Toward A Cosmopolitan Ethics Of Mobility

This book proposes a cosmopolitan ethics that calls for analyzing how economic and political structures limit opportunities for different groups, distinguished by gender, race, and class. The author explores the implications of criticisms from the social sciences of Eurocentrism and of methodological nationalism for normative theories of mobility. These criticisms lend support to a cosmopolitan social science that rejects a principled distinction between international mobility and mobility within states and cities. This work has interdisciplinary appeal, integrating the social sciences, political philosophy, and political theory.

This groundbreaking book investigates the clash between a desire for unfettered mobility and the prevalence of inequality, exploring how this generates frictions in everyday life and how it challenges the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. Reading fictional and popular cultural texts against real global contexts, it develops an ‘aesthetics of justice’ that does not advocate cosmopolitan mobility at the expense of care and hospitality but rather interrogates their divorce in neoliberal contexts.

In academic descriptions of cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction often recurs. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists whose ethnographic studies reveal many different expressions of cosmopolitanism, this distinction between aspiration and practice can often be quite ambiguous. This book therefore brings together five contributions from anthropologists who are reporting on encounters and aspirations that reveal different forms of spatial mobility, scales of commitment or risk, and are often transient, ambivalent and precarious. These are circumstances in which cosmopolitanism emerges as uneven and partial rather than as a comprehensive or unequivocal transformation of practice and outlook. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Mobility is a basic principle of modernity besides others like individuality, rationality, equality and globality. Taking its cue from this concept, this book presents a movement that begins with the macro-social transformations linked to mobility and ends with empirical discussions on the new forms of mobility and their implications for everyday life. The book opens with a study of the social changes unique to the second age of modernity, with contributions from Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Wolfgang Bonss and Sven Kesselring. It continues with a discussion of the implications of these changes for sociological research. Authors such as Vincent Kaufmann, Weert Canzler, Norbert Schneider, Beate Collet, Ruth Limmer and Gerlinde Vogl focus on a series of field examinations, both qualitative and quantitative, of emerging mobilities. The book is a foray into the exciting new field of interdisciplinary mobility research informed by theoretical reflection and empirical investigation.

"Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility--the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity--faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society"--Dust jacket.

This collection investigates the relationship between mobilities and social justice to develop the concept of mobility justice. Two introductory chapters outline how social justice concepts can strengthen analyses of mobility as socially structured movement in particular fields of power, what new justice-related questions arise by considering uneven mobilities through a social justice frame, and what a ‘mobile ontology’ contributes to understandings of justice in relation to 21st century social relations. In 15 subsequent chapters authors analyze the material infrastructures that configure mobilities and co-constitute injustice, the justice implications of ‘more-than-human’ movements of food and animals, and mobility-related injustices produced in relation to institutional acts of governance and through micro-scale embodied relations of race, gender, class and sexuality that shape the uneven freedom of human bodily movements. The volume brings numerous scales, types and facets of mobility into conversation with multiple approaches to social justice, to theorize mobility justice and reimagine social justice as a mobile concept appropriate for analyzing the effects and ethics of contemporary life.

Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State examines tensions between a push for clear boundaries defining nation-states and who “legitimately” belongs in them and a pull away from citizenship as capturing what membership in a political community looks like in the twenty-first century. Borders signify and represent these physical and metaphorical challenges in a world where (anti)migration and (anti)refugee rhetoric are central to the production and reproduction of postcolonial and nationalist political discourse and identity formation. With an expansive view of citizenship, authors challenge dominant narratives, explore alternatives to neoliberal frameworks, and link theory and practice through participatory opportunities for non-citizen political participation. In doing so, they present possibilities for reimagining citizenship for a just, more sustainable future. This book will appeal to academics and practitioners working in the disciplines of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Political Sciences, Citizenship Studies and Migration Studies. It was originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.

The optimism heralded by the end of the Cold War and the idea of an emerging borderless world was soon shadowed by conflicts, wars, terrorism, and new border walls. Migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have simultaneously become key political figures. Border and mobility studies are now two sides of the same coin. The chapters of this volume reflect the changing relations between borders, bordering practices, and mobilities. They provide both theoretical insights and contextual knowledge on how borders, bordering practices, and ethical issues come together in mobilities. The chapters scrutinize how bounded (territorial) and open/networked (relational) spaces manifest in various contexts. The first section, ‘Borders in a borderless world’, raises theoretical questions. The second, ‘Politics of inclusion and exclusion’, looks at bordering practices in the context of migration. The third section, ‘Contested mobilities and encounters’, focuses on tourism, which has been an ‘accepted’ form of mobility but which has recently become an object of critique because of overtourism. Section four, ‘Borders, security, politics’, examines bordering practices and security in the EU and beyond, highlighting how the migration/border politics nexus has become a national and supra-national political challenge. The chapters of this interdisciplinary volume contribute both conceptually and empirically to understanding contemporary bordering practices and mobilities. It is essential reading for geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and international relations scholars interested in the contemporary meanings of borders and mobilities.