Blog post by Max Mauro, Bournemouth University, UK
 
Lamine Yamal, the 17-year-old wonderkid in the world of football, has three tiny flags printed on his boots: that of Equatorial Guinea, the country of origin of his mother; that of Morocco, the country of origin of his father; and that of Spain, the country where he was born and that he decided to represent in international competitions. His case is not original; over the last decades, many athletes with multiple national backgrounds have risen to fame.
 
They are often the offspring of migration journeys from the Global South to the Global North or members of ethnic minorities. In one case or the other, they have likely been racialized, and they often claim to have experienced racism and discrimination. Furthermore, their belonging to the ‘nation’ is frequently questioned in public and media discourse, as happened to the members of the France national teams who won the men’s FIFA World Cup in 1998 and 2018.
 
The global visibility of sports such as football magnifies the impact that these dynamics can have on popular culture. In a way, the sporting spectacle exposes the fragility of the 'imagined communities' that we call nations by showing that is perfectly normal to have multiple belongings. As noted by Stuart Hall, identities are never fully settled; they are made of continuous additions and diversions. However, this contradicts the way sports and media usually represent people and nations; as crystallized identities, often fixed in stereotypical traits.

Blog post by Saime Özçürümez, Baskent University, Türkiye and Pınar Sönmez, Bilkent University, Türkiye
 
Scholars working on highly skilled migrants (HSMs) portray them as privileged cosmopolitans who can move effortlessly across borders due to high competition for attracting talent. However, little is known about how HSMs narrate their everyday experiences while reflecting on their sense of belonging. How do the HSMs reconcile national attachments with a global outlook? How do they navigate the complex socio-political landscapes of their host countries?
 
Our Identities article, ‘Patriotic cosmopolitans in Budapest: narratives of belonging among highly skilled migrants’, challenges the dominant framing and research on HSMs as essentially economic actors. We focus on their experience of international mobility and examine how they think through their identity and sense of belonging in complex socio-political settings. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s assertion that one can identify as both a cosmopolitan and remain loyal to country of origin, we conceptualize cosmopolitanism and patriotism as intertwined spatial and emotional attachments constituting the foundations of HSMs’ sense of belonging. 

Blog post by Amir Aziz, University of California, Berkeley
 
Situated in the scenic port area, the downtown neighbourhood Noailles is frequently touted as the heart of multicultural diversity in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille. Since the 1990s, Noailles has been subjected to waves of urban renewal programmes, such as the Euroméditerranée project, that sought to revitalize Marseille’s downtown by building new offices, hotels and tourist amenities. This construction of expensive projects has threatened to drive out longtime Noailles residents and shopowners, many of whom are of Muslim and northern/western African origin.

In October 2018, locals protested the decision to tear down Place Jean-Jaurès, a public square affectionately called La Plaine (‘The Plains’) that hosted free local activities and markets. The city deployed riot police to quell protests and guard the construction zone, erecting a costly 2.5-metre concrete wall to prohibit access. Yet, commercial redevelopment has not led to concrete living improvements for locals.

Blog post by Christian Lamour, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxembourg

Late modernity in the European Union is characterized by the return of ‘hot nationalism’, with a growing number of citizens supporting radical right parties and leaders. These political entities and personnel have hammered out an electoral winning, ‘nation-first’ agenda, which is notably marketed as protecting the cultural identity and cohesion of a national people, jeopardized by alien threats.

This vivid return of national cultural identities in the agenda of European states has appeared at a time when relationships between EU member states have been remarkably peaceful for generations, whereas their main long-term heritage has been the reproduction of national conflicts, territorial gains and momentary stabilization of borders following treaties torn apart in subsequent wars. The cultural enemies defined by today’s EU radical right within specific nation states are not neighbouring nations, but communities, the identities of which are represented as external to the world of nations. This means the elites are characterized as Europeanized/globalized, whilst the non-European migrants are racialized as oriental/African entities replacing the European national identities with the support of the globalized elite.​

Bermo carries my two year old son on one shoulder as we stroll down the main street in Antwerp, the beautiful medieval city in Belgium. My son uses Bermo’s soft turban as a place to rest his head, struggling to keep his eyes open. The photographer that follows the two of them in an attempt to get his best shot is really disturbing in his intensity and he has not even asked if he can take a photo. Bermo, used to being shown such excitement, pretends simply to ignore him. Bermo is not a celebrity as one might expect but a migrant worker from Niger that in his everyday life back home moves between the pastoral area and the city, where he struggles to make a living. Here I suspect that the combination of his clothing and dark skin, as well as the white body of my son, is arousing interest. While this particular event was rather extreme and took place prior to the so-called ‘crisis of migration’ in Europe, I have seen time and again WoDaaBe being perceived as belonging to the slot of the ‘exotic others’.

