Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

The development of a cosmopolitan imagination is crucial to engendering a global sense of ethical and political responsibility. By materialising concepts and meanings beyond the limits of a narrow individualism, art plays an important role in this development, enabling us to encounter difference, imagine change and make possible the new. This book asks what it means to inhabit a globalized world - how we might literally and figuratively make ourselves cosmopolitans, 'at home' everywhere. Contemporary art provides a space for this enquiry.
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination is structured and written through four 'architectonic figurations' - foundation, threshold, passage and landing - which simultaneously reference the built environment and the transformative structure of knowledge-systems. It offers a challenging new direction in the current literature on cosmopolitanism, globalisation and art.