be traced through the histories of political theory, philosophy, social and economic thought, as well as the humanities (in literary and art histories, comparative literature, and film and translation studies). Current theoretical work on cosmopolitanism seems to be largely bracketing off its contradictory genealogy, dividing the Enlightenment and Kant’s ideas of ‘perpetual peace’ from its potential for conflict and violence.
This research strands addresses these contradictions through a series of questions. For example, can violence be justified on humanitarian grounds? What are the limits of such justification? Can war be the vehicle of a growing cosmopolitan consciousness? Are there universal human rights that are available in the exceptional state of conflict but not in a situation of normality and peace? Is equality the unspoken pivotal value of cosmopolitanism, or is the recognition of a universal human nature also entangled in the acceptance of not simply difference but also inequality?
In our study of the genealogies of cosmopolitanism, we seek to carve out a discursive space that looks beyond Europe and Eurocentrism, and European versions of cosmopolitanism, in collaborations with colleagues and experts working in other regions, such as East Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and so on. One route into that discursive space is to study the notion of exile and exilic experiences; particularly in three areas: (i) exile as a transborder global experience (vs. methodological nationalism); (ii) exile as an individual experience (in writing, theatrical practice, and film-making, for example); (iii) exile as having the potential to reframe cosmopolitanism, not as normative discourse, as is the trend today, but as offering an experiential mode of relating to the world, which may compete with other modes. Is there such a thing as ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’?
From the humanistic notion of Weltliteratur to the postcolonial, global concept of ‘world literature’ (and ‘world cinema’), the question emerges of the ideological, axiological and aesthetic translatability of the work of art. The study of cultural transfers — its forms, channels and intensities —is one of our central tasks.
6. Belonging and Exclusion: Exile, Diaspora and Social Citizenship
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 ongoing modes of global interconnection and trans-border citizenship and exile, At a time when community cohesion and a sense of national belonging are high on the political agenda and ‘working class’ has become a taboo term, our query of processes of belonging and exclusion include those marginalized by urban regeneration project and find their ‘whiteness’ their only link to national rhetorics of citizenship.. 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.