Massimo PENDENZA | Cosmopolitan Sociology. A New Vision of Globalisation

Il programma

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Sociali e della Comunicazione

AIS - Sezione Teorie Sociologiche e Trasformazioni Sociali

ESA - RN 15 Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology

Cosmopolitan Sociology. A New Vision of Globalisation

Salerno, 14th October 2014

University of Salerno, Campus of Fisciano

Aula delle Lauree ‘G. De Rosa’

9:30am Opening Remarks

Massimo Pendenza (Salerno, Italy/AIS); Vincenzo Cicchelli (Paris Descartes, France/ESA)

Welcome Speech

Aurelio Tommasetti, Chancellor of the University of the Salerno

Annibale Elia, Director of the Department of Political, Social and Communication Sciences

Paola Di Nicola, President of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (AIS)

Carmen Leccardi, President of the European Sociological Association (ESA)

10:30am Session 1: Chair Carmen Leccardi (Milano Bicocca, Italy)

Robert Fine (Warwick, United Kingdom)

The Legacy of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism: Imperial, Universal or Reflexive?

Vittorio Cotesta (RomaTre, Italy)

Cosmopolitanism as form of universal way of life

David Inglis (Exeter, United Kingdom)

The Globalization-Cosmopolitanism Interface

Question time

1:00pm ‒ 2:30pm Lunch

2:30pm Session 2: Chair Paola Di Nicola (Verona, Italy)

Massimo Pendenza (Salerno, Italy)

Social Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism from a Local Perspective

Esperanza Bielsa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Translation

Stéphane Dufoix (Paris Ouest Nanterre, France)

Rising Phoenix from Global Ashes: How Scholars Embraced Cosmopolitanism

4,00pm ‒ 4:30pm Coffee Break

4:30pm Session 3: Chair Donatella Pacelli (Roma Lumsa, Italy)

Vincenzo Cicchelli (Gemass, Paris Sorbonne/CNRS, Paris Descartes, France)

Living in a Global World: An appraisal of Cosmopolitan Socialization

Sylvie Octobre (Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, France)

Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism among French Young People

Question time and discussion on future projects

La Descrizione

La Cosmopolitan Sociology è insieme un nuovo campo di indagine e un diverso approccio sociologico all’analisi dei processi di globalizzazione e dei suoi prodotti. Parte di un più ampio ‘movimento’ nelle scienze sociali, che inizia probabilmente con la rottura dell’equilibrio bipolare, tale approccio si caratterizza per una forte connotazione interdisciplinare e per un’attenzione ai processi di socializzazione con cui individui, gruppi sociali e istituzioni affrontano le sfide di fenomeni sociali sempre più transnazionali. Da qui lo scopo complessivo del convegno Cosmopolitan Sociology: A New Vision of the Globalisation, ovvero di prefigurare nuovi quadri interpretativi per la comprensione della globalizzazione e dei suoi effetti. Esito della collaborazione di due organismi associativi – la Sezione Teorie sociologiche e trasformazioni sociali dell’AIS e il RN 15 Global, transnational and cosmopolitan sociology dell’ESA – il Convegno salernitano si propone di alimentare in Italia la discussione sulle potenzialità euristiche di questo particolare approccio sociologico ai processi globali, che gode già di una consolidata legittimità nella comunità scientifica internazionale, riunendo per questa occasione accreditati studiosi del settore.

L'organizzazione

· Organizzatori

Università di Salerno

Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali e della Comunicazione

AIS - Sezione Teorie Sociologiche e Trasformazioni Sociali

ESA - RN 15 Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology

· Altri partners

CSE – Centro Studi Europei

Cultural Sociology

Comune di Salerno

Unicredit

· Responsabili scientifici

Massimo Pendenza pendenza@unisa.it

Vincenzo Cicchelli vcicchelli@msh-paris.fr

· Comitato scientifico

Massimo Pendenza, Donatella Pacelli, Marco Bontempi, Gennaro Iorio, Fabio D'Andrea, Fabio Massimo Lo Verde, Letizia carrera, Francesca Ieracitano

