Race and ethnicity within cosmopolitan theories of spatiality and temporality

This chapter considers the contribution of cosmopolitan theory to analyzing race and ethnicity in education. Epistemological links between the sociology of knowledge and multicultural/antiracism education reveal the rise of sociology as a discipline corresponded with the rise of the bounded nation-state and rejection and skepticism of the notion of a free cosmopolitanism once associated with exiles and elites (Delanty, 2009, p. 52). Liberal multiculturalism has focused on group rights within the nation-state, which assumes separateness and boundedness (Delanty, 2009, p. 154). The chapter considers how cosmopolitan theory provides a way of examining the agentic moves of subjects and how a multiscalar cosmopolitanism is attuned to complex, nonlinear spatialities and temporalities: temporary, circular movements of people and multiple belongings. Drawing on examples from a range of research projects, the chapter harnesses new cosmopolitan theories, which are then compared with multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and Critical Race Theory.