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Cosmopolitan logics and limits: networked discourse, affect, and identity in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis

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Cosmopolitan logics and limits: networked discourse, affect, and identity in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis

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Content Copyright 2020 Stefanie Z. Demetriades

COSMOPOLITAN LOGICS AND LIMITS:
NETWORKED DISCOURSE, AFFECT, AND IDENTITY IN RESPONSES TO THE SYRIAN
REFUGEE CRISIS

By:
Stefanie Zoe Demetriades, MA, MPD

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
COMMUNICATION

December 2020
ii

DEDICATION
To my mad genius family, who did all the hard labor of providing, encouraging, and challenging
so that I could have the privilege and pleasure of reaching this point.

And, of course, above all, to the people and communities who cross borders of all kinds and
reimagine the world every day.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A tremendous debt of gratitude is owed to my committee members, Patti Riley, Henry Jenkins,
and Manuel Castells. Their expertise, insight, and mentorship have made me a better thinker and
scholar, and I am immensely proud to have their fingerprints etched in my work.

Many thanks as well to the community of graduate students who hold one another up, and to Eric
Lindberg for his steady hand and attention in editing. It would have been a much longer, lonelier
climb without them.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii

List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ viii

Chapter 1: Why Cosmopolitanism, Why Now? ............................................................................. 1
Preview of Chapters .................................................................................................................. 3
References ................................................................................................................................. 6
Chapter 2: Research Context: Mass Displacement of Syrians........................................................ 7
Early Political and Public Responses ........................................................................................ 8
Hardening Borders .................................................................................................................. 11
Scholarly Significance ............................................................................................................ 16
References ............................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter 3: The Refugee “Crisis” in Western Imagination............................................................ 25
When is a Crisis a Crisis? Media Attention and Framing ....................................................... 25
Victimization and Humanitarianism ....................................................................................... 26
Threat and Securitization ........................................................................................................ 29
Ambivalence ........................................................................................................................... 30
References ............................................................................................................................... 32
Chapter 4: Approach to Research ................................................................................................. 36
Current Status and Gaps in Literature ..................................................................................... 36
Interdisciplinary Influences .................................................................................................... 39
Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 40
Limitations and Critiques ........................................................................................................ 42
References ............................................................................................................................... 46
Chapter 5: Cosmopolitanism......................................................................................................... 49
A Cosmopolitan Modernity .................................................................................................... 49
Mapping Approaches to Cosmopolitanism ............................................................................. 53
An Integrative Framework ...................................................................................................... 61
References ............................................................................................................................... 62
Chapter 6: Study 1 Moral–Political Antagonism in Twitter Discourses about the Syrian
Refugee “Crisis” ..................................................................................................................... 66
A Mediated “Crisis” ................................................................................................................ 67
Networked Media and Audiences ........................................................................................... 69
v
Methods................................................................................................................................... 73
Key Findings ........................................................................................................................... 78
Discussion ............................................................................................................................... 85
References ............................................................................................................................... 92
Chapter 7: Study 2 Static Ideals and Active Negotiations of Cosmopolitanism: A Case Study
of International Volunteers in the Skaramagas Refugee Camp ............................................ 100
Context: Humanitarian NGOs and the Refugee Response in Greece ................................... 101
Methods................................................................................................................................. 102
Key Findings ......................................................................................................................... 111
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 131
References ............................................................................................................................. 132
Chapter 8: Integrated Discussion Axes of Active Cosmopolitanism.......................................... 136
Networked Collectivity ......................................................................................................... 137
Efficacy, Performativity, and Participation .......................................................................... 141
Critical Imagining ................................................................................................................. 145
References ............................................................................................................................. 149
Chapter 9: Conclusion: Advancing a Dilemma-Centered Approach to Cosmopolitanism ........ 153
Toward a Dilemma-Centered Approach to Cosmopolitanism .............................................. 154
Future Directions .................................................................................................................. 157
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 159
References ............................................................................................................................. 160
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 162

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 187
Interview Guide .................................................................................................................... 187
Interview Participant Questionnaire ..................................................................................... 191

vi
LIST OF TABLES
Table 7.1. Characteristics of Interview Participants (N = 21)..................................................... 105

vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1. Displacement of Syrians ............................................................................................... 7

Figure 2.2. EU Asylum Applications, 2008–2018 ........................................................................ 13

viii

ABSTRACT
This dissertation research advances empirical inquiry and theorization of critical
cosmopolitanism in the context of Syrian refugee displacement. Extending beyond studies of the
mass media representation of refugees that tend to dominate under a text-centric paradigm of
distant suffering research, this multistage, multimethod project examines how cosmopolitan
publics and logics are constructed through the interaction of networked discourse, identity, and
affect. Combining a mixed-methods study of Twitter discourse about refugees with international
fieldwork and interviews at the Skaramagas refugee camp in Greece, the dissertation challenges
models of cosmopolitanism as a singular or neatly progressive orientation, arguing that centering
analysis on dilemmas and contradictions is critical to formulating a robust theory and empirical
grounding of cosmopolitanism as active practice.

1
CHAPTER 1: WHY COSMOPOLITANISM, WHY NOW?
The long history and winding legacy of cosmopolitanism—referring broadly to a sense of
entanglement and shared fate in a world beyond the immediacy of local or national boundaries
and identities—have left the subject with no small degree of conceptual confusion. Certainly,
critics of cosmopolitanism have derided the concept as an empty signifier, casting so wide a net
as to offer nothing of great use at all, or exhibiting a naively overzealous enthusiasm for mixity
that neglects historical and contextual specificity (e.g., Hutnyk, 2000; Knowles, 2007; Parker,
2003). Marwan Kraidy (2002), for instance, cautions that research related to cultural
globalization “oftentimes appears to be at best descriptive, at worst a noncritical celebration of
transnational culture as global multiculturalism” (p. 318).
Add to these sharp critiques a historical moment when much of the world is experiencing
substantial challenges to the legitimacy and authority of global institutions and international
organizations, a resurgence of populist nationalism paired with a normalization of far-right
ideologies, and amplification of racist, xenophobic, and inflammatory rhetoric, and it’s fair to
ask what scholarly and practical relevance the study of cosmopolitanism offers in the
contemporary context.
The most compelling answer is perhaps also the most straightforward. Cosmopolitanism
is a social reality, whether or not we have found the right formulation to adequately capture its
complexity: “The term ‘cosmopolitan’ has become indispensable for describing the
epistemological challenge in which ‘humanity’ and ‘world’ are not merely thinkable but
unavoidable social, political and moral categories for the human condition” (Beck & Grande,
2012, p. 307).
2
Our era of globalized, networked modernity is largely defined by mobility and
displacement of all kinds—the uprooting and diffusion of information, ideas, people, goods,
risks, and opportunities across time and space, accelerated and shaped by communication
technology. Such disruption, whether voluntary or coerced, creative or destructive, is profoundly
destabilizing to categories of identity and culture that were conventionally bound to national
boundaries and territory. In the words of Stuart Hall (1996), “The universe is coming!” (p. 343).
And this reality is only going to become all the more undeniable and urgent:
Global crises and disasters such as climate change, virulent pandemics, financial
meltdowns and world food, water and energy shortages, for example, are neither
territorially confined nor often best conceived as discrete national events that erupt
without warning to disrupt routines, established norms and social order. In their complex
interpenetrations and fall out around the globe they can affect us all. When approached in
global context these and other disasters are best reconceptualised and theorised as
endemic to, complexly enmeshed within and, potentially, encompassing in today’s world
(dis)order. (Cottle, 2014, p. 4)
Indeed, the final stages of writing this dissertation were completed as the escalating wave of the
COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, a stark reminder that we are all very much global citizens,
like it or not, who face the precarity, risk, and imbalance of global interdependence. At the same
time, these interconnections carry tremendous possibility for new forms of collectivity and
solidarity—“a profoundly new historical moment” in which a global consciousness and
“universal vision of belonging is potentially realizable” (Werbner, 2015, p. 345).
This social reality and possibility have thrust cosmopolitanism forward as a subject
demanding more rigorous social inquiry, establishing it as a richly generative construct through
3
which to examine the inherently globalized interactions and interdependencies of modern social
life. In contrast to traditions that tend to position cosmopolitanism either as an abstract moral
ideal or a political project of supranational governance, critical cosmopolitan social inquiry
defines cosmopolitanism as a “reflexive condition in which the perspective of others is
incorporated into one’s own identity, interests or orientation in the world” (Delanty, 2011, p.
634). Central to this orientation is the positioning of cosmopolitanism not as a static normative
state, but rather as a communicative practice of ongoing and often ambivalent or contested
cultural meaning-making.
Following this turn, this dissertation research advances empirical inquiry and theorization
of critical cosmopolitanism in the context of Syrian refugee displacement. Extending beyond
studies of the mass media representation of refugees that tend to dominate under a text-centric
paradigm of distant suffering research, this multistage, multimethod project examines how
cosmopolitan publics and logics are constructed through the interaction of networked discourse,
identity, and affect. Combining a mixed-methods study of Twitter discourse about refugees with
international fieldwork and interviews at the Skaramagas refugee camp in Greece, the
dissertation challenges models of cosmopolitanism as a singular or neatly progressive
orientation, arguing that centering analysis on dilemmas and contradictions offers a novel and
valuable approach in advancing a robust theory and empirical grounding of cosmopolitanism as
active practice.
Preview of Chapters
The project begins by establishing the research context of Syrian refugee displacement as
one of particular social urgency and relevance to the study of cosmopolitanism. Chapter 2
provides a background primer on the mass displacement of Syrians and subsequent political and
4
social response in the West. Chapter 3 then moves to a review of existing literature on how
refugees and migrants have been treated and covered in public, political, and media discourse,
with particular attention to dominant paradigms of humanitarian care and securitized control that
shape an ambivalent definition of and response to the “crisis.”
Chapters 4 and 5 orient the project’s approach as one of cosmopolitan inquiry. Chapter 4
begins with an overview of how the project intervenes to address current gaps in the literature
and outlines the overall methodological approach and rationale in pursuing two discrete studies,
each of which approaches the subject from distinct methodological perspectives and research
sites. Chapter 5 focuses on the theoretical lineage of cosmopolitan theory, mapping approaches
to the subject in existing literature.
Chapters 6 and 7 turn to the two-study empirical basis of the project. The first study,
presented in Chapter 6, examines Twitter discourse about refugees from a 5-month period in
2018. Applying a combination of big-data style insights to identify broad trends in the dataset
with thematic coding of a subset of tweets, the study finds a hyperpoliticized landscape in which
extreme views are amplified and support for refugees is often framed in terms of antagonistic
partisanship that leaves little room for refugee voices and experiences. The second study,
presented in Chapter 7, shifts research contexts and methodologies from the mediated, virtual
context of Twitter to fieldwork with international volunteers at the Skaramagas refugee camp in
Greece. Based on participant observation and semistructured interviews, the study identifies key
areas of tension in which volunteers struggled with translating normative cosmopolitan ideals
related to obligation, proper distance, and efficacy into practice.
Chapters 8 and 9 conclude the project by considering the findings and implications of the
two studies in dialogue with each other. In an integrated discussion, Chapter 8 identifies three
5
common underlying logics and limits of active cosmopolitanism that emerge in both studies:
networked collectivity; efficacy, performativity, and participation; and critical imagining.
Chapter 9 builds on this discussion to propose a dilemma-centered approach for cosmopolitan
inquiry, and closes the dissertation with directions for future research.

6
References
Beck, U., & Grande, E. (2012). Cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization. In G. Ritzer (Ed.),
The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization. John Wiley & Sons.
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog113
Cottle, S. (2014). Rethinking media and disasters in a global age: What’s changed and why it
matters. Media, War & Conflict, 7(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635213513229
Delanty, G. (2011). Cultural diversity, democracy and the prospects of cosmopolitanism: A
theory of cultural encounters. British Journal of Sociology, 62(4), 633–656.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01384.x
Hall, S. (1996). Ethnicity: Identity and difference. In G. Eley & R. G. Suny (Eds.), Becoming
national: A reader (pp. 339–349). Oxford University Press.
Hutnyk, J. (2000). Adorno at woman: South Asian crossovers and the limits of hybridity-talk. In
P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multi-cultural identities
and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 106–138). Zed Books.
Knowles, S. (2007). Macrocosm-opolitanism? Gilroy, Appiah, and Bhabha: The unsettling
generality of cosmopolitan ideas. Postcolonial Text, 3(4).
Kraidy, M. M. (2002). Hybridity in cultural globalization. Communication Theory, 12(3), 316–
339. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/12.3.316
Parker, D. (2003). Diaspora, dissidence and the dangers of cosmopolitanism. Asian Studies
Review, 27(2), 155–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820308713373
Werbner, P. (2015). Anthropology and the new cosmopolitanism: Rooted, feminist and
vernacular perspectives. Bloomsbury.

