Global cities,cosmopolitanism, and geographies of tolerance

Scholarly attention devoted to global cities has emphasized their economic and political significance. Yet global cities are also deeply cultural and ideological in nature. Contrary to a long tradition of urban studies that views urban life as inherently alienating, this essay argues that the social and cultural diversity of global cities renders them mechanisms for the generation of tolerance and empathy. It opens with a brief review of global cities. Second, it traces the contours of cosmopolitanism as an ideology that fosters respect for social and cultural differences and a wider community of caring. Third, it reviews the empirical evidence of American global cities to make the case that their diversity leads them to generate a progressive cosmopolitan ethnics. It draws on the literature of social psychology, the work of Richard Florida, and indices of immigration, religious and linguistic diversity, homophobia, and voting patterns to substantiate the claim that cosmopolitan values are most evident and deeply rooted in globalized metropolitan centers.     

Reexamining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

Geographers have assessed the success and failure of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in terms of the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival. Conspicuously absent from the geographic literature are pedagogically oriented studies of the historical geography of the Civil Rights era. The Movement's popular image has congealed into a celebratory collection of names and dates, the sum of which is a vague, nearly mythic retelling that students might recognize but not necessarily care about. As a result, the Movement is at once contemptuously familiar yet bewilderingly strange for our students. This article offers a sympathetic critique of conventional Movement narratives, introducing the notion of empathetic pedagogy and presenting a case study of the Montgomery bus boycott. Our pedagogical approach stresses the role of empathy, both as a factor in shaping the actual sociospatial development of the Movement, as well as a strategy for encouraging students to appreciate the everyday courage and sacrifice that animated so many of its participants. Our study brings together two burgeoning literatures that have the potential to cultivate empathy among students: the critical reevaluation of mobility and explorations of subjectivity from a psychoanalytic perspective. Here mobility is understood in both its literal and figurative sense: in the case of the bus boycott, the intricate network established to literally move African Americans around the city, as well as the figurative movement of sympathy and solidarity that “moved” people to support their efforts and now informs popular, selective understandings of the protest.     

NATIONALISM,COSMOPOLITANISM, AND GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS

In this article I set nationalism and cosmopolitanism into sharp contrast with one another as inherently incompatible geographical imaginations. I begin by briefly denaturalizing nationalism and the nation‐state. I then turn to the philosophy and political agenda of cosmopolitanism, an ideology simultaneously very old and new, which offers a more inclusive and empathetic alternative to nationalist xenophobia. In the third section I argue that contemporary globalization has laid the ontological foundations of a cosmopolitan world order. Next, I explicate nationalism's and cosmopolitanism's competing visions of the definition and meaning of “community.” I summarize major objections to cosmopolitanism and offer a defense of it. In the following section I focus on the implications of cosmopolitanism for contemporary geography, including relational spatialities of empathy and caring. Finally, I suggest that contemporary globalization is gradually putting into place the legal and institutional apparatus for cosmopolitan global governance and democracy.     

你还会去武汉吗？疫情下的共情与旅游意愿——目的地形象的中介作用

截取武汉解封前后共1个月的微博数据,探讨因疫情带来的共情、目的地形象变化对后疫情时期旅游意愿的影响。通过文本分析和回归模型进行分析,结果发现：后疫情时期,人们对武汉的共情以积极情绪为主,占比85.09%,武汉的目的地形象要素除了“热干面”和“樱花”,还因为在疫情中体现出的顽强精神及巨大牺牲,被赋予新的“英雄”形象;总的来说,人们对武汉的旅游意愿较为强烈,疫情本身转化为一种特殊吸引物。假设模型检验结果显示：共情能直接影响旅游意愿,但在目的地形象加入模型后,共情对旅游意愿的作用被完全中介,其效应量为0.191。综合来看,在面对突发公共危机时,需要做好积极情绪引导,对旅游业而言,积极情绪意味着较高的旅游意愿,但是,在共情和旅游意愿之间,需要重视目的地形象的完全中介作用,其在联通情绪与行为意愿的过程中起非常关键的作用。