Media and cosmopolitanism – a non-media centric approach

Firstly, I would like to thank the FSMK committee and the reviewers for shortlisting my dissertation as a top 3 candidate for the FSMK dissertation award (and congratulations to my good friend Flor Enghel who was awarded the prize). I would also like to thank the FSMK committee for inviting me to use this forum to summarize aspects of my PhD dissertation before colleagues in the field.

My dissertation, which I defended in May 2014, is an attempt to come to terms with certain discourses about social life and how it has fundamentally changed over the last couple of decades. It is often assumed that, in times of globalization and mediatization, we become more attuned to the world as a whole. Various media are thought of as being there at our disposal, expanding our imaginative horizons. Following such notions, media allow people to become cosmopolitans (or, “citizens of the world”).

In my dissertation I set out to study cosmopolitanism and its relationship to various media practices empirically. The aim being to understand this “expanded mode of reference” and the social conditions in which it exists. The study thus attempts to fill research gaps in the sociology of cosmopolitanism (what is cosmopolitanism and where in society do we find it?) and in media studies (are the media making us more cosmopolitan?).

The main findings and contributions include:

• A methodological insight into how we can think of cosmopolitanism as embodied dispositions of openness and go ahead to study it with various social scientific methods. I argue that since cosmopolitanism is such a vague and elusive concept, researchers should work to define it and capture it ‘between the theoretical and the empirical’. This it involves defining and synthesizing the many tenets of a cosmopolitan disposition and see to which extent they are met in empirical reality and what underlying dimensions that emerge there.
• The highlighting of the socially stratified character of various cosmopolitan dispositions. Regardless of what Ulrich Beck’s notion of “cosmopolitanization” might lead us to think – not everyone is cosmopolitan. Certain life trajectories are more attuned to cosmopolitan cultivation than others – particularly those that involve pursuing higher education and relatively high amounts of international traveling. The dissertation discusses whether a cosmopolitan disposition is emerging as the late-modern or global equivalent of what Bourdieu called “the aesthetic disposition”. Both are socially reproduced in privileged spheres of society, particularly in relation to the cultural capital.
• Forwarding a non-media centric media studies of the relationship between various forms of media use, access and media orientations and cosmopolitanism. Much of the literature concerned with the media and cosmopolitanism has focused the semiotic or discursive power of various messages of the media. In some cases social agents have been epistemologically positioned as mere outcomes of the “inner grammar” of texts or technologies. My dissertation constitutes an attempt to provide a perspective that put focus on cosmopolitanism as embodied by people, and how various media practices relate to that. Results indicate a complex and dynamic relationship between peoples’ predispositions of what the media should be used for, their actual uses of the media, and various cosmopolitan dispositions. The linear notion of ‘cause and effect’ that is sometimes persistent in notions of a ‘mediated cosmopolitanism’, and its tendencies to overlook the fact that different people construct the affordances of the media in different ways, should be put into question.

You can find the full dissertation at http://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A708364&dswid=-6241