Cosmopolitan education at the University of St Andrews--Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies

Impact: Social Impact, Cultural, Creative Impact

Description of impact

The Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies

Who is affected

Migrants, Caribbean peoples, Internationally adopted children, anthropologists and social scientists, policy makers, citizens of the world.

Narrative

In a world where conflict over social and cultural goods is rife, but where global citizenship and cosmopolitan communication have never before been so realisable or realistic as models for action, anthropology has a critical role to play. Deploying its principal tool - ethnography - anthropology takes the particularity of local lives and experiences to be a crucial resource for comprehending the principles governing the world at large. In this context, anthropology needs explicitly to reassess its implicit cosmopolitanism; and by writing each ethnography as an ‘ethnography of cosmopolitanism’ it can engage its knowledge with questions of global social change. In other words, anthropology can and should make full use of those insights that are uniquely available to it as a discipline.

Impact statusOpen
Category of impactSocial Impact, Cultural, Creative Impact
Impact levelInvolvement - mid or active stage