Embodied Cosmopolitanism as a Framework for Education

Embodied cosmopolitanism is a descriptive and normative conception of personhood as it is played out in the world today. The term refers to how people learn to fuse in their everyday lives reflective openness to new people, ideas, values, and practices, with reflective loyalty to local commitments and ways of being. The qualifier ‘reflective’ denotes both a critical and appreciative aspect. It conjures notions of open-mindedness articulated by the likes of John Dewey, Martha Nussbaum, and William Hare. But cosmopolitanism as approached by the PI is not a synonym with open-mindedness because it also incorporates a dynamic mode of reflective loyalty (cf. Josiah Royce) to local values and origins. The qualifier reflective is necessary because a cosmopolitan-minded relation with tradition is neither idolatrous nor dogmatic. Rather, reflective loyalty constitutes a supple relation with cultural inheritance that involves both self-criticism and gratitude.This study hypothesizes that the dynamic fusion of reflective openness and loyalty can be witnessed and cultivated in schools. The PI plans to address this hypothesis through systematic field work in several culturally diverse public schools in New York City, conjoined with ongoing philosophical study of what it might mean to be an ethically and morally minded person under today’s conditions of accelerating globalization.,