Toward A Cosmopolitan Ethics Of Mobility

This book proposes a cosmopolitan ethics that calls for analyzing how economic and political structures limit opportunities for different groups, distinguished by gender, race, and class. The author explores the implications of criticisms from the social sciences of Eurocentrism and of methodological nationalism for normative theories of mobility. These criticisms lend support to a cosmopolitan social science that rejects a principled distinction between international mobility and mobility within states and cities. This work has interdisciplinary appeal, integrating the social sciences, political philosophy, and political theory.

This groundbreaking book investigates the clash between a desire for unfettered mobility and the prevalence of inequality, exploring how this generates frictions in everyday life and how it challenges the ideal of just cosmopolitanism. Reading fictional and popular cultural texts against real global contexts, it develops an ‘aesthetics of justice’ that does not advocate cosmopolitan mobility at the expense of care and hospitality but rather interrogates their divorce in neoliberal contexts.

Mobility is a basic principle of modernity besides others like individuality, rationality, equality and globality. Taking its cue from this concept, this book presents a movement that begins with the macro-social transformations linked to mobility and ends with empirical discussions on the new forms of mobility and their implications for everyday life. The book opens with a study of the social changes unique to the second age of modernity, with contributions from Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Wolfgang Bonss and Sven Kesselring. It continues with a discussion of the implications of these changes for sociological research. Authors such as Vincent Kaufmann, Weert Canzler, Norbert Schneider, Beate Collet, Ruth Limmer and Gerlinde Vogl focus on a series of field examinations, both qualitative and quantitative, of emerging mobilities. The book is a foray into the exciting new field of interdisciplinary mobility research informed by theoretical reflection and empirical investigation.

"Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility--the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity--faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society"--Dust jacket.

The cosmopolitan political tradition defines people not according to nationality, family, or class but as equally worthy citizens of the world. Martha Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision, confronting its inherent tensions over material distribution, differential abilities, and the ideological conflicts inherent to pluralistic societies.

This book provides a philosophical defence of open borders. Two policy dogmas are the right of sovereign states to restrict immigration and the infeasibility of opening borders. These dogmas persist in face of the human suffering caused by border controls and in spite of a global economy where the mobility of goods and capital is combined with severe restrictions on the movement of most of the world’s poor. Alex Sager argues that immigration restrictions violate human rights and sustain unjust global inequalities, and that we should reject these dogmas that deprive hundreds of millions of people of opportunities solely because of their place of birth. Opening borders would promote human freedom, foster economic prosperity, and mitigate global inequalities. Sager contends that studies of migration from economics, history, political science, and other disciplines reveal that open borders are a feasible goal for political action, and that citizens around the world have a moral obligation to work toward open borders.

Cosmopolitan Borders makes the case for processes of bordering being better understood through the lens of cosmopolitanism. Borders are 'cosmopolitan workshops' where 'cultural encounters of a cosmopolitan kind' take place and where entrepreneurial cosmopolitans advance new forms of sociality in the face of 'global closure'.

The Ethics and Politics of Immigration provides an overview of the central topics in the ethics of immigration with contributions from scholars who have shaped the terms of debate and who are moving the discussion forward in exciting directions. This book is unique in providing an overview of how the field has developed over the last twenty years in political philosophy and political theory. The essays in this book cover issues to do with open borders, admissions policies, refugee protection and the regulation of labor migration. The book also includes coverage of matters concerning integration, inclusion, and legalization. It goes on to explore human trafficking and smuggling and the immigrant detention. The book concludes with four topics that promise to move immigration ethics in new directions: philosophical objections to states giving preference to skilled laborers; the implications of gender and care ethics; the incorporation of the philosophy of race; and how the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism affects the discussion.

In academic descriptions of cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction often recurs. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists whose ethnographic studies reveal many different expressions of cosmopolitanism, this distinction between aspiration and practice can often be quite ambiguous. This book therefore brings together five contributions from anthropologists who are reporting on encounters and aspirations that reveal different forms of spatial mobility, scales of commitment or risk, and are often transient, ambivalent and precarious. These are circumstances in which cosmopolitanism emerges as uneven and partial rather than as a comprehensive or unequivocal transformation of practice and outlook. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.