7
CHAPTER 2
RESEARCH CONTEXT: MASS DISPLACEMENT OF SYRIANS
In what the UNHCR called “the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time,”
millions of Syrians have been displaced from their homes since civil conflict and violence began
escalating in 2011—a devastating combination of a civil war between President Assad and
resistance groups, exacerbated by Islamic State terrorist campaigns and geopolitical struggles for
control and influence in the region (UNHCR, 2016). Current estimates place the total number of
displaced Syrians at more than 5.6 million, with millions more in Syria in severe need of
humanitarian assistance. Almost half of these refugees have been internally displaced in Syria,
and most others have resettled in neighboring countries. A relatively small proportion—about 1
million, or 10%—have sought refuge farther West, primarily in Europe, but also in Australia,
Canada, and the United States (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1. Displacement of Syrians

8
Triggered by a confluence of destabilizing political factors in Syria and internationally,
1

the rate of Syrian refugee arrivals to Europe increased dramatically in 2015. At its peak, more
than 1 million people attempted the treacherous and often deadly journey across the
Mediterranean to reach Italy or Greece, first point-of-entry countries for migrants aiming to cross
through the Balkans and continue to Northern Europe.
2

For many Western audiences, the summer of 2015 was the introduction to what would
come to be widely known as the “Syrian refugee crisis.” Indeed, the issue only really captured
significant attention as a “crisis” in Europe once refugees were quite literally reaching its shores:
“In Western media, the mass movement of forced migrants was only narrated as a crisis when
refugees began traveling to Europe, while larger numbers of forced migrants, including Syrian
refugees, had already been living in country including Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt, sometimes
for years” (Leurs & Ponzanesi, 2018, p. 7). In the months and years since that summer of 2015,
however, the response has been uneven and fraught, shifting from relative openness to an
increasingly defensive posture aimed at minimizing the movement and visibility of these
refugees.
Early Political and Public Responses
For a brief window of time in the summer of 2015, there was a belated but nonetheless
fairly remarkable swell of public and political support for the refugees, spurred in no small part
by high-profile tragedies in the Mediterranean—including the death of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi in
the Aegean Sea, whose image made international headlines and provoked a massive public
outcry. Indeed, his image became perhaps the defining moment of this period, breaking through

1
See the UNHCR timeline (https://www.unrefugees.org/news/timeline-of-the-syrian-crisis-seven-tragic-years/) for a
summary of key development between 2011 and 2018.
2
For detailed figures on Mediterranean sea and land arrivals since January 2015, see the UNHCR Refugee
Situations Portal (https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean).
9
the initially tepid response and marking a substantive shift in discourse and policy (Mortensen &
Trenz, 2016).
Positioning herself as a moral and political leader at the forefront of the response,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel emerged among global leaders to most forcefully make a
claim of moral duty and political responsibility. Most significantly, Merkel broke with the 1990
Dublin regulation stipulating that refugees could request asylum only in the first country of
arrival, announcing that Germany would process all Syrian asylum claims regardless of entry
point. This “open-door” policy, backed by a strong majority in Germany, put pressure on other
European leaders to take a similar stand. Public movements of opinion largely rose up in support
of a concerted humanitarian-oriented response during this period. On social media, the hashtag
#RefugeesWelcome quickly gained traction, reaching “trending” status and becoming an
international rallying call for activists (Barisione et al., 2019). In September 2015, tens of
thousands of people across cities in Europe and Australia marched in an international “day of
action” in support of refugees (“Pro-migrant rallies in Europe and Australia draw thousands,”
2015). Citizen donations likewise surged—in the aftermath of Kurdi’s death in particular,
donations increased more than 100-fold (Slovic et al., 2017), and numerous grassroots
organizations emerged alongside large international organizations to provide refugees with both
immediate humanitarian aid and longer-term support (Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). On the Greek
island of Lesbos, the generous response of local villagers rallying to care for asylum seekers
garnered international accolades, including the UNHCR’s highest humanitarian award and a
Nobel Peace Prize nomination (Smith, 2016). In Germany, majority support for refugees was
framed around Willkommenskultur—a culture of welcome—as a core national value,
undergirded by statements of public officials affirming a moral duty and pragmatic generosity
10
exemplified in Merkel’s oft-repeated rallying call “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”). A wide
range of prominent politicians and public figures likewise advocated in support of refugees as a
moral and humanitarian duty, among them Ban Ki-moon, who described the issue as a “true test
of our collective conscience” (Ki-moon, 2018), actress and activist Angelina Jolie, who wrote
that “our response will be the measure of our humanity,” (Jolie, 2018), and Pope Francis, whose
statements and public displays of support for refugees called for compassionate solidarity.
It is, of course, important to avoid romanticizing this period, and certainly the response
was far from unanimously positive. Antirefugee sentiment, protests, and political rhetoric
escalated. Hate crimes against refugees marred any semblance of untroubled tolerance: In 2016,
an estimated 10 attacks on migrants occurred per day in Germany (“Germany hate crime,” 2017)
and numerous instances of arson attacks targeted refugee homes and migrant shelters across
Europe beginning in 2015. Nor should the delayed response by European leaders be understated,
recalling that displacement of Syrians had begun years before young Alan Kurdi’s death
provoked such public outcry.
Yet the swell of empathetic sentiment and rhetoric that permeated mainstream discourse
in the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016 was nonetheless remarkable. Particularly in Europe,
Germany’s Willkommenskultur seemed a kind of declaration of global accountability,
encapsulating a moment of broad commitment, determination, and even optimism:
For many political and academic observers the temporarily hegemonic atmosphere of
welcome in 2015 came as something of a surprise. Every major political party, trade
union, company, all kinds of associations and the media joined in the welcoming
campaign (even the populist and rather right-leaning tabloid “BILD”). The events
themselves, and the positive attitude of the government and mainstream media together
11
mainstreamed the movement that already existed. (Hamann & Karakayali, 2016, pp. 74–
75)
Hardening Borders
In a matter of months, however, political backlash and conflict among European Union
members had overtaken early promise. Despite obligations under the UN and calls from
Germany, France, and Italy for mandated distribution of migrants throughout the EU, countries
in Eastern Europe rejected quotas and, in some cases, refused outright to accept any refugees
(Wintour, 2017).
High-profile violent incidents also inflamed anxieties and hardened resistance toward the
end of 2015. On November 13, a string of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris carried out by the
Islamic State killed more than 130 people and wounded hundreds of others. Reports indicated
that some of the attackers had used forged Syrian passports and posed as refugees to enter the
EU; in fact, all the attackers were EU citizens, most of them born in Belgium or France. In
December, 12 people were killed in a terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, carried out
by a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia. The following month, on New Year’s Eve, dozens of
women in Cologne were threatened and sexually assaulted, with reports implicating refugees and
migrants in the attacks (Smale, 2016). Although international agencies emphasized that no
evidence linked refugees to increased risk of terrorism, and cautioned that “policies that are
restrictive or that violate human rights may in fact create conditions conducive to terrorism”
(OHCHR, 2016), the incidents became a political crisis for Merkel’s promigrant stance,
inflaming fears over refugees as physically dangerous and socially incompatible with European
norms and values. Far-right political parties seized on such incidents in framing refugees as
target for national populist anxiety, often painting the acceptance of refugees stance as a
12
dangerous betrayal of patriotism; AfD leader Frauke Petry, for instance, tweeted “After the wave
of crimes and sexual attacks, is Germany ‘colorful and cosmopolitan’ enough for you, Frau
Merkel?” Far-right parties succeeded in broadening support across Europe. The 2016 Brexit
campaign notably featured prominent antimigrant messages, including the famous UKIP
billboard depicting a long line of refugees with “BREAKING POINT” emblazoned across the
picture. Similar rhetoric was echoed in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as then-candidate
Donald Trump pledged not only to bar Syrian refugees from entering the United States, but also
to deport those already in the country, declaring “I’m putting the people on notice that are
coming here from Syria, as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they’re going
back.” Even where they did not achieve electoral victories, far-right parties often succeeded in
pushing antimigrant rhetoric and policy positions further into the political mainstream.
By the end of 2015, Hungary had closed its borders to migrants, and Macedonia, Croatia,
and Slovenia followed suit a few months later, blocking the route from Greece to Western
Europe through the Balkans. In March 2016, the European Union, aiming to further slow the
movement of refugees into Europe, signed a controversial deal to hold migrants arriving in
Greece and deport those not approved for asylum to Turkey, with an explicit aim of discouraging
migrants from attempting the journey.
The effect has been dramatic: Since the deal passed, refugee arrivals and asylum claims
in Europe have plummeted (see Figure 2.2). In 2018, asylum applications in the EU fell to 2014
levels (Eurostat, 2019). Highlighting the disparity among host countries under the 2016 deal,
however, applications filed in Greece and the small Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta
have continued to climb. Even with the drop in asylum claims across Europe, conditions on the
islands have worsened, leaving thousands stranded in administrative limbo in overcrowded
13
camps. Nor have slowing arrivals ended deaths in the Mediterranean, which have topped 1,000
for six years in a row; in fact, the reality has been the grim inverse, with the rate of fatalities
rising to an average of 6 per day in 2018 (UNHCR, 2019a). Aid groups have been highly critical
of the deal in this regard, decrying it as “cruel, inhumane and cynical” (Doctors Without Borders,
2019). In early 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, citing insufficient support and
burden-sharing from the European Union, announced that Turkey would longer stop migrants
from crossing into Greece. Violent clashes at the border ensued, with Greek troops deploying
tear gas and water cannons to turn back migrants (Gumrukcu & Toksabay, 2020)
Figure 2.2. EU Asylum Applications, 2008–2018

Australia and the U.S. have likewise largely resisted and rejected hosting or resettling
Syrian refugees within their borders. For years, Australia has maintained a harsh “zero-
tolerance” antimigrant policy, detaining refugees and migrants in offshore camps on the Pacific
14
islands of Nauru and Manus. The tiny, desolate islands have been the subject of intense legal and
humanitarian criticism, described as nightmarish and “apocalyptic” sites of neglect and abuse
(Isaacs, 2018; Médecins Sans Frontières, 2018). Under a 2016 deal signed during former
President Obama’s administration, the United States agreed to resettle up to 1,200 refugees from
Australia’s offshore detention centers; this was thrown into doubt when newly elected President
Trump initially resisted honoring the “dumb” deal, complaining that “they are not going to be
wonderful people” (Miller et al., 2017). It was only in February 2019 that the last child on Nauru
was resettled in the United States following years of growing alarm about a mental health crisis
that had children as young as 8 suffering from extreme trauma and self-harm. About 1,000
migrants still remain on the islands.
The United States, which already had among the lowest rates of Syrian refugee
acceptance, even with former President Obama’s effort to increase Syrian resettlement in 2016
and 2017, has turned to a harder stance against refugees under President Trump. The Trump
administration has presided over drastic cuts to refugee resettlement (Davis & Shear, 2019;
Hesson, 2019). In 2017, the United States accepted fewer refugees than the rest of the world for
the first time since the adoption of the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act (Connor & Krogstad, 2018). In
2019, as reports of efforts to effectively end refugee acceptance altogether circulated, the
administration announced an unprecedented cap at 18,000 refugee admissions for the 2020 fiscal
year (Krogstad, 2019). President Trump’s mixed signals on U.S. policy in Syria—announcing
unexpectedly in 2019 that the United States would withdraw troops from Syria, and later
softening the stance—have provoked further uncertainty and insecurity, not least for the tens of
thousands of refugees living in Syrian camps under the direct protection of U.S. troops (Rogin,
15
2018), and raising concerns that destabilization will spark a renewed humanitarian crisis (Marks
& Lang, 2019).
Canada has stood out as somewhat of an exception to the trend, with a surge in
government and privately sponsored resettlement programs that put it first in refugee
resettlement globally in 2018 and second in granting citizenship to refugees (“Canada resettled,”
2019). Prime Minister Justin Trudeau notably advocated for greater support for refugees as key
part of his political brand, campaigning with a promise to rapidly resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees,
and making a point of personally welcoming the first arrivals at a Toronto airport (Austen,
2015). In the years since, however, the emphasis has increasing shifted toward private
sponsorship over government assistance, and in 2019, the Trudeau administration announced a
substantial shift in policy to turn away those who had already made a claim in a “safe third
country” and deny claimants full hearings (Kestler-D’Amours, 2019; “Trudeau’s ‘sharp turn,’”
2019).
More recently, Russia has led a push to repatriate Syrian refugees despite the continued
instability and violence in the country. Although the UNHCR has indicated a “notable trend” of
Syrian refugees expressing a long-term desire to return home, but fear it will not be possible to
do so safely in the foreseeable future (UNHCR Lebanon, 2018). Now in its ninth year of conflict,
the country’s housing, infrastructure, and services have been devastated. Death, injury, and
displacement continue to climb in the face of ongoing armed conflict: July 2018 marked the
largest internal displacement in the history of the conflict, with 330,000 Syrians forced out of
southwest Syria (UN News, 2018), and continued fighting in the Islamic State’s remaining
stronghold in eastern Syria has forced thousands more to evacuate to already-overwhelmed
camps. A government offensive for control of Idlib province in northwestern Syria provoked a
16
renewed wave of devastation in late 2019 into 2020, displacing a further 800,000 civilians in
only a matter of months and setting off urgent warnings that the situation is now unfolding as
potentially “the biggest humanitarian horror story of the 21st century” (“Syria war,” 2020).
Meanwhile, the focus of the response in Europe has shifted from the immediacy of mass
arrivals to the bureaucratic management and control of refugees. Refugee camps are vastly
overcrowded—regularly holding more than three times the capacity they were designed for—and
severely underresourced, with long lines to access even basic necessities. In addition to
inadequate physical care and security, refugees in these camps, burdened with a traumatic past,
untenable present, and uncertain future, are vulnerable to serious mental health issues; recent
reports found that children as young as 10 are attempting suicide (Squires, 2018). Those who
have been resettled also bear the weight of posttraumatic stress, depression, and anxiety
(Javanbakht et al., 2019). And precarity feeds further precarity, with repeated displacement
eroding personal resources and destroying coping mechanisms needed to meet basic needs
(IDMC, 2019).
Scholarly Significance
Undoubtedly, there are compelling reasons to advance research and analysis of the
current mass displacement of Syrians as a distinct historical moment, with full recognition of its
historical specificity and significance as a singular phenomenon. Both the sheer scale of the
displacement, with more than half of Syria’s prewar population forced from their homes, and the
particular confluence of historical, social, and political forces that have shaped its trajectory are
unique.
Yet much of the richness of the topic in scholarly inquiry lies in how this case
encapsulates and signifies broader phenomena of globalized modernity. In one of the most literal
17
forms of evidence that “the defining feature of the contemporary world is more circulation than
stable structures and organizations” (Diminescu, 2008, p. 566), mass migration and
displacement, already at record highs globally, will likely only become more frequent and more
salient in the face of heightened political, economic, and climate pressure (Gemenne, 2011;
UNHCR, 2019b). More fundamentally, the issue has become one of the most prominent
contemporary expressions, materially and symbolically, of a profound global unsettling, as
Zygmunt Bauman notes in his 2016 book, Strangers at our Door:
What we call “refugee crisis” is but one of multiple manifestations of the state of
“interregnum”—one in which the habitual ways of acting have stopped working properly
and bringing familiar results, but the new ways—more adapted to the changed
conditions—are still at best stuck at the drawing-board stage … [refugees and migrants]
are embodiments of the collapse of order (whatever we consider to be an ‘order’: a state
of affairs in which the relations between causes and effects are stable, and thus graspable
and predictable, allowing those within it to know how to proceed), of an order that has
lost its binding force. (Bauman, 2016, pp. 2, 21)
There is, in this sense, deep ontological and existential insecurity embedded in discourse and
responses to movement and displacement. The figure of the migrant or the refugee is “often a
placeholder, marking memories of empire, of fears of globalization, or a sense of impending
catastrophe” (Anderson, 2017, p. 1535), and as such, how they are framed or understood reveals
a great deal about the anxieties of a cosmopolitanized modernity in which national narratives and
conventional borders are simultaneously disrupted and shored up, global risk and
interdependences are reconfigured, and encounters with difference—direct and mediated—is a
defining feature of social experience. At the same time, there is tremendous openness and
18
possibility in this moment, with new affective consciousness, new solidarities, and new social
forms emerging in response to this displacement.
This issue thus draws into relief key dimensions and tension of cosmopolitanism. Here
the conditions of involuntary “cosmopolitanization” (Beck & Sznaider, 2006)—represented in
this case in forced mobility and encounter, and the diffusion of global risk and
interdependence—come head to head with the potentials and limits of a normative cosmopolitan
ideals. This dynamic, transformative potential—ambivalent, imperfect, but profound
nonetheless—is what makes the case of the Syrian refugee “crisis” uniquely valuable as a site of
cosmopolitan inquiry.

19
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Bauman, Z. (2016). Strangers at our door (1st ed.). Polity.
Beck, U., & Sznaider, N. (2006). Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: A research
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4446.2006.00091.x
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Davis, J. H., & Shear, M. D. (2019, September 6). Trump administration considers a drastic cut
in refugees allowed to enter U.S. The New York Times.
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20
Diminescu, D. (2008). The connected migrant: An epistemological manifesto. Social Science
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The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/eu-takes-action-against-
eastern-states-for-refusing-to-take-refugees

25
CHAPTER 3
THE REFUGEE “CRISIS” IN WESTERN IMAGINATION
The ambivalence of the Western response to this displacement, teetering between
compassionate opening and defensive closing, speaks to the fundamental precarity of the refugee
as figure evoking both care and anxiety. Public perceptions and policy responses waver
unsteadily between compassionate opening to refugees as victims of circumstance and defensive
closing against refugees as threats to national order and security. Rather than representing
exclusive opposites, these two paradigms of humanitarian care and securitized control often
work in uncomfortable tandem, producing an ambivalent relationship of care and control,
solidarity and exclusion that is reflected and reified through mediated representations.
When is a Crisis a Crisis? Media Attention and Framing
We begin with the fundamental premise and recognition that media coverage and
narratives of the issue are neither neutral nor objective reflections of dominant public perceptions
and attitudes, but rather actively construct meaning in the public mind. As such, media
representations of refugees and migrants “influence public opinion, promote various
interpretations of the immigration system (e.g. too lenient vs not accommodating enough), or cue
specific considerations, including legitimacy, “need,” and security” in ways that have profound
implications for understanding the issue among Western audiences and the subsequent response
to those seeking asylum” (Lawlor & Tolley, 2017, p. 968). Indeed, the very notion of the current
displacement of Syrians as a “refugee crisis” is itself largely a product of media frames defining
it as such. As noted previously, the state of crisis in Western discourse was defined primarily as a
function of immediate visibility and proximity (Leurs & Ponzanesi, 2018). This kind of attention
bias is certainly not unique to Syrian displacement—media scholars have long recognized a
26
preference for stories that are proximal, timely, and contain some element of conflict in foreign
affairs news coverage generally (Chang et al., 2012), and in migration stories in particular (Hier
& Greenberg, 2002; Lawlor & Tolley, 2017). Nevertheless, it is particularly telling that media
attention has so markedly declined with the decrease in arrivals and asylum claims in Europe
despite the unaltered scale and human consequences of displacement: A search in LexisNexis
indicates a drop in coverage by almost 50% in 2017 and 2018 as compared to 2015 and 2016.
Coverage in 2018 fell by more than 70% from the peak in 2015. There is, in this sense, an “out
of sight, out of mind” element to Western media coverage of the issue. Indeed, in recent years,
the European Commission has made explicit efforts to manage this notion of “crisis.” Notably, in
a 2019 factsheet titled “Debunking myths about migration,” the first item on the list was a firm
statement that “Europe is no longer is crisis mode,” supported by figures documenting the drop
in arrivals since 2015 (European Commission, 2019).
This, too, points to the dominant construction of the crisis as one of refugee movement
and arrivals rather than a crisis of political or humanitarian responsibility (e.g., Chouliaraki &
Stolic, 2017). The salient point here is not that Syrian displacement either should or should not
be identified as a “crisis” as such, but that the scope and criteria used to define what kind of
crisis it may be orients the logical and appropriate response. Consequently, the way the crisis is
framed in media and political discourse lays the foundation for the relative emphasis of either a
humanitarian paradigm, focused on the needs of refugees as victims, or securitization paradigm,
centered on the anxiety around refugees as threats.
Victimization and Humanitarianism
As victims of circumstance, refugees are positioned as objects of compassion requiring
care and support. In public and political discourse, moral claims are frequently made based on
27
universalizing principles of human rights and dignity. This is codified in the 1951 United
Nations Refugee Convention, which emerged from the collective trauma of World War II as a
formalized recognition of the rights of refugees and lays out international responsibilities to
protect asylum seekers.
It is difficult to disentangle such paradigms of care and compassion from moralizing
frameworks, with complex implications for the power relationship between Western responses
and refugee subjects. Chouliaraki and Stolic (2017), for instance, critique a “regime of empathy”
as encouraging compassion and care from Western audiences, specifically through charitable
giving, while reinforcing the marginalization and otherness of refugees in the process. The
authors argue that such frameworks of charitable empathy are fundamentally ambivalent and
unstable, susceptible to “swiftly shifting into rival affective moods of indignation or fear,” as was
the case in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017, pp. 1168–1169).
This kind of contingent compassion is similarly evident in the way refugees and migrants are
sorted into categories of legitimacy and deservingness. In media coverage, this begins with the
very act of naming: Labels such as “migrant,” “economic migrant,” “forced migrant,” “refugee,”
“asylum seeker” may all bear different weight and connotations in various contexts. Certainly,
some of these terms carry legal significance and force,
3
but these categories also carry broader
symbolic significance in public discourse. The term “migrant,” for instance, is often associated
more closely with voluntary or opportunistic movement, whereas “refugee” tends to be more
closely linked with more involuntary—and thus, more deserving of compassion—movement and
victimization (Berry et al., 2015; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016).

3
Under international law, for instance, “asylum seeker” refers to those who have requested international protection
but whose claim has not yet been legally assessed; consequently, not all asylums seekers will be formally recognized
with official refugee status and protections
28
Discourse around refugees is also inextricably bound up with racialized and gendered
narratives. Young male Syrian refugees, for instance, are widely portrayed as dangerous and are
a favorite target of anti-immigrant discourses that cast them as terrorists or “rapefugees,” or
conversely as cowards who have abandoned their country and family (e.g., Berry et al., 2015;
Rettberg & Gajjala, 2016). In the context of Syrian displacement, this is particularly evident in
disparate responses based on religion and gender: The United States, among other countries, has
prioritized accepting Christian refugees, and single young Muslim men are often met with far
greater anxiety and resistance than women, children, and families. It is also important to
recognize that Syrian refugees on the whole have garnered greater public attention and support
than refugees and migrants from other regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa; as Lawlor and
Tolley (2017) remark: “There is a hierarchy of acceptance with White, Christian, able-bodied
immigrants at one end of the spectrum, and racial minority, non-Christian, non-
Anglophone/Francophone at the other end of the spectrum” (p. 972).
In addition to judgments made about refugees themselves, humanitarian responses are
also very much a function of inwardly focused narratives and performances of cultural identity
and value. At a national and regional level, many of the arguments made in favor of accepting
refugees were built on an appeal to national and European identity aligned with the West as
paternalistic caretaker, savior, and leader (e.g., Siapera et al., 2018). Along similar lines,
Mortensen and Trenz (2016) identified in the response to Alan Kurdi’s death a “sentimental pity
– a self-oriented emotion that celebrated ‘ourselves’ as a benevolent public as much as it showed
care for vulnerable others” (p. 350).

29
Threat and Securitization
The humanitarian care paradigm runs up against anxieties about refugees and migrants as
inherently threatening. The prevailing response to such a framework of anxiety and threat has
been a move toward a paradigm of securitization, in which greater control over borders and
people is constructed as a necessary response to an existential threat (e.g., Bourbeau, 2015). In
this regard, the securitization of refugees is manifest in both material and symbolic expressions
of threat and control. Certainly, the border has become elevated as a site of increasingly
militarized control, and the European Union has twice tripled its spending on border security
since 2015 (Stone, 2018). Technology is also a key mechanism of securitization, used to identify,
surveil, and categorize migrants in ways that often “[mask] human intervention and decisions
that have configured the parameters of datafied decision making and discrimination” (Leurs &
Ponzanesi, 2018, p. 9).
Simultaneously, securitization is also produced through symbolic and communicative
processes that establish control over populations by delineating categories of risk, legitimacy,
and exclusion (e.g., Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Vaughan-Williams, 2015). The
construction of refugees as unknown and dangerous “others” is thus a crucial foundation for the
implementation of restrictive policies and militarized responses. Research in this regard has
consistently identified the prevalence and persistence of broadly negative portrayals in news
media that primarily position refugees in terms of costs and risks (Berry et al., 2015; Chouliaraki
& Zaborowski, 2017; Pantti & Ojala, 2019; Philo et al., 2013). Reviewing previous studies along
these lines, Bozdag and Smets (2017) identified common clusters of intersecting frames,
including a “danger/securitization/control framework,” emphasizing migrants and refugees as
threats to physical security, an “economic/social costs framework,” representing refugees as
30
drains on national resources, and a “culture/integration framework,” focused on refugees as
culturally incompatible or resistant in mainstream Western society. These frameworks often
intersect and reinforce one another, contributing to a broader narrative of refugees as a drain and
fundamentally as an acute problem to be solved. Scholars have likewise analyzed how the
language used to represent refugees in media and political discourse contributes to and reinforces
such constructions, finding that “media language is extremely ideological and contributes to
political stigmatization or even determines the legal fate of refugees” (Sajir & Aouragh, 2019, p.
557). Metaphors evoking natural disasters are especially prevalent, with terms such as “flood,”
“waves,” “flow,” “tide,” and “spillover” contributing to a narrative of uncontrollability and risk
(e.g., Abid et al., 2017; Bradimore & Bauder, 2012; Gale, 2004; Lacroix, 2004). Such metaphors
“serve to dehumanize migrants and refugees while exaggerating the size, scale and threat of the
phenomenon” (Welch & Schuster, 2005, p. 400) and contribute to an impression of an
overwhelming, unmanageable influx of “faceless and de-identified” strangers (Banks, 2012, p.
302).
Ambivalence
Narrowly conceived, humanitarian and securitization paradigms might be positioned as
exclusive opposites, with securitization associated with a disproportionate and dehumanizing
prioritization of control at the expense of humanitarian concerns of care, rights, and dignity.
Critical migration scholars have argued, however, that in practice, securitization is often
uncomfortably entangled with norms and practices of compassion in a complex humanitarian–
securitization framework of combined care and control (e.g., Vaughan-Williams, 2015; Watson,
2009). Chouliaraki and Georgiou (2017) extend this idea in their study of refugee reception on
the Greek island of Chios, describing this entanglement as a model of “hospitability,” in which
31
competing claims for securitized control and humanitarian concern are woven together in a “new
and highly ambivalent moral order” with a “double moral requirement: to upload the
humanitarian imperative to care for vulnerable others, and simultaneously, to protect European
citizens from potential threats by those same others” (pp. 159–160).
In short, no straightforward or exclusive demarcation exists between care and concern,
control and compassion, and it is this grounding of ambivalence that serves as the entry point of
for this inquiry. In such a context of fraught mediated representations, intersecting narratives,
and competing affective claims, what are the cosmopolitan logics and limits that shape cultural
meaning and responses to refugee displacement?
The next chapter establishes the scope and objectives of this project to this end, situating
it in the existing scholarly landscape, before turning to a more detailed elucidation of its
underpinnings in cosmopolitan theory in Chapter 5.

32
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474505057117

36
CHAPTER 4
APPROACH TO RESEARCH
Current Status and Gaps in Literature
As previous sections indicated, a rich body of scholarly work has examined the Western
mediation and response to the displacement of Syrian refugees. Communication scholars have
provided significant insight and analysis regarding the ways news narratives establish
frameworks of compassion and anxiety and reinforce categories of legitimacy, exclusion, and
risk. These studies situate the issue in an overarching discursive architecture, identifying
prevailing news frames and political narratives that have been the primary point of exposure for
most Western audiences. Regarding the full scope and significance linking distant suffering to
networked audiences and cosmopolitan publics, however, there are areas that remain strikingly
underexplored in the existing literature.
To begin, many of these studies align with a media studies perspective on spectatorship
and distant suffering. This field has a rich history of critically examining (mainly Western)
representations of disasters and humanitarian crises (mainly in the global South), but it is also
subject to a fairly restricted focus—namely, media studies of distant suffering tend to be
primarily concerned with news media representations of humanitarian issues and those affected
individuals. Remarkably few go beyond the question of representation to examine the spectator’s
active role and response to distant suffering. This is not a new critique; Seu (2010) notes the
striking dearth in empirical studies of “how audiences respond to communication about distant
suffering, even though many assumptions have been made about what happens in this space” (p.
43). There has been a recent push to advance a more audience-focused and interdisciplinary
approach to studying distant suffering (e.g., Höijer, 2004; Kyriakidou, 2015; Ong, 2014; von
37
Engelhardt, 2015). A special issue of the International Communication Gazette in 2015
highlighted this need, urging communication scholars to draw more broadly on interdisciplinary
theories and insights to better “disentangle the conditions of representation that might create
responses of compassion and/or empathy [and] work towards a more in-depth understanding of
those situations in which representation fails to evoke moral emotions” (von Engelhardt, 2015,
pp. 703–704). Addressing its place in the study of cosmopolitanism directly, Lindell (2012) is
likewise cautious of mediated distant suffering as a primary theoretical paradigm:
Existing research is predominantly confined within a reception of distant suffering-
paradigm where focus is put on finding certain semiotic-discursive traits in extraordinary
content of news depictions of starvations, floods, conflicts or other catastrophes that can
trigger compassion or empathy in Western audiences (see e.g. Chouliaraki, 2006; 2008;
Joye 2009; 2010). The central problem here is that these accounts run the risk of textual
reductionism as the influence of these texts on actual audiences, which is the ultimate
concern, largely remain in the sphere of hypotheses and ideal types. Others have turned to
audiences yet remained largely in the limited understanding of “global compassion,” or
cosmopolitanism arising as emotional responses of empathy, out of the reception of
“distant suffering.” (p. 48)
What few audience-focused studies do exist have been conversely critiqued for “inadequate
references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses” (Ong, 2014, p.
3).
Relatedly, with a focus on news media representations dominating studies of distant
suffering, significantly less attention has been paid to social media spaces, where access,
interactivity, and simultaneity complicate representation and spectatorship in potentially
38
profound ways (e.g., Couldry et al., 2014; Pfister, 2014). This tendency is particularly notable
given the broadly recognized transformation of traditional news media spaces toward hybrid
systems in which mainstream media, organizations, groups, and individuals interact across
multiple platforms (Chadwick, 2013). These hybrid spaces have the potential to amplify more
diverse voices and perspectives that may challenge dominant narratives and stereotypes. As it
relates to distant suffering, these less stable, interactive systems also transform the role of the
spectator significantly and provides the scaffolding for affective publics to coalesce around
shared experiences and discourses (Papacharissi, 2015). This point is discussed in greater detail
in later sections, but suffice to say for the moment, the role of networked communications and
networked publics in distant suffering and cosmopolitanism is ripe for further study.
Finally, there is a practical and temporal lag in the existing literature on the current
Syrian displacement. Thus far, virtually all research on the subject has focused on the summer of
2015 into 2016 when Syrian refugee arrivals to Europe peaked and the issue burst to the fore in
mainstream Western attention as a “crisis.” As detailed in previous sections, the nature of the
situation has changed dramatically in the intervening years, with the immediate visibility of the
issue declining as a result of restricted movement and resettlement. Indeed, by many popular
accounts the crisis is considered over, despite the ongoing and unresolved humanitarian and
administrative issues of those still awaiting processing or struggling through resettlement, to say
nothing of the millions continuing to face devastating conditions in Syria and neighboring
countries. This seems particularly pertinent in considering paradigms of distant suffering and
what counts as a crisis in dominant discourse and representations. There is also a compelling
reason to continue to track this issue as a matter of critical engagement and coherence: Turning
39
attention away at this point risks mirroring and reinforcing the very constructions of the “crisis”
as contingent on proximity and visibility that have been the target of so many cogent critiques.
This research project uses these gaps in the literature as a starting point to complement
existing studies on the current Syrian displacement with research that: (a) examines its status in
Western imagination and discourse after the “crisis” of 2015 had fallen from its front-page
prominence and (b) moves beyond representation to engage directly with spectators as active
participants in constructing and responding to distant suffering while building cosmopolitan
collectivities of shared concern and attention. In this topical and theoretical context, this research
investigates the cosmopolitan logics, limits, and tensions of networked Western audiences in
constructing cultural meaning and social responses to the displacement of Syrian refugees.
Interdisciplinary Influences
True to cosmopolitanism’s boundary-spanning nature, the subject thrives at the
crossroads of multiple disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. In formulating the challenge of
contemporary empirically grounded cosmopolitan inquiry, Beck and Sznaider (2006) begin with
an insistence that “the intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a trans-
disciplinary one” (p. 1). In describing hybrid cultures, Canclini (1995) similarly writes of the
need for “nomad social sciences capable of circulating through the staircases that connect
[disciplinary] floors – or better yet, social sciences that redesign the floor plans and horizontally
connect the levels” (p. 2). In this spirit, the project straddles disciplinary paradigms, integrating a
social scientific approach with critical scholarship.
With an emphasis on the communicative processes that shape cultural meaning and social
forms, this project is grounded in communication studies, but draws consciously and heavily on
multidisciplinary theory and insights. It owes a particular intellectual debt to sociologists like
40
Ulrich Beck, Gerard Delanty, and others, whose work has insistently pushed the theorization of
cosmopolitanism forward. In addition, although the empirical studies presented in Chapters 6 and
7 employ social scientific approaches to globalization, media, and cultural sociology, Chapter 8
draws on insights from cultural studies traditions to integrate and contextualize the respective
findings and insights of both studies together. With its attention to culture and identity as active
processes of meaning making and to the agency and transformative potential of everyday cultural
practices, the tradition of cultural studies is particularly useful in illuminating and beginning to
untangle some of the most central questions of cosmopolitan inquiry, as Appadurai (1996)
suggests:
The subject matter of cultural studies could be roughly taken as the relationship between
the word and the world. I understand these two terms in their widest sense, so that the
word can encompass all forms of textualized expression and the world can mean anything
from the means of production and the organization of life worlds to the globalized
relations of cultural production … Cultural studies conceived in this way could be the
basis for a cosmopolitan (global? macro? translocal?) ethnography. (p. 51)
Taken together, these cross-disciplinary perspectives help to shape an approach to cosmopolitan
inquiry that grounds cosmopolitanism in the domain of lived experience, positioning it as an
ongoing cultural process in which everyday experiences of exchange and encounter play a
central role in building new social forms and imaginaries.
Methodology
Just as it benefits from diverse disciplinary insights, a multimethod approach is
particularly well suited to the multifaceted nature of cosmopolitanism that has made it such a
notoriously challenging subject of empirical study. Mixed methods incorporate multiple data
41
types, integrating quantitative and qualitative insights to gain a better understanding of a research
problem than any single method or data type could provide individually (Creswell & Plano
Clark, 2007). In the case of empirical research on cosmopolitanism specifically, purely
quantitative studies offer appealing coherence and methodological clarity, but risk reducing
cosmopolitanism to a series of indicators (Lindell & Lin, 2014), thereby squandering the richness
and utility of the concept. Likewise, purely qualitative studies of cosmopolitanism are more
attuned to nuances of cultural context and subjectivities but are subject to the critique that they
further mystify an already slippery concept. Integrating multiple data types provides a pragmatic,
responsive approach that draws on the advantages of each while guarding against some of their
respective pitfalls (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Beyond the mechanics of data collection
and analysis, mixed-methods research also has a broader philosophical outlook to “participate in
dialogue about multiple ways of seeing and hearing, multiple ways of making sense of the social,
and multiple standpoints on what is important to be valued and cherished” (Greene, 2007, p. 20)
that is well suited to a subject as multidimensional as cosmopolitanism.
With this in mind, and in recognition of critiques of cosmopolitanism and distant
suffering research, this project advances exploration of this topic through two studies. Each relies
on a different approach and scale of analysis, but both are designed to inform one another such
that insights from each can enrich the other. More detailed descriptions methodologies are
included in each study’s respective chapter, but an overview of each study is provided here.
The first stage of research analyzes Twitter discourse from a 5-month period in 2018.
This approach combines quantitative, big-data insights from a dataset of more than 2 million
tweets with a close qualitative reading and coding of a sample of individual tweets referencing
refugees. The study analyzes trends in attention, voice, influence, and dominant frames in the
42
discourse. The second stage of data collection involved intensive fieldwork with an aid
organization at the Skaramagas refugee camp in Greece, which adds further qualitative depth to
the research project and moves beyond distant reception and media discourse to active
engagement on the ground. Participant observation and interviews with volunteers and staff
provide opportunities to further explore how volunteers navigate the tensions embedded in the
project of cosmopolitan care.
Although each of chapters can function as a standalone study, with a distinct site or
object of examination and its own targeted research questions and methods, taken together they
are intended as a constellation of related case studies that constitute a research project richer than
the sum of its parts. Following the after presentation and discussion of each discrete stage, the
final sections of the dissertation turn to a discussion of integrated insights to consider broader
implications and contributions to the theorization and study of cosmopolitanism.
Limitations and Critiques
Methodological limitations in data collection and analysis specific to the various research
stages are discussed in their respective chapters, but it is worth pausing at this point to
acknowledge and address some overarching constraints, critiques, and considerations in the
framework and orientation of the research project.
First, the choice to focus on Western perspectives and experiences of Syrian
displacement in this research project is hardly exempt from pitfalls or critique. Indeed, as noted
previously, a bias toward Eurocentrism is among the most pressing critiques of both distant
suffering and cosmopolitanism. Positioning Syrian displacement primarily in terms of distant
suffering experienced by Western audiences rather than focusing on the lived experiences of
refugees and migrants themselves could thus risk compounding their marginalization. As a
43
matter of practical feasibility, however, robust engagement with refugee perspectives and
experiences would be critically limited by issues of access and available data in the context of
this study—and would therefore raise substantial concerns of research ethics and efficacy. Future
studies expanding on this project will seek to incorporate migrant experience more centrally by
building connections and collaborations with deep local, cultural, and linguistic expertise.
Feasibility issues for this particular project aside, it is also important to recognize that
migrant experience is being addressed in refugee studies and other disciplines, and a growing
body of important work has explored the connectivity and cultural navigation of displaced
peoples and Syrian refuges specifically. Vandevoordt and Verschraegen (2019), for instance,
examine how Syrian refugees in Belgium draw symbolic boundaries in their new communities.
Likewise, a decade ago, Diminescu (2008) offered a still-compelling and relevant
“epistemological manifesto” calling on scholars to resist the assumption of rootlessness as the
defining feature of migration and consider instead how “connected migrants” use digital
technologies to establish and maintain dynamic bonds and social relations that cross both their
“home” and “host” communities.
Beyond such methodological considerations, there is compelling theoretical and
empirical reason to focus attention on Western constructions and responses to the issue. To
begin, in the West, the refugee “crisis” has been largely constructed in terms of the distant
suffering of the other, so it is important to critically assess the implications and consequences of
such a perspective. Additionally, this context offers one of the sharpest instances of rhetorical
cosmopolitanism—the discourses of liberal multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, and
Europeanness, for instance—crashing up against ambivalent experiences of encounter and
44
practice. Particularly in the European context, here is a situation in which distant suffering is
brought close.
That said, the notion of a Western audience serving as an orienting basis of this research
should not be left untroubled either. As Ong (2014) observes, there is a prevailing tendency in
the literature on distant suffering to take a middle-class conception of “the audience” as an ideal
type, often neglecting the diversity of characteristics like nationality, age, gender, religion, and
ethnicity. Certainly, with regard to refugee displacement, a wide spectrum of policy responses
has emerged on national and regional levels, from Germany’s early but precarious
Willkommenskultur and the violently explicit antirefugee policies of far-right administrations in
Hungary and others to the sharply contrasting rhetoric and policies of U.S. President Trump and
Canadian President Trudeau in North America. There are likewise well-documented fissures in
nations and communities along demographic lines: For instance, younger, more educated, and
higher-income individuals typically tend to be more supportive of accepting refugees and
migrants (Gonzalez-Barrera & Connor, 2019). It also important to recognize that this research is
operationally limited to English-language texts, interviews, and data. I did attempt to remain
attentive to such diversity of context, experience, and perspectives in data collection, analysis,
and discussion, but these built-in limitations and biases of attention should be acknowledged.
Still, the notion of a Western orientation does retain merit as a preliminary organizing framework
in the sense that the global mass media is in large part organized in oligopolistic networks based
in Western nations (Arsenault & Castells, 2008). More to the point with regard to the empirical
and theoretical goals of the project, given that the reception and treatment of displaced refuges
and migrants hinge in large part on the policies of liberal Western democracies where mediated
public opinion and attention carry significant weight, this perspective thus also highlights
45
asymmetries of global power and privilege that shape the public and political response to
displacement.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge the weight and complexity of migration and
displacement as an academic subject. Certainly, as discussed previously, it warrants research and
scholarly attention as a timely issue of substantial real-world impact with very real human and
policy costs, and it also provides important grounding for theory building and development.
Nevertheless, scholars like Anderson (2017) have cautioned against uncritical use of dominant
frameworks that hierarchically categorize mobility:
If the “migrant” is a constructed figure, made by policy and public discourse, and the
separation of “migration” from other areas of policy is one of the causes of the problem,
what does this mean for academic research which reifies the migrant subject? How can
we as scholars, who are also part of the “migration industry” conduct work on migration.
(p. 1535)
Appadurai (1996) similarly acknowledged that any project on globalization “is a mild exercise in
megalomania, especially when it is produced in the relatively privileged circumstances of the
American research university” (p. 18). In this regard, I am conscious of my own discrepant
privileges of identities and resources in relation to the subject, and make no claim to the
subjective, embodied experience of displacement. What I can offer instead is the humility of
genuine inquiry with the particular perspective and insight of a communications scholar trained
in uncovering relationships and analyzing possibilities of engagement and connection in this
discursive environment.

