Cosmopolitan Imaginations, Pluriversal Futures, and the Making of Local Space
Convener: Alberta Christina
Co-convener: Sheila Maharani, Geger Riyanto
The dynamics of people’s way of life include how they move beyond their space and community or is often called cosmopolitanism. Then, how do imaginations fueled by cosmopolitan interactions and exchanges in an increasingly multipolar world shape local landscapes and spatial practices? This is the central question of our panel. Globalization expands not only the reach of ideologies but also reshapes how local landscapes and the inhabitants within are imagined. It generates imaginaries that travel, flow, and circulate, influencing practices across diverse locales regarding how these landscapes are supposed to be, thereby reshaping people’s relationships with their environments. In an increasingly multipolar world, cosmopolitan imaginations no longer circulate solely from Euro-American centres, but also through South-South networks, regional powers, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), religious movements, and development regimes. From participatory community mapping inspired by Indigenous movements in the global North, to autonomous community initiatives drawing from anarchist collectives in Europe, to environmental and climate discourses promoted by civil society organizations and supported by global environmental funding, transnational discourses increasingly act as forces that transform local spheres through the expectations they impose. Locals, in turn, are expected to become subjects aligned with global norms in their relationships with their landscapes, such as local indigenous champions or guardians of the forest.
Our panel explores how global imaginaries intersect with locally grounded ontologies and moral worlds that produce plural and conflicting futures, rather than a singular trajectory of development. The panel engages with the notion that landscapes are intricately connected with paradox, tensions, and competing hegemonic fields beyond their localities through cosmopolitan imaginations of place. Dynamics that illustrate such situations range from urban collectives inspired to improve their neighborhoods, to rural communities working with conservation templates and expectations introduced by transnational organizations, to youth groups exposed to global Indigenous struggle narratives that shape their ideas and interventions in rural conflicts. Nevertheless, we also emphasize that cosmopolitan influences do not simply arrive as powerful external prescriptions; they encounter tensions, are negotiated, transformed, and reappropriated, giving rise to hybrid spatial practices. We invite contributions that illuminate what unfolds following the imposition of global imaginations onto particular localities. We seek to discuss the adaptations, appropriations, frictions, and subversions of these global imaginaries as they take place among local actors, intermediaries, and distant stakeholders, and, through these processes, to explore how space emerges through intricate connections with wider global dynamics.