Exploring disjuncture: elite students’ use of cosmopolitanism

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses current debates around elites, education and cosmopolitanism. It studies disjuncture (and interaction) between cosmopolitan practices and aspirations on the basis of 24 interviews with international students at a British elite university. Specifically, the article discusses four cases of elite students’ use of cosmopolitanism by drawing on Ann Swidler’s concepts of ‘strategies of action’ and her distinction between ‘unsettled’ and ‘settled’ lives. The case studies demonstrate that individuals, who find themselves in an unsettled phase of their life, may mobilise cosmopolitanism either to set themselves new life goals or to closely examine their lives. In settled lives, cosmopolitanism may be integrated in established strategies of action but it may also be used to (rhetorically) defend a stable orientation. This typology of four different ways of using cosmopolitanism complements previous research by exploring in depth the various forms in which ambivalences of students’ engagements with cosmopolitanism may arise.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmopolitanism
• elite students
• interviews
• aspirations

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Florian Töpfl and Matthias Koenig for their comments and their support. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editors in charge for their valuable and constructive suggestions which helped to improve the article.

Notes

1. PwC, which stands for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG, a name that was chosen when KMG (Klynveld Main Goerdeler) merged with Peat Marwic in 1987, are both professional service companies and offer, among others, audit, tax, and advisory services (see www.pwc.com and www.kpmg.com).

2. All names are pseudonyms for the respondents in my research group. Additionally, some biographical details have been changed to secure anonymity.

3. Note that, among my interviewees, there were also cases of students to who elite cosmopolitanism was both an established strategy of action and a self-consciously expressed aspiration. However, I chose to present Anna’s case to highlight that what people say is not necessarily consistent with their practices.

4. To a certain degree, my interviewees’ background in terms of gender, race, ethnicity and class may also have inflected the ways in which they embraced and used cosmopolitanism. While my sampling strategy was not designed to investigate this question, I realized that those, who were drawing on cosmopolitanism within their established strategies of action, were most often interviewees from Western countries (but there was also one Indian interviewee from an upper middle class background). In that regard Anna is quite typical. It is also remarkable that, across all interviews, those students, who made extensive use of cosmopolitanism in an unsettled period of their life, were either originating from Asia (as the two students presented in this article) or had a transnational non-Western European background.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.