46
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707. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048515601561

49
CHAPTER 5
COSMOPOLITANISM
The notion of cosmopolitanism hardly a new one. In the Western tradition, it reaches
back millennia, at least to the 5th century BCE, when Cynic philosopher Diogenes rejected an
exclusive belonging to single city-state and declared himself instead kosmopolitês, a citizen of
the cosmos.
4
This sense of belonging and entanglement that reaches beyond the immediacy of
local or national boundaries and identities is the deceptively simple basis of all cosmopolitan
thought. The concept has proven remarkably resilient throughout the centuries as a philosophical
and moral orientation, but the conditions and potential of cosmopolitanism today are profoundly
transformed in light of globalizing processes that have complicated traditional borders and
distinctions, particularly in relation to new modes of connectivity that have made encounter with
difference and interdependence increasingly engrained as part of daily life. Propelled by these
developments, scholarship around cosmopolitanism has surged in recent decades with a renewed
relevance and urgency not as abstract philosophical exercise, but as a social and cultural
response to global transformation and the “multiple ways the local and the national is redefined
as a result of interaction with global” (Delanty, 2006, p. 36).
A Cosmopolitan Modernity
The turn toward empirically grounded cosmopolitan inquiry began in earnest with the
escalation and intensification of globalization in the 1980s and 90s. Of course, exchanges,
interactions, and interdependencies among societies and nations are far from a recent

4
Much has been written on the development and evolution of cosmopolitanism in Western traditions, but this should
be recognized as a function of asymmetric scholarly attention rather than a feature of cosmopolitanism itself. Citing
Arab, Muslim, and Chinese traditions of cosmopolitanism, Vertovec and Cohen (2002) note that “in refuting the
notion that cosmopolitanism is exclusively ‘Western’ we have had to show that the idea can find fertile soil in many
cultures and many contexts. The idea itself remains universal though the language, idiom and form in which it is
expressed may differ” (p. 16).
50
phenomenon. Territorial boundaries have never been so rigid as to be capable of sealing off their
contents from the influence of people and ideas from distant places. In this sense, the superficial
facts of globalization—namely, interactions and interdependencies across borders—do not in and
of themselves represent a new development, and although distinct variations can certainly be
found in particular historical moments and contexts, we can speak with high confidence about
cross-border exchange as a fixture throughout history. There is, however, good reason to believe
that the current moment represents a more fundamental rupture: In short, what is new is not the
fact of these ties and interactions, but rather their intensity and character, moving connectivity
from an incidental element to perhaps the defining feature of modernity.
Certainly, a great deal of important work remains to be done at this structural level,
mapping the global features and propellants of these conditions: the transnational flows of
people, goods, and information across borders; the integration of global financial and consumer
markets; the development of a global risk environment; and so on—the myriad different sub-,
trans-, inter-, and supranational processes and structures that together shape the conditions of
global interaction and interdependence. These will be familiar as features of globalization, but
here it is useful to further demarcate globalization from cosmopolitanism, because although they
are closely intertwined, they are not interchangeable. Elaborating the distinction between the two
concepts is important both theoretically and empirically, alerting to different features and
suggesting different frameworks of analysis and interpretation. Particularly, more recent
globalization theory and scholarship features more nuance and overlap than space to fully
account for here, but broadly speaking, as a conceptual and empirical framework, globalization is
primarily concerned with the changing relations and processes among nations. The state is thus
held steady as the primary unit of reference and organization. The consequence tends to be a
51
privileging of formalized sectors of politics and economics. This framework also holds to distinct
delineations between the categories of the national and global, often positioned in tension with
each other. Contemporary cosmopolitan scholarship in the vein of Ulrich Beck, by contrast, is
premised on a critique of this kind of “methodological nationalism” by which the nation-state is
assumed as the natural container and organizing unit of society (Beck & Sznaider, 2006). Such a
paradigm, Beck and Sznaider (2006) argued, misses the more fundamental point that “the
dualities of the global and the local, the national and the international, us and them, have
dissolved and merged together in new forms that require conceptual and empirical analysis” (p.
3). Without denying the continued relevance and power of the nation-state, this vein of
cosmopolitan inquiry is attuned to processes of “globalization from within” that provoke
transformation of conventional categories at every level of social organization and life,
transforming “the inner qualify of the social and political itself” (Beck, 2002, p. 24). In short,
although cosmopolitanism is shaped and conditioned by globalization, it is not reducible to its
processes. Delanty (2006) summarized the distinction with further clarity:
Globalization—as a process that intensifies connections, enhances possibilities for
cultural translations and deepens the consciousness of globality—is the principal motor
of modernity. Modernity is not a global condition as such, but a transformative condition
which can be called cosmopolitan due to its plural nature and interactive logics. …
Cosmopolitanism has become one of the major expressions of modernity today due to the
extent and speed of globalization. (p. 38)
We have at this point laid the groundwork in terms of the conditions of the current
cosmopolitan moment, situating it in the broader context of global transformation. The premise
is established: Cosmopolitanism is an expression of a globalized modernity of perpetual
52
connectivity and transformative encounter. But if this is the premise, we are still missing its
conclusion; cosmopolitanism is an expression, but expressed how and to what effect? These
definitional questions have proven among the thorniest challenges of cosmopolitan inquiry, and
exactly how cosmopolitanism manifests and where it can be said to be “located” remain
unsettled matters of theoretical debate and open empirical investigation.
Indeed, setting out to define cosmopolitan can be, as Sobré-Denton and Bardhan (2013)
put it, like “trying to bottle air” (p. 6). They go on to say that “this is actually a good thing,”
arguing that “concretely defining cosmopolitanism would actually be an obstruction in the way
of its outward and unfolding vision” (p. 6). Pollock et al. (2002) echo the sentiment, describing
cosmopolitanism as a “project whose conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only as
yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because
specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do” (p. 2).
Certainly, the complex, multidimensional nature of cosmopolitanism—reaching across social,
economic, cultural, and political realms and drawing on a truly interdisciplinary well of theory—
is what makes cosmopolitanism such a rich and challenging subject of inquiry. Constraining
cosmopolitanism to a single, strict operational definition risks reducing the very complexity that
makes it worthwhile. At the same time, however, our work as theorists and researchers requires
that we stake a claim in defining the contours of the subject and establishing its relevance to our
own disciplinary focus and perspective. To this end, I begin by first briefly reviewing the major
avenues in the long trajectory of cosmopolitan thought. Informed by this scholarly context and
history, I then establish the orientation and working definition of cosmopolitanism as applied in
this research project.

