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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from online research on the transatlantic culture wars to explore the reconfigurations of the anti-woke movement during the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises. We examine the pandemic's divisive impact on the movement and how the war abruptly shifted 'the conversation' away from Covid.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from long-term online research on the transatlantic culture wars to explore the reconfigurations of the anti-woke (aka heterodox) movement during the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises. Through leading anti-woke figures such as JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and Sam Harris - all highly skilled media practitioners - we track the effects of the pandemic and of the Ukranian war as critical media 'events' (Sewell 2005) on this transnational world. The varied responses to each crisis, we suggest, shed 'luminous' ethnographic data (Katz 2001, 2002) on obscure causal relations across this dynamic space of content production and cultural criticism (Johansen 2021). We start by examining Covid's divisive impact on the movement as some of its key figures - supposedly paragons of Western science and rationality - began to promote alternative treatments (e.g. ivermectin) and to display deep-seated scepticism towards the medical establishment and mainstream media. Taking our cue from public debates within the movement, we ask to what extent this schism was a product of algorithmic 'audience capture' - a self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards content creators for telling their audiences what they want to hear. We then turn to how the Ukrainian war abruptly shifted the movement's 'conversation' away from Covid.

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This paper documents fashion among religious Muslim and Jewish women in Israel as a dispositive that engenders a cosmopolitan worldview. We argue that it creates a common space, open to diversity and global influences, which is shared by communities that otherwise perceive each other as enemies.

Paper long abstract:

The talk will present work in progress about fashion among religious Muslim and Jewish women in Israel, as a lens to the vernacularization of cosmopolitanism in a Middle Eastern setting. Religious women's fashion (RWF) has captured the attention of the global fashion industry and has gained growing momentum in critical feminist literature. We draw on the latter and aim to take it a step further by treating RWF as a dispositive, whose unstable structure encourages participants to reach out across group boundaries, which they rarely do otherwise, therefore engendering a cosmopolitan outlook. RWF spreads across offline and online spaces, inviting participants to move back and forth between local, regional, and global relations, images, and destinations. Concomitantly, communitarian ethics and parochial orientations inadvertently blend with the late-modern habitus and its compulsion to self-invent. RWF's analytical importance lies in the fact that it features seemingly unexpected combinations of lifestyles and moral discourses. Indeed, our ethnography of religious Muslim and Jewish women's fashion practices documents unprecedented interactions between members of communities that otherwise perceive each other as enemies. We find that the RWF dispositif entails innovative maps of semiotic exchange and surprising affinities among Strangers, which effectively redraw the contours of the common. Accordingly, we suggest that RWF may offer hope for a sustainable, if seemingly incidental and unstable, coexistence of communities that are simultaneously racist and segregationist, but also diverse and open to global influences.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the creative aspirations and models of a cosmopolitanism of a group of professionals with Polish nationality, who enrolled in a postgraduate degree for international creative film production during the COVID-19 pandemic at a Polish film school.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the creative aspirations and models of a cosmopolitanism of young professionals with Polish nationality, who enrolled in a postgraduate course for international creative film production during the COVID-19 pandemic at a Polish film school. The group of students included a YouTuber, the director of a musical school for children, an outdoor sports content producer, an attorney, a member of a social think tank, to only name a few. The paper asks what it means for those mostly transnationally living individuals to craft professional and personal identities in times of right-wing conservatism in Poland and lasting inequalities in the EU, but also in an era of transforming media-landscapes through VOD-services and Youtube, and in the light of conversations shaped by #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. It provides insights into the complexity of interweaving digital capitalism, 21st century discourses of the global, personal aspirations and dreams, cultural politics and hegemonies, the creative kinship groups, and the challenges of the pandemic. My interviewees reflect on the promises of creative self-development and the realities of filmmaking, their relationships to Poland and their individual projects of building cosmopolitan lives, on being creative producers in different contexts.

The paper concludes by reconsidering what Cosmo-Polishness (Artur Becker, 2019) - could mean in the context of my interviewees. I highlight the shared desire for recognition as creative professionals, while drawing attention also to emerging fragilities, doubts, and hopes around the global film sector.

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Paper short abstract:

Given the challenges it faces in today's viral world, this paper interrogates the prospects of cosmopolitan conviction from a multi-sited perspective. To what extent and under what conditions can a cosmopolitan and/or transnational outlook be a cogent source of critique?

Paper long abstract:

The way we think about and perform 'the political' has changed significantly in the twenty-first century, leading to new forms of nationalism and provincialism worldwide. Posing a great challenge to theories and practices of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, concepts of belonging based on clearly demarcated national (usually framed as cultural) allegiances are (re)gaining ground - as governmental strategies, but also, and above all, reflected in popular imaginaries.

The pandemic has accelerated this trend in many ways. Yet, while the restrictions it brought led to the closure of - actual and imaginary - borders on the one hand, it has called for the creative use and expansion of the remaining space on the other.

Referencing case examples from environmental mobilizations in Europe and South Asia, this paper examines regional variations in the use of (trans)national/cultural notions of belonging as political resource. It attempts to answer three interrelated questions: First, can a cosmopolitan mindset be a cogent resource of critique in face of nationalist and/or populist endeavors? Second, are the two mutually exclusive in any case, or what is the relationship between the national and the transnational in certain contexts? And third, how does the negotiation between the cosmopolitan and 'local' forms of belonging take shape? The aim is to explore regional remnants and prospects of a critique that draws on cosmopolitan ideals, with particular attention to the use of new media and forms of expression necessitated by the pandemic.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes cosmopolitan imagery in advertisements and pilgrimage photography in Muslim and Christian Indonesian Jerusalem-pilgrimages. This imagery reflects cosmopolitan middle-class identities but also vernacular cosmopolitanism across different religious, national and social affiliations.

Paper long abstract:

Cosmopolitan imagery in Indonesian transnational pilgrimage-tourism to Jerusalem reveals, on the one hand, elitist middle-class identities and polarizing engagements with the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the other hand, it conveys notions of vernacular cosmopolitanism that include people from different religious, national and social backgrounds. Furthermore, some cosmopolitan images create more nuanced understandings of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In reference to Strassler’s (2020) work on democracy, images and mediation in contemporary Indonesia, I argue that vernacular cosmopolitan imagery goes beyond the sphere of travel because of the images’ meanings within the Indonesian domestic context and their online accessibility to non-travelers. Even if tourist-pilgrims mainly move in the “environmental bubble” (Cohen 1972) of the tourist group, the imagery mediates views of the world and one’s place in it, also during the pandemic. As a fun activity and a medium of encounter, photography can blur the environmental bubble that is usually coined by stereotypical perceptions of cultural Others, and thus it inspires reflections, which may go beyond the class-related connotations of cosmopolitan imagery and enhance “critical cosmopolitanism” (Delanty 2009). The internet and the ability to take part in circulating images makes this process communicative and dialogic.

With these observations, the paper shall contribute to overarching questions on transnationalism in times of populist polarizations and shed light on the contradictions and ambivalences in expressions of cosmopolitanism. Regarding the conference themes of hope and transformation, this case study shall offer examples of specific conditions that foster openness and inclusion across different religious, national and social affiliations.