ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Chris Rumford’s ideas on critical cosmopolitanism are not just a mere social theory on the globalisation phenomenon and its very critical impacts, especially in the West-European context, but, first and foremost, a postmodern-inspired approach on a politics of space, borders and strangeness in the twenty-first century. Ambivalence, contingency, openness, and even unpredictability of spatiality, borders, and strangeness make the world seem polymorphic and heterocosmic, i.e. multi-faced, differential and heteronomic. Cosmopolitan imaginaries signify the existence of many worlds. Nevertheless, as Rumford states throughout his work, this does not mean that the world in the Global Age is either unlimited or easily accessible. ‘Borderwork’, as a procedure of a fragmented and contingent world, full of cosmopolitan spaces and cosmopolitan strangers, could be seen as a ‘pluri-step-world-threshold’, where cosmopolitan moments take place first and foremost as heterocosmic performances.