53
Mapping Approaches to Cosmopolitanism
In attempting to reach conceptual clarity and theoretical utility, contemporary
cosmopolitan inquiry has been simultaneously propelled and hampered by the long history and
transdisciplinary roots of the subject, with various traditions producing slippery and sometimes
competing definitions and frameworks. There are numerous ways to group and parse these
approaches according to various criteria and conditions, but for the purposes of this review, I
offer a brief overview of four primary conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism: moral, political,
cultural, and structural or realistic. Each has a particular emphasis and orientation, providing a
useful starting point in mapping major avenues in the study of cosmopolitanism.
Moral Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism has been associated with morality and ethics since its earliest
formulations, a bent that continues to influence both popular and scholarly thinking on the topic
today. The classical cosmopolitan philosophy of the Cynics and Stoics was premised on a
universal human brotherhood, conceived as a model of concentric circles with broadening
attachments emanating outward from the self and culminating in oikeiôsis—an essential affinity
with humanity as a whole. Both social and moral concern thus extended beyond the bounds of
the city-state to the entirety of the inhabited world. This formulation would be deeply influential
to Immanuel Kant in articulating his Enlightenment vision of a cosmopolitan order (Kant &
Reiss, 1991). Centuries later, Martha Nussbaum (1997), credited as among the key figures to
kickstart renewed interest in cosmopolitanism in the modern age of globalization, again drew
explicitly on this classical model:
Kant, and through him, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and above all Cicero present us with a
challenge that is at once noble and practical … If we want to give the world a paradigm
54
from the ancient Greco-Roman world to inform its engagement with the political life, in a
time of ethnic violence, genocidal war and widespread disregard for human dignity, it is
this one that we should select. (pp. 3–4)
In this framework, cosmopolitanism requires an expansion of moral horizons beyond the
local and familiar, extending concern and empathy to distant others. Tomlinson (1999) describes
cosmopolitanism in this vein as a kind of “ethical glocalism” by which global commitments are
woven into everyday life (p. 196). Among the most prominent cosmopolitan ethicists, Kwame
Anthony Appiah (2006) likewise articulates the key principles of cosmopolitanism as “universal
concern and respect for legitimate difference” (Kindle location 137).
Traditionally, a moral conception of cosmopolitanism has tended to be most comfortably
situated in these kinds of philosophical and theoretical arenas and typically less so in the
empirical realm. Indeed, a concern that moral cosmopolitanism “lacks a nuanced sociological
dimension and assumes a too strong universalistic sense of universal humanity” (Delanty, 2006,
p. 28) has been one of its most persistent critiques, accounting in no small part for the chronic
suspicion surrounding the subject in many social scientific circles. A bid for a universal moral
framework is also subject to critique as Western or Eurocentric in its orientation. In one such
sharp rebuke, Anthony Pagden (2000) notes that “it is hard to see how cosmopolitanism can be
entirely separated from some kind of civilizing mission, or from the more humanizing aspects of
the various imperial projects with which it has been so long associated” (p. 4).
Proponents of cosmopolitan inquiry have—with varying degrees of success—actively
taken in these critiques without surrendering the endeavor, working to develop more critical
perspectives on cosmopolitan morality with greater empirical grounding and relevance. Although
the tendency still skews toward more theoretical work, there has been a significant push to open
55
more empirical entry points by anchoring robust analysis to the functions and mechanisms of
cosmopolitan ethics. In particular, as noted in Chapter 3, more audience-centric empirical work
on mediated distant suffering has begun to produce notable strides in this regard. A study by
Robin Vandevoordt (2018), for instance, situated engagement with mediated stories about distant
others in concrete everyday practices and contexts, examining how micro-, mezzo-, and
macrosocial spheres “immunise or protect individuals from moral claims encroaching upon their
lives from across the globe” (p. 208). Von Engelhardt (2015) also advocated for the
incorporation of theory and empirical models from moral psychology as particularly valuable in
this project, noting that its constructs and methods are well suited to parsing how modes of
representation facilitate—or hobble—moral and emotional engagement with distant others.
Political Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism has also been widely conceived as an explicitly political project,
predominantly concerned with transnational and supranational structures of governance and
accountability that formalize interdependence across national borders. This too has roots in
ancient cosmopolitan thought, although it is most famously associated with Kant’s vision of an
international law and order as set out in Perpetual Peace:
The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal
community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of laws in one part of the
world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan law is therefore not fantastic and
overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and
international law, transforming it into a universal law of humanity. (Kant & Reiss, 1991,
pp. 107–108)
56
Under this conception of cosmopolitanism, the functions of international bodies like the United
Nations and European Union are naturally of interest, and theories like world polity theory that
consider diffusion and influence of norms and cultural forms through international organizations
and institutions are particularly relevant (Boli, 2006; Boli & Thomas, 1997). Although in its
most conventional form, political cosmopolitanism—or “cosmopolitics”—is perhaps most
closely associated with formalized institutions, attention has increasingly turned to transnational
movements and activism as potential manifestations of bottom-up political cosmopolitanism
(e.g., Caraus & Parvu, 2017; Ingram, 2013). A rich body of scholarship in citizenship and
migration studies has also interrogated the very notion and function of national citizenship in a
globalized context (e.g., Brecher et al., 1993; Linklater, 1998; Tan, 2017).
Regarding an institutional view of cosmopolitanism, there are substantial and legitimate
challenges to the premise that state sovereignty has been subsumed or diminished by
supranational institutions. Many cosmopolitan theorists would readily cede this point, however.
Skrbis et al. (2004) caution, for instance, against a sweeping, uncritical notion of global
citizenship, writing, “we do not think it wise to encourage individuals to think of themselves as
global citizens if there are no effective global governmental mechanisms” (p. 125). Rather than
unproblematically predicting the erosion or obsolescence of the nation-state or the continued
force of national borders and power, a more compelling line of study suggests that the role
nation-state is not diminished, but rather transformed in significant ways requiring renewed
theorization and study. As Castells (2011) notes, “under the conditions of multilayered
globalization, the state becomes just a node (however important) of a particular network, the
political, institutional, and military network that overlaps with other significant networks in the
construction of social practice” (p. 19). Implicit here is the risk that a rigid perspective on
57
political cosmopolitanism may miss or minimize more diffuse and subtle transformations that
may be taking place in such “other significant networks.” This concern has inspired a more
recent cultural turn in cosmopolitan theory and study, attuned to the more inside-out
transformative processes taking place among individuals, societies, and communities.
Cultural Cosmopolitanism
Contrasting a narrower political framework, scholars have argued for the need to place
culture at the center of theory and analysis. Advanced most actively in media studies and
sociology, a cultural perspective on cosmopolitanism “shifts the emphasis to internal
developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary
mechanism” (Delanty, 2006, p. 27).
Along these lines, cultural cosmopolitanism has been theorized in terms of cultural
disposition, associated with an openness to and appreciation of diversity and difference,
described by Hannerz (1990) as “a willingness to engage with the Other … an intellectual and
aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather
than uniformity” (p. 239). To this celebration of difference, Held adds a recognition of
interconnectedness, shared fate, and the ability to empathize with others as criteria for cultural
cosmopolitanism (Brown & Held, 2010).
In this framework, cultural omnivorousness and an appreciation of cultural difference
have been held up as key indicators and modes of cultural cosmopolitanization, as consumers’
interests, affinities, and engagement with culture transcend local and national boundaries. Chin
and Morimoto (2013), for instance, explored transcultural fandoms, noting that fan communities
emerge around “border-crossing texts of objects not necessarily because of where they are
produced, but because they may recognize a subjective moment of affinity regardless of origin”
58
(p. 99). Jenkins (2006) likewise describes “pop cosmopolitans” who turn to popular culture “to
escape the gravitational pull of their local communities in order to enter a broader sphere of
cultural experience” (p. 155).
Expanding beyond individual dispositions and tastes, cosmopolitanism has also been
theorized—particularly in the field of cultural sociology—as a more diffuse sociocultural
transformation. Gerard Delanty (2006, 2011), for instance, has been a leading figure in
advancing a “critical cosmopolitanism” that “concerns the analysis of cultural modes of
mediation by which the social world is shaped and where the emphasis is on moments of world
openness created out of the encounter of the local with the global” (Delanty, 2006, p. 27),
whereas scholars like Jeffrey Alexander (2007) have considered cosmopolitanism with regard to
the diffusion of cultural codes or norms in terms of emergent global publics. Michèle Lamont’s
influential work on symbolic boundaries was also a significant breakthrough, offering one of the
first empirical studies demonstrating the multiple forms of identification and distinction used by
“ordinary cosmopolitans” in defining communities of belonging and solidarity, and thus pushing
against universalizing notions of cosmopolitanism as a single, homogenous framework (Lamont
& Aksartova, 2002). This likewise was part of a broader shift in cosmopolitan inquiry from a
top-down perspective, focusing on elite travelers and institutions (e.g., Gustafson, 2009;
Hannerz, 1990; Van Den Anker, 2006), to a bottom-up focus on the “ordinary,” (Lamont &
Aksartova, 2002; Skrbiš & Woodward, 2013), “banal” (Beck & Sznaider, 2006), and “rooted”
(Appiah, 2005) cosmopolitanisms of everyday lived experiences and cosmopolitanism “from
below” (Gilroy, 2006).
Although this cultural turn has expanded cosmopolitanism to encompass vital nuance and
diversity of experience, it wrestles with its own share of substantial limitations and critiques.
59
Scholars have warned that an uncritically overzealous embrace of difference and diversity from a
universalizing perspective may inadvertently reinforce and conceal more subtle hierarchies of
power (Morley & Robins, 1995, p. 115) or can “hug too hard” and risk destroying “the very
diversity it seeks to celebrate” (Parker, 2003, p. 171). Such approaches can also tend to implicitly
position encounter as a process in which individuals consciously reflect on and expressly
articulate their position and relationship to distant and diverse others. In less careful articulations,
this can risk eliding cultural and moral conception of cosmopolitanism or assuming that one
naturally or inevitably leads to the other. Regarding culturally omnivorous consumption, for
instance, Jenkins (2006) cautions that the pop cosmopolitan “walks a thin line between
dilettantism and connoisseurship” (p. 164). Assuming a linear or causal relationship between
cultural encounter and a corresponding sense of obligation to distance others is thus highly
problematic, both theoretically and empirically, and speaks to a need to treat the relationship
between theses multiple dimensions as a subject of investigation rather than a given outcome.
Structural or Realistic Cosmopolitanism
In reaction to conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism as conscious and reflexive
processes or dispositions, scholars have argued for an approach that recognizes transformations
that are occurring whether or not people realize it—or indeed, desire it. Ulrich Beck (2006)
termed these conditions of encounter and interdependence in which we are bound
cosmopolitanization, framing it in explicit counterpoint to the notion of cosmopolitanism as “a
conscious and voluntary choice, and often that of an elite” (p. 16). He goes on to explain that
“‘cosmopolitanization’ in this sense means latent cosmopolitanism, unconscious
cosmopolitanism, passive cosmopolitanism which shapes reality as side effects of global trade or
global threats such as climate change, terrorism or financial crises” (p. 19).
60
The significance of this move should not be understated; indeed, this call to treat
cosmopolitanism as an “actually existing” social reality rather than a more abstract moral or
political philosophy marked a key turning point in cosmopolitan inquiry, paving the way for the
revitalization of the subject in the social sciences. Tied to the insights of globalization and global
culture (Appadurai, 1990; Giddens, 1997; Hall, 1990; Stiglitz, 2003; Tomlinson, 1999), world
risk society (Beck, 1999), and network society (Castells, 2011), such a framework grounds the
conditions of cosmopolitanism in distinct spatiotemporal structures, positioning it in terms of
connectivity, risks, interdependencies, and possibilities that are simultaneously global and local.
Contact and entanglement are understood, in short, as defining feature of modernity that must be
reckoned with; regardless of whether such transformations are embraced, resisted, or denied, the
social fact is that they are happening. Indeed, the conditions of cosmopolitanization—
interdependence, connectivity, encounter, and global–local entanglement—are just as likely to
result in beliefs and outcomes in stark opposition to normative cosmopolitan ideals. Consider, for
instance, xenophobia, populist nationalism, terrorism, global health crisis, and climate change, to
name just a few.
Maintaining this distance between a moral or reflexive cosmopolitanism and a “realistic”
cosmopolitanism serves as a valuable reminder that there is no predetermined social or moral
outcome to these transformations; there is no guaranteed or neat linear relationship between
processes of cosmopolitanization and expressions of consciously cosmopolitan morality or
politics. Such a conceptual distinction can also be also analytically expedient, helping to clarify
and organize the sites and subjects of cosmopolitan inquiry.
In practice, however, the lines between normative and empirical dimensions of
cosmopolitanism are far from solid, and many scholars have argued that the two are inevitably
61
and inextricably interwoven. Inglis (2014) for instance, rejects the notion that “cosmopolitan
political philosophy and the sociology of cosmopolitanism are fundamentally antagonistic,”
arguing that “socio-economic conditions first produce, and then are regulated by, cosmopolitan
moral dispositions” (p. 109). Skrbiš and Woodward (2013) likewise note that “abstract and
philosophical arguments about cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan ethics make no sense and
have no relevance when decoupled from the messiness of actual social, political and cultural
life” (Kindle location 1091).
An Integrative Framework
We emerge from this rocky, often slippery, conceptual terrain with the sense that
cosmopolitanism is no single “thing” – it is conceived variously as a moral orientation and
ideology, a disposition, a political project, and a sociocultural condition. In true cosmopolitan
form, however, the boundaries between these forms and rubrics are not firm – indeed, the richest
and most generative approaches are those that grapple with their interconnections. An integrative
framework, therefore, recognizes cosmopolitanism as constituting multiple modes and
dimensions - moral, political, cultural, and structural – all of which interact to drive “new or
emergent social realities” (Delanty, 2012, p. 25. Cosmopolitanism, from such an orientation, is
thus understood not as an abstracted ideal or a static condition, but as an active cultural process
of meaning-making in response to a globalized modernity, enabled and constrained by both the
material and symbolic conditions of globalization and cross-border mobility and exchange. And
this is the working definition and starting point from which this project begins its cosmopolitan
inquiry.
62
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CHAPTER 6
STUDY 1
Moral–Political Antagonism in Twitter Discourses about the Syrian Refugee “Crisis”
Situated in the context established in the previous chapter, the study presented in this
chapter examines networked discourses of support for refugees, oriented around the following
research questions: First, what discourses take shape among networked audiences and publics as
they construct narratives and social political identities in response to refugee displacement? And
second, how do putatively prorefugee discursive frameworks variously reinforce or challenge
structures of cosmopolitan solidarity and marginalization, inclusion and exclusion, and affect and
action?
The study analyzed Twitter discourse about the refugee “crisis” during a 5-month period
in 2018. Combining big-data insights from structured metadata with close qualitative reading and
coding of individual tweets and drawing on theories of affective publics and distant suffering, the
