Research
Cosmopolitanism is by no means a unproblematic or uncontested banner under which to place one's work. Indeed, in some instances, it has come to signify, legitimate or accompany cultural elitism, socio-economic neoliberalism, and falsely universalistic ethnocentrism. By contrast, I use and understand critical cosmopolitanism as being made up of at least three dimensions, which are interwoven in practice but distinguished here for heuristic purposes:

The version of critical cosmopolitanism used here is sustained by two analytical perspectives:

a) An intercultural critical hermeneutics (or ethnological imagination), which examines and critiques the principal Euro-American institutions, ways of acting and thinking by seeking out and substantively engaging with varieties of cultural alterity.

The resulting comparative decentring, estrangement and interrogation of the familiar and seemingly self-evident can generate both a better understanding of multiple configurations of modernity around the world, and a radical putting into question of the necessity and 'naturalness' of the existing social order in the West.

Accordingly, critical cosmopolitanism does not merely consist of a global scaling up of established analytical paradigms, but rather a refounding of the latter through their opposition to two common ethnocentric tendencies in the human sciences: a parochialism urging us to retreat to what is familiar and proximate, and a false universalism that generalizes culturally and historically specific findings (including many kinds of liberal cosmopolitanism).

b) A cultural materialism, which aims to sidestep two key dualisms, the first of which exists between economism and culturalism (the analytical essentialization of the primacy of, respectively, economic or cultural factors). Thus, critical cosmopolitanism considers the mutual constitution of and overlap between material and symbolic-ideational dimensions of social life, and the entanglement of these forces in the production and reproduction of relations of power at various scales and in multiple sites as well as in possibilities for resistance and emancipation.

In addition, a cultural materialism confronting the second dualism—that pitting voluntarism to structural determinism—focuses on how social action shapes and, in turn, is shaped by structural forces (including both social, political, and economic institutions and symbolic-discursive systems).

Accordingly, it distances itself from both the pure volitionality or spontaneity characterizing subjectivist philosophies of consciousness, and at the other end of the scale, crude versions of structuralism and post-structuralism that reduce subjects to bearers or effects of the operations of material or discursive structures. Critical cosmopolitanism studies modes of social practice, that is to say, patterns of action created and enacted by agents in power-laden, structured and structuring fields of capabilities and constraints.