· Segreteria organizzativa

Massimo Pendenza

Dario Verderame

Vanessa Lamattina

Per informazioni pendenza@unisa.it

Abstract

Living in a Global World: An appraisal of Cosmopolitan Socialization

Vincenzo Cicchelli - Gemass, Paris Sorbonne/CNRS, Paris Descartes, France

Far from debating the usefulness of cosmopolitanism in sociology, this paper endeavors to address a consistent operationalization of this perspective by exploring what a framework of cosmopolitan socialization would entail. In an attempt to reinforce the current research conducted on the tangible mechanisms that are building the lives of individuals in contemporary societies, this paper first draws cosmopolitanism on the dialectic between universalism and particularism and differentiates the cosmopolitan turn from other in-vogue perspectives dealing with alterity. It then takes a distinctive position in the analysis of lived cosmopolitanism - considered as a spirit or a mind that people acquire through actual, virtual, or imagined contact with alterity -, rather than a substantive property or reified disposition. Cosmopolitan socialization is meant to follow the long, tangled, and reversible paths that lead people to produce or not universalistic accounts and cosmopolitan repertories, to perform or not cosmopolitan cultures. Finally, four pillars of cosmopolitan socialization are distinguished: esthetic, cultural, political and ethical. They are conceived as distinctive ways of handling otherness and as distinctive expressions of the cosmopolitan spirit in a world where boundaries are paradoxically more porous and more rigid.

Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Translation

Esperança Bielsa - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Whereas globalisation theory was predominantly silent about the role of translation in making possible the flow of information worldwide, assuming instant communicability and transparency, translation has gained a central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism which emphasise global interdependence and the negotiation of difference. Thus, for Ulrich Beck (2006: 89) the cosmopolitan capacity obliges one to practice the art of translating and laying bridges, relativising one’s form of life in front of different possibilities, while for Gerard Delanty (2006: 43, 2009) the cosmopolitan imagination is, above all, a condition of self-problematisation and openness to the world, and cosmopolitan processes take the form of translations between things that are different. There is also an increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism and translation in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project such as global democracy (Archibugi 2008), human rights (Benhabib 2004, 2011; Santos 2010), social movements (Santos 2005) and borders (Balibar 2010). In this context, it becomes necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature, specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act (Venuti 1998), and formulates relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethnocentrism in order to open up translation to the difference of the other. Such politics consists in an extension of an ethics of translation based on linguistic hospitality, so that cultural asymmetries, inequalities and conflicts at a wider social level are addressed and political and normative responses to them can be devised from a cosmopolitan perspective.

Social Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism from a Local Perspective

Massimo Pendenza - Università di Salerno

The aim of the paper is to validate the argument asserting that cosmopolitanism has to be rooted in the ‘local’. In this context, the paper affirms both the conceptual and empirical autonomy of the ‘local’, understood as belonging to a particular social milieu and ‘cosmopolitanism’, generally interpreted –on the contrary – as voluntary adhesion to mankind. The paper rejects the dichotomy between the two and asserts, vice versa, the combined and intrinsic relationship between the ‘local’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Sociologically, the two forms merge shaping reality. In short, in line with Durkheim and Simmel, it is maintained that cosmopolitanism is more the consequence of transcendence – without destruction – of the concrete social space rather than the manifestation of a cognitive universalism, based on the abstract nature both of the individual and mankind.

Note bio-blibiografiche

· Esperança Bielsa

Esperança Bielsa is Senior Researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research interests are in the areas of the sociology of culture, the sociology of translation, globalisation and cosmopolitanism, news translation, Latin American culture and literature. Her current research investigates the relevance of translation for an understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on the development of theoretical and methodological issues as well as on empirical research on the translation of literature, social theory and news. Esperança Bielsa is author of The Latin American Urban Crónica: Between Literature and Mass Culture (Lexington Books 2006), co-author, with Susan Bassnett, of Translation in Global News(Routledge 2009), and co-editor, with Christopher Hughes, of Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). She is currently working on a forthcoming monograph on cosmopolitanism and translation, provisionally entitled Translating Strangers: Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of the Foreign, to be published by Routledge.