study first examined big-data trends in attention and influence before turning to a qualitative
analysis of frames shaping the discourse. Among the most striking findings is evidence of
widespread, diffuse support for refugees punctuated by less frequent but disproportionately
visible instances of antirefugee sentiment. Additionally, although humanitarian and security
frames broadly persist as key interpretive paradigms, much of the discourse is largely structured
around moral–political antagonism, in which the crisis serves as a symbolic battleground while
refugees themselves remain largely excluded.
A rich body of scholarly work has emerged to examine the highly mediated nature of
Syrian refugee displacement, providing significant insight as they analyze news narratives
frameworks of compassion and anxiety and reinforce categories of legitimacy, exclusion, and
67
risk. Thus far, existing research on this issue has been dominated by studies of mass media
representations, with significantly less attention paid to networked discourse on social media,
where access, interactivity, and simultaneity complicate representation and spectatorship in
potentially profound ways. Indeed, scholars have called for greater attention to the social media
space in the context of distant suffering and refugees, given that “despite growing interest in the
role of social media in shaping public discourse about refugees, there is still a lack of empirical
research, in particular qualitative and comparative studies” (Bozdag & Smets, 2017, p. 4050).
Most studies of Syrian refugees focused on the period of peak arrivals in 2015 and early
2016, when the issue was at the forefront of Western media coverage and political attention (e.g.,
Chouliaraki, 2017; Chouliaraki & Georgiou, 2017; Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017; Mortensen &
Trenz, 2016; Pantti, 2016). Since 2016, however, arrivals and asylum claims have slowed
significantly, due in large part to a European Union arrangement to detain refugees in Turkey
and Greece and the erection of border fences along key routes in the Balkans. At the same time,
the number of Syrian refugees accepted to the United States has plummeted under President
Trump, falling more than 90% from Obama-era numbers. As noted previously, these shifts have
been matched by a corresponding decline in Western media coverage. Consequently, this set of
circumstances presents a valuable opportunity to reexamine public discourse at this time of
reduced perceived salience in the West.
A Mediated “Crisis”
For most Western publics with little direct experience or prior knowledge of Syrian
displacement, this “crisis” has been primarily a mediated one, with news media serving as the
primary source of information and indirect encounter. Consequently, how media narratives shape
the perception, moral evaluation, and response to issues through processes of selection and
68
salience becomes particularly significant (Entman, 1993; Tuchman, 1978). Research in this vein
has consistently found a high prevalence of negative portrayals of refugees in news media (e.g.,
Berry et al., 2015; Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Pantti, 2016). Coverage often has oriented
the issue in terms of costs, risks, and problems to be managed by host countries, emphasizing
refugees as potential risks to national security and social stability. Studies of language use have
likewise documented the prevalence of terms—many evoking natural disasters—such as “flood,”
“masses,” and “waves” that contribute to an impression of an overwhelming or unmanageable
influx of bodies and “serve to dehumanize migrants and refugees while exaggerating the size,
scale and threat of the phenomenon” (Welch & Schuster, 2005, p. 400). Such frames often
reinforce negative stereotypes and inflame mistrust and fear of refugees. Discourse around
refugees also has been imbued with deeply racialized and gendered representations and
narratives, leaning into stereotyped “regimes of representation” to justify the exclusion and
othering of migrants (Hall, 2003; Hall et al., 2013). Frameworks of inclusion are likewise
frequently structured around hierarchical evaluations of legitimacy, distinguishing “deserving”
from “undeserving” migrants (Berry et al., 2015; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016; Lawlor & Tolley,
2017; Rettberg & Gajjala, 2016).
At the same time, however, these anxiety-laden frames are intertwined with emotionally
fraught humanitarian frames emphasizing the vulnerability of refugees as victims of violence and
neglect and highlighting compassionate public responses. The effect is a fundamental tension
between compassion and anxiety in framing and responses to refugees and migrants. The relative
salience of these frames has evolved over time, often in response to specific events and discrete
moments of intensified media and public attention. The devastating image of 3-year-old Syrian
toddler Aylan Kurdi, who drowned crossing the Mediterranean, for instance, prompted a surge of
69
humanitarian sympathy and public support for refugees (Bozdag & Smets, 2017; Mortensen &
Trenz, 2016). A year later, the image was paired with another photograph of a Syrian child: 5-
year-old Omran Daqneesh, the “boy in the ambulance” whose image similarly went viral and
triggered an outpouring sorrow and outrage (Demetriades, 2019). Conversely, following the
Paris terror attacks of November 2015 carried out by the Islamic State, support for refugees
plummeted dramatically. Examining the evolution of European news media narratives during
this period, researchers identified a “gradual shift … from emotional, humane, narrative
surrounding the refugees and national citizens to a relatively distant emotionless framing” and a
“rising militaristic frame” (Georgiou & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 11).
Significantly, whether refugees are positioned as passive victims of geopolitical forces or
as active threats, the common effect of such narratives tends to be an erasure of the refugee as
fully human, with little space carved out for individual narratives and less still for refugees to
directly share their stories. In this regard, scholars have identified “collectivization” or
“massification” as the dominant trend, treating refugees as a monolithic, anonymous block rather
than humanized and diverse individuals (Bozdag & Smets, 2017; Chouliaraki & Zaborowski,
2017). Expanding on this dehumanizing tendency, Chouliaraki (2017) has described a process of
“symbolic bordering” by which “norms of humanity (who is human?), recognition (who is
included?), and voice (who can speak?)” (p. 92) are defined by global media systems that
regulate attention and public life.
Networked Media and Audiences
Although news media retain a dominant agenda-setting and gatekeeping role, we are now
well into an era in which traditional news media has been supplemented—and to a significant
extent, transformed—by networked social media as a key site for public discourse and the
70
interactive consumption, production, and response to news. The accessibility, interactivity, and
instantaneity afforded by social media complicate the hierarchical control and broadcast model
of news media, contributing to a hybrid media system of overlapping, intersecting, and
competing voices (Chadwick, 2013). Facilitating a many-to-many model of communication
through diffuse horizontal networks, such an environment of “mass self-communication”
(Castells, 2007, 2011) afforded by social media may provide opportunities for bottom-up,
alternative discourses to emerge without reliance on conventional news gatekeepers and norms.
In addition, the always-on environment of simultaneous, real-time interaction unfettered by
geographic distance or borders has effectively unbound “the artifact of communication from
national audiences,” reconfiguring traditional models of a nationally bound public sphere into
one of global reach and resonance (Pfister, 2014, p. 178) and allowing the creation of
transnational spaces for the collective construction of meaning.
In the context of Syrian refugee displacement, the extent to which this capacity has
indeed manifested in discourses that counter mainstream media narratives or promote alternative
voices has yet to be fully examined, but evidence thus far points to ambivalent, tenuous effects.
Examining tweets with refugee-related hashtags in 2015 and 2016, Siapera et al. (2018)
concluded that although some evidence of more nuanced frames existed, on the whole, dominant
narratives on the social networking site largely mirrored those in mainstream media, with the
humanitarian–securitization paradigm persisting along with a continued marginalization and
othering of refugees. As for the potential of social media to empower alternative voices, the
authors also found that media, politicians, and non-governmental organizations maintained the
most prominent positions in discourse, with few “ordinary” users achieving significant visibility
or influence (Siapera et al., 2018). Studying the #RefugeesWelcome hashtag, Barisione et al.
71
(2017) similarly concluded that social media elites, namely news media and celebrities,
dominated what appeared as a fairly homogenous “digital movement of opinion.” Although these
studies provided valuable inroads, as Bozdag and Smets (2017) note, “despite growing interest in
the role of social media in shaping public discourse about refugees, there is still a lack of
empirical research, in particular qualitative and comparative studies” (p. 4050).
Beyond representations of refugees, social media also complicate and transform
questions of audience reception and engagement. Whereas Boltanski’s (1999) influential
formulation of distant suffering rests primarily on mediation through traditional media, social
media more directly involve and implicate the audience, as Mortensen and Trenz (2016) have
noted:
[The] innovative element is that social media moral spectatorship mostly takes place in
public space and can be observed and scrutinized by others. This redefines spectatorship
in an important way: the spectator is no longer the one who sees without being seen. (pp.
346–247)
The authors go on to the explain that “being on social media and engaging in issues of distant
suffering is already an involvement of sorts, which binds the observer into moral discourse” (p.
351). This resonates as well with social media use as deeply performative:
Tweets present socially informed reactions to news and current events, but they are also
part of the everyday context of presenting the self. These condensed reactions accumulate
to form not just digital imprints of social movements or current events but also of
political performances of the self, articulated one tweet at a time. (Papacharissi, 2015, p.
95)
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This expressive quality, Papacharissi (2015) argues, can activate latent ties between users,
enabling the bottom-up formation of “affective publics” of like-minded individuals that “are
mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment” (p. 125). Twitter
data are thus understood not as a collection of individual acts of expression and speech, but as
“digital storytelling” that provides a discursive architecture of shared meaning and a premise for
action (Siapera et al., 2018, p. 3).
When based on shared expressions and experiences of concern and empathy with distant
others, these affective formations may translate to nascent cosmopolitan publics, “organised
around global representations of distant suffering and [enabling] solidarity to be imagined
beyond the communitarian bond of fellow citizens” (Mortensen & Trenz, 2016, p. 345). Of
course, as any casual experience with social media would make abundantly clear, such
networked communication is hardly limited to prosocial activity, and it may also support
distinctly antidemocratic and anticosmopolitan publics, exacerbating division and amplifying
discourses of rage and intolerance. This has recently been thrown into stark relief with growing
attention to the use and manipulation of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to
promote hate speech and disinformation. Evidence of targeted efforts by political actors—
Russia, most prominently—to manipulate political tensions and instability by promoting divisive
social media content has heightened such anxieties. Indeed, the subject of migrants and refugees
was identified as a key wedge issue targeted by Russian troll accounts aiming to destabilize
political discourse during the Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election in 2016. Even
without such targeted manipulation, social media has proven fertile ground for racist and
antirefugee rhetoric. In a 2016 study, for instance, Simpson concluded that “the transnational,
translocal, and multidimensional strategies of far-right publicists and spokesmen coproduced
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identities through face-to-face and digital networks that ultimately serve the ideological purpose
of mainstreaming extremist ideas” (p. 49). These networked discourses fuel real-world
aggression and violence, with mounting evidence demonstrating the role of social media in
fomenting and exacerbating antimigrant violence (e.g., Ekman, 2018; Müller & Schwarz, 2018;
Taub & Fisher, 2018).
With such ambivalent and fraught possibilities in mind, this study examined how
discourse about Syrian refugees was shaped on Twitter among networked publics of interest and
affect, paying particular attention to how patterns of attention, voice, influence, and narrative
frames structured the discourse.
Methods
The methodology combined big and small data approaches to analyze discourse on
Twitter. Big-data social media studies typically use metadata such as tweet frequency, hashtags,
mentions, and retweets to identify dominant trends and themes across a large Twitter dataset.
Siapera et al. (2018), for instance, effectively employed a big-data approach to identify elites and
examine frames around prominent refugee-related hashtags. Although well-suited to broad
structural analyses, such big-data approaches limit the depth of interpretation and analysis,
particular in relation to the kind of cultural meaning of interest in this project. Noting in this
regard that “the actual meaning and sentiment of tweets – and any social media data – is still
very difficult for machine-based approaches to discern,” scholars like Kozinets (2019, p. 74)
recommend a mixed-methods approach:
Because it can be easily collected and coded, but also may contain enough verbal and
contextual content to be culturally informative, Twitter data has also been found useful to
those researchers pursuing paths of hybridized data coding and interpretation. Whelan et
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al. (2016) recommend qualitative, meaning-centric approaches such as netnography are
mixed with the quantitative analysis of ‘big trace datasets’ in order to attain heightened
understanding. (Kozinets, 2019, p. 74)
With this rationale in mind, this study draws on insights from structured metadata and qualitative
coding of individual tweets, allowing for more granular analysis and interpretive depth.
The methodology was designed to add qualitative depth to big-data insights, taking
advantage of both structured and unstructured data to provide a more nuanced picture of
discourse on Twitter. However, key limitations are worth noting at the outset. To begin, the use
of “refugee” as a keyword may privilege certain types of users and discourses. Terms like
“refugee” and “migrant” are not neutral and may carry inherently positive or negative valences.
Specifically, “refugee” more often refers to forced, involuntary movement and may be more
associated with humanitarian regimes of protection, whereas “migrant” is often linked to
economically motivated movement and has been used in some contexts to delegitimize rights to
refugee status and asylum (Berry et al., 2015). Additionally, it is important to note that the
qualitative analysis was based on the interpretation of tweets by the researcher, and the study did
not include direct measures of user attitudes through surveys or interviews. Finally, although
Twitter maintains an outsize role as a platform for information sharing and shaping public
discourse, its users are not representative of the general public (Sloan & Quan-Haase, 2017;
Wojcik & Hughes, 2019). Although important to bear in mind, this study was not intended to
draw generalized conclusions, but rather to consider how specific conversations on Twitter take
shape as part of a networked discourse.
Data Collection
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English-language tweets with keywords “refugee” or “refugees” were gathered using
DiscoverText, a Gnip-enabled proprietary program for social media data collection and analysis.
Similar to the Twitter Firehose,
5
the platform collected the complete corpus of tweets meeting
the search criteria between February and June 2018, yielding more than 2.1 million tweets.
DiscoverText’s built-in tools were used to assess overall metadata trends across the
dataset, such as attention over time, influential accounts, and prominent hashtags. The program’s
deduplication function was also used to consolidate exact and near-exact duplicate posts,
indicative of retweets in which users post another user’s post verbatim or with minor changes.
This allowed for both the identification of highly influential posts or stories and the removal of
duplicates for subsequent analysis.
The deduplicated dataset was cleaned through manual filtering and developing machine
classifiers to exclude tweets dealing exclusively with other refugee contexts. Tweets that
explicitly mentioned the Syrian context were retained, as were tweets that referenced refugees
generally without specifying a particular context or country of origin. The inclusion criteria were
assessed by three coders using a sample of 100 tweets. Intercoder reliability was strong, with a
Krippendorff’s alpha score of .86. A machine classifier was then trained in DiscoverText and
applied to the entire deduplicated dataset, yielding 173,772 tweets.
Coding and Qualitative Analysis
In line with grounded theory approaches to thematic coding (Bryant & Charmaz, 2019),
codes were developed in an iterative process of close reading and annotation, with reference to
existing research and theory, to construct and refine a set of salient coding categories. The

