Journal of Sociology

Debates about globalization have been accompanied by considerable critical assessment of the notion of cosmopolitanism. The upsurge in travel, trade, communication, and resettlement among non-elite individuals and groups has raised questions about the nature and form of ‘bottom-up’ or ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism. This article explores the ways in which the experiences of a group of young people (12–15 years of age) in south-western Sydney contribute to shared practices of membership in a culturally differentiated society. On one level, these young people display a de facto vernacular cosmopolitanism through familial experiences of migration. However, the article shows how these young people often move within socially and culturally bounded communities defined by ethnicity, language, socio-economic status, shaped by desires for safety, support and belonging, and maintained by propinquity, religion and the persistence of traditional expectations and patterns around gender and inter-marriage.

There has been an explosion of interest in recent years in cosmopolitanism, as both political philosophy and object of sociological investigation. In the empirical sociological literature, there is a strong tendency to present Western cosmopolitan thought as purely theoretical in nature, devoid of empirical referents and underpinnings. This article re-narrates the history of cosmopolitan thinking – stretching from ancient Greece and Rome through Kantian philosophy to the time of Durkheim – to demonstrate that this is a caricature, and that there are important empirical and sociological elements in cosmopolitan thought. This fact must be acknowledged in future cosmopolitanism studies, so that political philosophy and sociological analysis are no longer seen to stand in unhelpful opposition to each other, and such that broader, unproductive divisions between the empirical and normative domains are transcended.

The academic literature on the use of television shows in sociology education has successfully highlighted the value of the practice, but has not afforded any examples from seminar teaching. This article contributes to the discussion by demonstrating how The Simpsons, an American animated television sitcom, assists in teaching sociology seminars. The article suggests that using The Simpsons in group-based, participatory teaching and the learning environments of seminars helps students to understand sociological theories and develop their sociological imagination. It shows the application of the cartoon series to seminars of a Sociology of Belonging module and tests the value of the practice by drawing on responses to student satisfaction surveys and in-class observations. The results illustrate that the cartoon helps to highlight sociological theories and improve students’ sociological imagination. The research concludes that the sociology curriculum would benefit from developing particular ways of using The Simpsons according to course content.

VicHealth’s Community Arts Development Scheme (CADS) funded three community arts organizations to work with people from marginalized or disadvantaged communities, to provide opportunities for personal and community development through the arts. This article investigates how CADS engages the public in thinking about and discussing social issues and, more generally, the role of community arts practice in promoting civic dialogue. A mixed method approach was used. Interviews were conducted with community organizations in contact with the three CADS organizations to study to what extent this contact had promoted civic dialogue. Audience surveys were used to measure the extent of similar effects in audiences of CADS performance. The interview and survey data indicated that the arts organizations were successful in engaging the community in civic dialogue by provoking and contributing to discussion of challenges faced within communities.

There are many key questions concerning the current status of the notion of neoliberalism. What is it? Is it an appropriate concept to describe a political and intellectual movement or form of state? What are its prospects as a framework of public policy after the global financial crisis? The article proposes a way of answering these questions by regarding neoliberalism as a definite ‘thought collective’ and a regime of government of and by the state. It exemplifies these by shifts within neoliberalism regarding the question of monopoly, its relationship to classical liberalism and its approach to crisis management. In regard to the latter, it further proposes an emergent rationality of the government of and by the state concerning the fostering of resilience in the anticipation of catastrophe.

Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic turn’? If so, does it matter? The answers to these questions are positive if we look at the problem from a cultural sociological point of view. It has been observed that the concept of the ‘iconic turn’, coined by a German philosopher Gottfried Boehm, may capture more effectively the sense of life attributed to visual objects than W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous ‘pictorial turn’. This article endorses this conjecture and provides a theoretical context for its justification. It thus contributes to the emerging debate about the paradigm shift in studies of visual culture.

This article applies Q methodology in order to explore Australian Muslims’ orientations to the secular society in which they live. The analysis is guided by some theoretical claims that are made about the dispositions of Muslims who live in Western societies. While a simple ‘closed’ versus ‘open’ dichotomy has some plausibility, deeper investigation reveals four empirical types: respectively, semi-engaged, coexisting, assertively religious and untroubled participant. These four types vary in the same direction from the theoretical specification that informed the search for the type in question in a way that appears to reduce the tension between the type and the norms of secular society. Generalizations commonly made in both popular and scholarly discourse about the problematic character of Muslim orientations to secular society appear not to apply in Australia.

Globalization and cosmopolitanism are treated differently in various literatures. The relations of each to the political state and migration, in terms of mobilities and enclavement, are also variably treated in different sources. The article shows that these concerns are not confined to early 21st-century developments but drew attention in accounts of globalization in 17th- and 18th-century social economies.

The article explores the considerations that are at stake in assessing the prospects of cosmopolitanism today. It is argued that there is scope for fruitful dialogue between sociology and political science around the question of how a normative idea, such as global justice, becomes an empirical phenomenon. The idea of global justice should be placed in the context of the broader framework of cosmopolitanism. Rather than focus only on the normative project, attention needs to be given to the process by which cosmopolitanism emerges. Cosmopolitanism, in this view, involves socio-cognitive shifts for critical publics in ways in seeing the world. It is such changes in cognitive capacities and in individual and societal learning that often make possible the articulation of new normative principles or their application in domains where they previously did not apply.