Webpage: http://gent.uab.cat/ebielsa/

· Vincenzo Cicchelli

Vincenzo Cicchelli is associate professor at University Paris Descartes and Research Fellow at Gemass (CNRS/Paris Sorbonne). Former General secretary of the European sociological association, he currently is the chair of the Research Network Global, transnational and cosmopolitan sociology(ESA). He is the series editor of Youth in a Globalizing World (Brill Publishing, Leyden/Boston). His primary research and teaching interests are in global studies, cosmopolitanism, international comparisons, and youth conditions in the Euromediterranean area. Among his last books: (with Cotesta V. and Nocenzi M., eds), Global Society, Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Cambridge Scholar Publishing [2013]; L'autonomie des jeunes, La documentation Française [2013]; L'esprit cosmopolite. Voyages de formation des jeunes en Europe, Presses de SciencesPo [2012].

· Vittorio Cotesta

Vittorio Cotesta insegna Sociologia presso l'Università degli Studi Roma Tre - Dipartimento di Scienze della formazione. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: Posternarsi. Piccola indagine sulla regalità divina nelle civiltà euroasiatiche (Bevivino, Milano, 2012), Global Society and Human Rights (Brill, Leiden, 2012), Sociologia dello straniero (Carocci, Roma, 2012).

· Stéphane Dufoix

Stéphane Dufoix is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, and the director of the Sophiapol (Political Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology) research unit. His research themes include globalization theory, historical sociology of social science, sociologcal and historical semantics of concepts, political sociology of national identity discourses. Among his publications are: Les Diasporas (Paris, PUF, 2003), Les mots de l'immigration (with Sylvie Aprile, Paris, Belin, 2009) and Loin des yeux près du cœur. Les Etats et leurs expatriés (co-edited with Carine Guerasimoff and Anne de Tinguy, Paris, Presses de Sciences-Po, 20110). He has recently published La Dispersion. Une histoire des usages du mot diaspora (Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2012) and co-edited with Alain Caillé, Le Tournant global des sciences sociales (Paris, LA Découverte, 2013). He is currently working on a social history of the rise of globalization theory.

· Robert Fine

Robert Fine is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. In Democracy and the Rule of Law (Pluto 1985, Blackburn 2005) he argues for recognition of Marx's debt to as well as critique of Enlightenment jurisprudence. In Beyond Apartheid (Pluto 1991) he demonstrates historically that the struggles of the labour movement in South Africa have offered a distinctive social democratic alternative to nationalist politics. In Political Investigations (Routledge 2001) he explores correspondences between Hegel, Marx and Arendt and argues they can be more fruitfully read together than in opposition to one another. In Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2007) he welcomes the cosmopolitan turn in the social and human sciences on the proviso that cosmopolitanism is not turned into a fixed idea. In a recent co-edited volume on racism and antisemitism he analyses and criticises tendencies toward their disconnection (European Societies 2012). In a further co-edited volume he addresses the hidden debt of social theory to the natural law tradition (Journal of Classical Sociology2013). He is currently co-authoring a monograph on Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism (Bloomsbury 2014).

· David Inglis

David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. He writes in the areas of social theory, cultural sociology and globalization studies.

· Sylvie Octobre

Principaux champs de recherche: les publics de la culture et les pratiques culturelles : socio-démographie, usages, analyse de transformations des univers culturels; les âges de la vie, les générations et la culture : traitement de l'enfance et de l'adolescence, autonomie et dépendance, rapports de champs (école/culture), comparaison générationnelles et effets du cycle de vie, (r)évolution numérique et recomposition du champ culturel, âge et position sociale; les recompositions de genre : différences et/ou inégalités, origines et effets culturels de ces différenciations, le genre situé sociologiquement (intersectionnalité); le cosmopolitisme culturel : nouveau régime culturel ou recomposition de la stratification.

· Massimo Pendenza

Massimo Pendenza is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Salerno, Italy. His research interests cover Social Theory, Classical Sociology and Sociology of Europe. He is editor of Classical Sociology Beyond Methodological Nationalism, Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2014.