In my Identities article, ‘Global citizens, exotic others, and unwanted migrants: mobilities in and of Europe’, I focus on those portrayed as exotic to ask larger questions about otherness in Europe in the present. What kinds of bodies are welcomed in Europe that, after all, has for the last few years been characterised by large headlines proclaiming an ‘invasion’ of people from Africa into Europe? These depictions have often intersected with racialised narratives of Muslims and asylum seekers as threats, simultaneously criminalising and reifying these heterogenous categories. My article is based on ethnographic research in Belgium that consisted of brief visits conducted over a long period of time, wherein I participated in the life of WoDaaBe migrant men, as well as in the lives of other migrants from Niger in precarious positions. Some of these individuals I knew going on 20 years, having met them a long time back, while undertaking my two-year long PhD fieldwork in Niger.

Have you ever thought about the way that language is used to frame our understanding of ourselves and other people? It wasn’t many years ago that public transport systems moved from calling people ‘passengers’ to ‘customers’ – a transition that reflects the privatisation of these services, and the now primarily economic nature of the relationship between the service user and provider.
  
On a global scale, we principally use the language of nation-states to frame self and other. These are not empty frames, but full of meaning, rights and responsibilities. Nation-states ascribe citizenship, enact power, arrange economies, provide healthcare and education (to varying degrees), determine freedom and influence (consider the power of a British passport over, say, an Iranian one), and control the movement of goods and people.
 
But what happens when people challenge this nation-focused way of divvying up the world? How do we see the nationally non-compliant, and how does that influence how we ourselves are then framed?

When I was asked to write a blog to accompany my Identities article, 'The most cosmopolitan European city: situating narratives and practices of diversity in Marseille', I was asked to provide a suitable image. This faced me with a dilemma that cuts to the heart of my argument:  how to choose a picture that symbolises cosmopolitanism in Marseille without falling into stereotypical representations of what and where cosmopolitanism is, and who represents it?

Searching the internet for images of 'cosmopolitan Marseille' in English and in French ('Marseille cosmopolite') brought up quite different results. In the English language search, the majority of photographs showed shots of Marseille intended for international tourists: terrace cafés, well-known landmarks and generic promotional images from restaurant chains, bars and rental apartments. There was just one picture of a busy multi-ethnic market street. In the French search, similar touristy images also came up, alongside images that felt both more everyday and more ‘local’: interiors from different shops displaying open bags of spices for sale and a photograph from the municipal website of local politicians receiving international delegations from Marrakesh and Dakar, accompanied by a title describing Marseille as coloré et cosmopolite ('colourful and cosmopolitan'). There were, in addition, several references to specific impoverished neighbourhoods in the city-centre that are often taken as the embodiment of Marseille’s ‘cosmopolitanism’ while at the same time are the target of local and national urban renewal programmes that seek to attract a different - less ethnically-marked -  population into the city centre for many decades now.

Being international, open and cosmopolitan is ‘cool’. This is specifically true for students at elite universities, where values such as multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are promoted and enhanced by diversity-related activities and spaces. But what do students actually mean when they self-identify as cosmopolitans or global citizens? Do they all mean the same thing (probably not)? And what role does cosmopolitanism actually play in their lives?

My research, as explored in my Identities article, 'Exploring disjuncture: elite students' use of cosmopolitanism', is based on 24 interviews with international students at a global university in the UK. Its main finding is a typology of four different ways in which students use the idea of cosmopolitanism.

To fill this typology with life, I introduce the reader to Jing, Shigeki, Faisal and Anna. Each of these four students represents one of the four ways in which my respondents made sense of cosmopolitanism.