ABSTRACT

This book offers transdisciplinary scholarship which challenges the agendas of and markers around traditional social scientific fields. 

It builds on the belief that the study of major issues in the global cultural and political economies benefit from a perspective that rejects the limitations imposed by established boundaries, whether disciplinary, conceptual, symbolic or material. Established and early career academics explore and embrace contemporary political sociology following the ‘global’ and ‘cultural’ turns of recent decades. Categories such as state, civil society, family, migration, citizenship and identity are interrogated and sometimes found to be ill-suited to the task of analyzing global complexities. The limits of global theory, the challenges of global citizenship, and the relationship between globalisation and situated and mobile subjects and objects are all referenced in this book.

The book will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, Geography, Area studies and European studies.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

The importance of the ‘cultural encounter’

part I|42 pages

Encounters beyond borders

chapter 2|16 pages

Seeing from the border with Chris Rumford

Towards cosmopolitan borders and a multiperspectival border studies

part II|54 pages

Everyday encounters and strangeness

chapter 4|15 pages

The complex trajectories of the commoner

Cosmopolitanism, localisation, and nationalism

chapter 6|14 pages

The story of the ship-in-a-bottle

Encountering strangeness and familiarity through a globalised object

chapter 7|8 pages

Don’t look back in anger

A reflection on strangeness and borders in academia

part III|73 pages

Global studies and interdisciplinarity

chapter 8|14 pages

Europe in crises

Europe’s others and other Europes from a global perspective

chapter 9|14 pages

Globalisation

Interactive and integral

chapter 11|15 pages

Religion and globalising processes

An investigation into the relationship between religious practices and institutions and the complex historical forms of global social change

chapter 12|14 pages

Challenges of globalisation and the cosmopolitan imagination

The implications of the Anthropocene