LAST CALL FOR PAPERS

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting,

5th - 9th March 2003, New Orleans

The Production and Consumption of Cosmopolitan Geographies

Organisers: Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, Craig Young – Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, the Manchester Metropolitan University

Cosmopolitanism has become a key term for those critically thinking through the relationships between the national and the global, and the multiple attachments to place within transnational communities. Discussion about cosmopolitanism routinely focuses on a positive commitment to an inclusive, multicultural universalism as opposed to a narrow or exclusive nationalism. Forms of consumption and of subjectivity are seen as key to the constitution of the cosmopolitan. Thus Ulf Hannerz has argued that questions of knowledge and taste are key to the formation of the cosmopolitan subject. For Hannerz cosmopolitan subjectivity entails an engagement and knowledge of the Other. Is cosmopolitanism then merely a neat label to attach to the consumption and commodification of difference in late capitalism?  Is cosmopolitanism an object or attitude? We recognize there are multiple geographies of cosmopolitanism and a myriad of ways in which we can approach the subject. Cosmopolitanism is a notoriously difficult term to define as it resists the fixity of identity resting in the nation-state, and is concerned with multiple attachments to place and the fluidity of identities. However in this session we wish to focus on the production as well as consumption of cosmopolitanism. The following is an inexhaustive list of themes.

• Defining and delimiting the nature of cosmopolitanism and its spatial (re)production.
• Who are the stakeholders involved in the production of cosmopolitan geographies? ‘Tastemakers’, elites and ‘backstage’ cosmopolitan producers.
• Cosmopolitan Others: social and cultural exclusion in cosmopolitan spaces.
• Living and engaging with cosmopolitan difference.
• Governance and cosmopolitan urban regeneration: exploring the role of the local state in producing and marketing the cosmopolitan city.
• Consuming and practising the cosmopolitan city: performing cosmopolitan identities.
• Cosmopolitan, national and transnational communties.
• Cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.
• Cultural consumption and class difference.

Expressions of interest (with a brief indication of the paper's topic) or abstracts should be sent to [log in to unmask] (below) by 20th September 2002. Further details of the conference are available at www.aag.org, from where registration forms can be downloaded from 1st August