Transclusion versus Demediation: Mediatization and the Re-embedding of Cosmopolitanism

There is today much evidence that the cosmopolitan ethos is associated with geographical mobility. Both quantitative and qualitative studies have shown that extensive travel, (trans)migration and/or longer stays in foreign places can be taken as predictors of cosmopolitan values (Mau et al., 2008; Pichler, 2008; Kennedy, 2009; Mau, 2010; Jansson, 2011; Weibull, 2013). Mobility as such is of little or no significance, however. What matters are the world opening social and cultural experiences and the associated elaborations of interpretative frames of reference, which corporeal mobility sometimes generates. Such experiences together with other factors are constitutive of self-transformative cosmopolitan trajectories, as we discussed in Chapter 2. At the same time, the cliché association, or conflation, of cosmopolitanism with mobile life paths must be contested. Simply put, many cosmopolitans are not very mobile, as argued in accounts of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (e.g. Cheah and Robbins, 1998) and “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Nava, 2002), and many mobile groups do not express much of a cosmopolitan ethos, but move either out of practical necessity, for mere individual pleasure, or within and through securitized and segregated “non-place” corridors (Hannerz, 1990; Augé, 1995 Calhoun, 2003a, 2003b; O’Reilly, 2007; Jansson, 2011).