Thursday, June 27, 2013
C1.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
Attempting to elucidate the tension between Europeanisation and globalisation, this study challenges work which studies Europeanisation as a purely political concept; essentially representing a new idea of what constitutes a 'European' by studying mobile practices in the European field. The linkage between Europeanised practices and identifications with the EU however is not a straight forward line as these practices could be perceived as globalisation or internationalisation. By drawing on the concept of cosmopolitanism and defining it as a transformation of self-perception and new social imaginaries, EU governance can be seen as a catalyst of such a cosmopolitanism that is specific to the European internal space: Cosmopolitan currents are evident in globalisation, but particularly articulated in processes of Europeanisation and globalisation can be seen as the regional context in which Europeanisation operates. This study operationalises the question of cosmopolitanism within the European Union with a case study on international high school education in the Danish city of Aarhus. It aims to examine Danish international students’ everyday stories of belonging, mobile practices and lived experiences and thereby detecting and mapping how cosmopolitanism is locally nested. Such cosmopolitan conditions are found in the local as a reflexive respond to the global; in this case using qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups. Data shows that cosmopolitanism self-perceptions does exist, particular as a social disposition, in their strategic planning of the future and in stories of distinction, in the way young students distance themselves from certain localities and narrow ideas of belonging.
