Cosmopolitanism From The Grassroots

This book aims to present a holistic picture of the Chinese immigrants from Fuzhou in New York. It shows how a small village in Southeast China has expanded to New York and has undergone a transformation over the past few decades, from rural Third World peasants to ethnic entrepreneurs in a global city. Validating Marshall Sahlins’s statement that migrants can “organise the irresistible forces of the world system according to their own system of the world,” the book seeks to explain the following aspects: first, how Chinese migrants from Fuzhou built a self-governing community and provided public goods for its members. Second, how they adapted their pre-modern social relations to a market environment, creating interwoven economic networks in an ethnic economy and reshaping local culture-based economies into a distinctive form of capitalism. Third, how they transformed their religious world, adapting Chinese Buddhism and folk religion as a focus for their society and economy. Fourth, the characteristics of the migrants’ cultural identity, examining the continuities in their identity and how it has changed over time. Students and scholars in anthropology, Chinese studies and cultural studies will find this book essential reading.

"This book aims to present a holistic picture of the Chinese immigrants from Fuzhou in New York. It shows how a small village in Southeast China has expanded to New York and has undergone a transformation over the past few decades, from rural Third World peasants to ethnic entrepreneurs in a global city. Validating Marshall Sahlins' statement that migrants can "organise the irresistible forces of the world system according to their own system of the world", the book seeks to explain the following aspects. First, how Chinese migrants from Fuzhou built a self-governing community and provided public goods for its members. Second, how they adapted their pre-modern social relations to a market environment, creating interwoven economic networks in an ethnic economy and reshaping local culture-based economies into a distinctive form of capitalism. Third, how they transformed their religious world, adapting Chinese Buddhism and folk religion as a focus for their society and economy. Fourth, it analyses the characteristics of the migrants' cultural identity, examining the continuities in their identity and how it has changed over time. Students and scholars in anthropology, Chinese studies and cultural studies will find this book essential reading"--

Invigorating and timely, this book provides a thorough overview of the geographies of cosmopolitanism, an ethical and political philosophy that views humanity as one community. Barney Warf charts the origins and developments of this line of thought, exploring how it has changed over time, acquiring many variations along the way.

This book visits contemporary British children’s and young adult (YA) fiction alongside cosmopolitanism, exploring the notion of the nation within the context of globalization, transnationalism and citizenship. By resisting globalization’s dehumanizing conflation, cosmopolitanism offers an ethical, humanitarian, and political outlook of convivial planetary community. In its pedagogical responsibility towards readers who will become future citizens, contemporary children’s and YA fiction seeks to interrogate and dismantle modes of difference and instead provide aspirational models of empathetic world citizenship. McCulloch discusses texts such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jackie Kay’s Strawgirl, Theresa Breslin’s Divided City, Gillian Cross’s Where I Belong, Kerry Drewery’s A Brighter Fear, Saci Lloyd’s Momentum, and Julie Bertagna’s Exodus trilogy. This book addresses ways in which children’s and YA fiction imagines not only the nation but the world beyond, seeking to disrupt binary divisions through a cosmopolitical outlook. The writers discussed envision British society’s position and role within a global arena of wide-ranging topical issues, including global conflicts, gender, racial politics, ecology, and climate change. Contemporary children’s fiction has matured by depicting characters who face uncertainty just as the world itself experiences an uncertain future of global risks, such as environmental threats and terrorism. The volume will be of significant interest to the fields of children’s literature, YA fiction, contemporary fiction, cosmopolitanism, ecofeminism, gender theory, and British and Scottish literature.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are widely heralded as an opportunity for the poor to have greater access to information that can help them escape poverty. ICTs also provide local NGOs that work with the poor access to knowledge that can guide them in implementing better development programs. Such ideas reflect long-held notions about the role of knowledge provision as a tool for development. But as author Tanya Jakimow shows, the consequences of the information age are often unintended and deviate greatly from our image of an interconnected, modern world. Not only do most people remain largely excluded from ICTs, but when they do engage with these technologies, they do so in unforeseen ways. Peddlers of Information shows how local NGOs in rural India are actually using these technologies—particularly the internet—and the implications this has had for development work and ideas about poverty. Jakimow’s critique of dominant views on ICTs and her discussion of class and power relations in Southern organizations is essential reading for development scholars and practitioners.

Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, students and lecturers were left to absorb and negotiate waves of constantly changing government instructions blended in the online world with disinformation and fearmongering, while still attempting to pursue the exchange and expansion of teaching content. Student and lecturer wellness needs have begun expanding and changing along with the needs of the disabled community, all of which must be considered and integrated towards a responsible curriculum transformation. Fostering Diversity and Inclusion Through Curriculum Transformation offers a rounded revisioning of curriculum transformation within this era and covers newly emerging case studies in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Covering key topics such as curriculum, assessment, diversity, and evaluation, this premier reference source is ideal for principals, administrators, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

The term cosmopolitan is increasingly used within different social, cultural and political settings, including academia, popular media and national politics. However those who invoke the cosmopolitan project rarely ask whose experience, understanding, or vision of cosmopolitanism is being described and for whose purposes? In response, this volume assembles contributors from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to examine cosmopolitanism’s possibilities, aspirations and applications—as well as its tensions, contradictions, and discontents—so as to offer a critical commentary on the vital but often neglected question: whose cosmopolitanism? The book investigates when, where, and how cosmopolitanism emerges as a contemporary social process, global aspiration or emancipatory political project and asks whether it can serve as a political or methodological framework for action in a world of conflict and difference.

This collection reclaims public intellectuals and scholars important to the foundational work in American Studies that contributed to emerging conceptions of an "ecological citizenship" advocating something other than nationalism or an "exclusionary ethics of place." Co-editors Adamson and Ruffin recover underrecognized field genealogies in American Studies (i.e. the work of early scholars whose scope was transnational and whose activism focused on race, class and gender) and ecocriticism (i.e. the work of movement leaders, activists and scholars concerned with environmental justice whose work predates the 1990s advent of the field). They stress the necessity of a confluence of intellectual traditions, or "interdisciplinarities," in meeting the challenges presented by the "anthropocene," a new era in which human beings have the power to radically endanger the planet or support new approaches to transnational, national and ecological citizenship. Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common—namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground—and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups—ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional—that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision. Read together, the essays included in American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship create a "methodological commons" where environmental justice case studies and interviews with activists and artists living in places as diverse as the U.S., Canada, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Taiwan and the Navajo Nation, can be considered alongside literary and social science analysis that contributes significantly to current debates catalyzed by nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, hurricanes, and climate change, but also by hopes for a common future that will ensure the rights of all beings--human and nonhuman-- to exist, maintain, and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes