Music Talks, the Department of Arts and Culture Studies and Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture will be hosting a guest lecture by dr. Ian Woodward (University of Southern Denmark) on cosmopolitanism “The cosmopolitan possibilities of encounters with globality: Openness, reflexivity, ethics, power”.
The cosmopolitan possibilities of encounters with globality: Openness, reflexivity, ethics, power
Encounters with difference are increasingly a feature of everyday life yet are still relatively underexplored in terms of their features and outcomes. The study upon which this presentation is based contributes to the growing research on everyday cosmopolitanism in diverse societies. Drawing on a qualitative dataset, the current paper will examine how individuals narrate encounters with difference in a range of everyday situations. It employs a cosmopolitan encounters framework to explore the reflexive openness people perform and the ethical reasoning they draw on to get along with each other. A number of features of the empirical findings from a larger project will be discussed, and particular hallmarks and contradictions of cosmopolitan engagement identified. In doing so, the paper reflects on the nature of a more stringent conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism which sharpens the demarcation between cosmopolitan encounters and those in which diversity is strategically negotiated by enacting practices of civility. The paper argues that cosmopolitanism emerges from interactions in encounters between individuals when they reflect on their positionality within unequal power relationships and when their actions are guided by a cosmopolitan ethics of acknowledgement and sharing.
Short bio
Ian Woodward is Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management of the University of Southern Denmark. He has research interests in the sociology of consumption, aesthetics and material culture, and in the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism. His recent books are Cosmopolitanism, Uses of the Idea (Sage/TCS, 2013, with Zlatko Skrbis), and Vinyl, The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2015, with Dominik Bartmanski). His current projects include co-editing a handbook of consumption studies, co-writing an ethnographic study of the economic sociology of independent record labels and compiling a collection on cosmopolitanism, markets and consumption. He holds an adjunct position at Griffith University, Australia, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology.
Practical information
Host: Music Talks, the Department of Arts and Culture Studies (ESHCC) and Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture (ERMeCC)
Venue: Erasmus University Rotterdam, Polak 2-16
Date: 29 April 2016 from 16:00 – 17:15 hours
Organizers: Pauwke Berkers
Information: berkers@eshcc.eur.nl