MECM90003 Chap.9 Cosmopolitanism, World Building and Universalism
Cosmopolitanism, World Building and Universalism
This chapter joins the second half of Week 9 to Week 11. Stornaiuolo and Nichols move cosmopolitanism from a moral ideal of openness to a critical practice that names power, and finally to cosmopolitics, the contested work of building a shared world. The tutorial borrows world-building tools from fantasy and science fiction to design kinder mobility.
Week 11 then asks whether human rights reach refugees and strangers, whether an ethics without borders is possible, and whether data is a universalising force. Together the weeks ask what a fairer shared world would require and who gets to design it.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Moral cosmopolitanism and its long, not only European, lineage
- 02
Critical cosmopolitanism: strategic versus ethical openness
- 03
Cosmopolitics: a shared world built rather than found
- 04
World building: macro and micro layers and three tests of a world
- 05
Mutual shaping of users and technologies, seen through a border app
- 06
Human rights, national rights and membership
- 07
Data universalism and the relation between data and power
Worked example · free
Testing an imagined border world against Wolf's three tests
- 1Invention: the rule differs clearly from present border regimes, so the world feels genuinely new.
- 1Completeness: the design still needs macro detail, such as geography and transport, and micro detail, such as who teaches the lessons.
- 1Consistency: if every crossing requires lessons, the world must explain how people too ill or young to study can move.
- 1Cosmopolitics: the gap in consistency shows that a kinder world still has to decide openly whom its rules include.
Key terms
- Critical cosmopolitanism
- Critical cosmopolitanism is an approach that refuses to treat global openness as neutral and analyses power, privilege and oppression.
- Cosmopolitics
- Cosmopolitics is the ongoing and often conflictual labour of building a shared world, rather than a state of togetherness that people simply reach.
- Subcreation
- Subcreation is Tolkien's term for building a secondary world from the materials of the real one.
- Mutual shaping
- Mutual shaping is Boczkowski's view that users and technologies shape each other recursively and unpredictably.
- Data universalism
- Data universalism is the assumption that one model of data and datafication describes everyone everywhere, which the Week 11 reading challenges.
- Ethical cosmopolitanism
- Ethical cosmopolitanism is openness to the world understood as hospitality and obligation towards others rather than economic advantage.
Cosmopolitanism, World Building and Universalism FAQ
What is the difference between strategic and ethical cosmopolitanism?
Strategic cosmopolitanism values openness to the world as an economic asset, for example a competitive advantage in a global labour market. Ethical cosmopolitanism values it as hospitality and obligation towards others. The Week 9 lecture notes that real communities often run on both motives at once.
Why does the subject use world building?
The Week 9 tutorial borrows tools from fantasy and science fiction to think concretely about better worlds for people on the move. Groups decide who may cross borders, what technology mediates movement, where home sits and whose capability expands, then test the result for invention, completeness and consistency.
What questions does Week 11 ask about universalism?
It asks whether the concept of human rights is broad enough to embrace refugees and strangers, whether an ethics without borders is possible, and whether data is a universalising force. It also examines how diasporas and transnational networks change representation, membership and the relation between human and national rights.
What are Nussbaum's three cosmopolitan capacities?
The Week 9 lecture lists the ability to question oneself, a sense of belonging to humanity as a whole, and narrative imagination, which lets a person picture someone else's life from the inside. The lecture treats narrative imagination as a capability in Sen's sense and presents the world-building exercise as narrative imagination made deliberately systematic.
Assessment move
Write one paragraph for each Week 11 key issue, each drawing on at least one earlier week, such as the Refugee Convention from Week 2, Molnar from Week 6 or mutual shaping from Week 9. Then practise the world-building drill with a single rule for crossing borders and test it for consistency.
The essay question on whether mobilities research reproduces the boundaries it challenged rewards exactly this habit of testing ideals against cases. Week 11 has no lecture slides in the materials available here, so build your notes from its key issues and the two essential readings.
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