Introducing Youth and Globalization and the Special Issue: The Rise and Fall of Cosmopolitanism
Résumé
Youth and Globalization is an academic forum for discussion and exchanges, a space for intellectual creativity on all questions relating to youth in a globalizing world. Its aim is to provide an innovative understanding of youth studies in a global context based on multiscalar, multilevel, multisite, and multidisciplinary approaches. Young people both are affected by and are the actors of the globalization of everyday life. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, the journal explores how young people relate to globality and its outcomes. To open this discussion, the Journal starts with an issue devoted to understanding the global generation through the lenses of the cosmopolitan approach. It discusses four major criticisms and provides a counter position to. In the first case, cosmopolitanism is too often considered as a natural consequence of globalization, while in the second as being too ethnocentric. In the third case, cosmopolitanism has been assimilated to the ideology of contemporary global capitalism and in the fourth case it is mocked as a mere utopia. The papers gathered here investigate values, norms, behaviors and practices related to esthetic, cultural, ethic and political cosmopolitanisms.