Luke Ulas (University of Sheffield): Being Cosmopolitan – A Political Approach

Bio:
Luke Ulas is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. Prior to coming to Sheffield he was a Research Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, and before that he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the 'Justitia Amplificata' programme at Goethe University Frankfurt. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Abstract:
What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach; the focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form. What it means to be cosmopolitan in this thoroughly political sense cannot involve appeal to any particular moral orientation, because politics is about, inter alia, the contestation of such orientations and commitments. Instead, the book offers an account that is based upon the internalization of particular kind of global 'social imaginary', involving the imagination of a global public to which certain issues - or global public affairs - are understood to pertain.