5
Twitter has since shifted its business model, and at the time of writing GNIP data can now be purchased only
through Twitter.
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resulting code set featured six categories: (a) geographic context, related to the primary national
or geographic focus of the tweet content; (b) orientation toward refugees, referring generally to
pro- or antirefugee sentiment; (c) tweet type, categorized in terms of informative, commentary,
or action-oriented content; (d) reference source, related to the source of information or basis for
the tweet content, included as either a link or reference; (e) refugee subject, coded as either
“generalized” for tweets broadly referencing refugees in undifferentiated or anonymous terms or
“particular” for those focusing on specific individuals; and (f) dominant frame, categorized as
“humanitarian,” “security,” “political,” or “other.”
Given that a pressing critique of Twitter research is an inattention to context and nuance,
particularly given the brevity of individual tweets, in addition to a close reading of each tweet in
full, the coding process also involved seeking additional insight from relevant Twitter
conversation threads and linked stories or materials as necessary. This allowed for a more
nuanced and contextualized reading of the tweet, which was particularly helpful in considering
divergent responses to shared material. Two tweets by different users sharing the same news
article might therefore be coded differently in various categories based on contextualizing
information about the user and tweet.
The six coding categories were assessed by three coders using a sample of 50 tweets.
Intercoder reliability was high overall (κ = .91). Individual coding categories also had
satisfactory intercoder reliability, ranging between .81 for dominant frame and .98 for
geographic focus. Once the coding scheme was confirmed, the 75 most retweeted posts and an
additional 1,000 randomly selected individual tweets from the deduplicated dataset were coded
by the author and transferred to qualitative data analysis software package NVivo 12 for further
analysis.
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Key Findings
Patterns of Attention
Metadata results indicated broad insights into patterns of attention. Regarding geographic
attention, Europe and the United Sates dominated. Given both persistent biases against
international news and the focus on English-language tweets, this tendency is perhaps not
surprising, but the relative inattention to the Middle East is nevertheless striking, accounting for
less than 8% of the coded dataset despite the fact that most Syrian refugees are displaced in that
region.
Notable spikes in attention were driven by media and political events, most dramatically
in the days following U.S. missile strikes in Syria in response to chemical attacks against
civilians in Douma. Another interesting spike, albeit significantly lower than that triggered by
the missile strikes, was associated with events such as the identification of the Austin, Texas,
bombing suspect in March 2018, which was seized on by many users to highlight the
discrepancy between the inflated perceived risk of terrorism posed by refugees as compared to
domestic terrorism and violence.
As numerous studies have demonstrated, hashtags can be an important part of mobilizing
counterpublics and activists around social issues. Unlike in 2015 and 2016, however, when
hashtags like #RefugeesWelcome went viral internationally in a swell of support for refugees,
here the dominant hashtags indicated far more diffuse, less widely activated conversations.
Mirroring declining media attention as noted previously, these trends thus seem to reflect the
general dissipation in galvanized attention around this issue. Most of the top hashtags—such as
#refugees, #Syria, and #Germany—were broad topic markers whose use was not necessarily
limited to particular ideological or political perspectives. A couple of notable exceptions are
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worth drawing out, however. The use of #Manus, #Nauru, and #LetThemIn hashtags was
prominent in predominantly critical tweets about Australia’s controversial policy to detain
refugees and migrants on remote offshore islands. Indeed, a robust conversation centered on
Australia, but it was quite contained as a distinct topic. Another notable hashtag was #fu2eu,
employed by anti-European Union users rejecting EU efforts to accept refugees.
Influential Voices
Metadata for the full dataset indicated a high overall prevalence of retweets: Of the full
2.1 million unit dataset, only 17% were distinct single tweets, and the top 75 most retweeted
posts relevant to this study accounted for more than 297,000 tweets, with the top four units
exceeding 10,0000 retweets each. Such high levels of duplication align with observations
identifying “the typical initiators and leaders of movement and discussion networks” (Barisione
et al., 2017, p. 7). Notably, a diverse array of user types was represented among these highly
influential posts, including journalists, activists, media and social media personalities, and
various individual users. There is thus some indication of the potential for diverse voices beyond
mainstream media to gain prominence, although traditional agenda-setting and gatekeeping
functions of news media and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—typically the dominant
sources of primary information related to refugees—were still evident. The coding results of
source type indicate that news sources and NGOs each accounted for 27% of sources referenced
or linked to by users.
Evidence emerged of selection bias in the use of such sources as well, with both news
media and organizations associated with more positive orientations toward refugees. This is
largely expected among NGOs, which typically pursue an active role in advocating for refugees.
The association of positive orientations with media was slightly less obvious, however,
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particularly given previous research indicating the prevalence of negative media coverage about
refugees. It is possible that media narratives have substantively shifted in the years since peak
attention and visibility in 2015; again, future studies examining this comparative dimension
would be very valuable to assess changes in this practice. In the context of this study, however,
given its focus on how sources were used rather than the content of media coverage itself, the
more salient point of interest is that prorefugee users were more likely to reference a wider array
of mainstream media and organizations.
By contrast, the use of alternative media sources was almost entirely associated with
antirefugee orientations. Indeed, among the most striking findings in this regard was the outsize
visibility of extreme far-right voices. In terms of prevalence of individual tweets, antirefugee
messages accounted for 17% of coded tweets, significantly outnumbered by prorefugee tweets at
83%. In terms of visibility and influence, however, extreme antirefugee tweets were notably
overrepresented, jumping to 42% of the most shared tweets. Additionally, alternative media
sources like Voice of Europe—a far-right website with extreme antirefugee and anti-immigration
bias that frequently traffics in misleading and unsubstantiated claims (Huitsing, 2018)—
accounted for eight of the 10 most frequently linked URLs across the dataset and were likewise
disproportionately represented among the most retweeted posts. Network analysis in future
studies will be useful to clarify these dynamics, but an initial interpretation suggests a more
tightly linked, insular network of sources dominated by a few key sources, in contrast with the
more diffuse network of mainstream sources cited by prorefugee users.
Indeed, in their study of media hostility, Arlt and Wolling (2016) found that people with
antirefugee sentiment were more likely to distrust mainstream media. A similar insularity
appears in studies of political partisanship more broadly: A recent study of mainstream and
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social media coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for instance, found a significantly
more insular network of media on the right anchored by a few key partisan sources that used
“social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world” (Faris et al.,
2017, para. 2). Arlt and Wolling (2016) also note that interpersonal communication “can function
as important, complementary or even contrary information sources on the refugee issue” (p. 7)
relative to mainstream media. This too, is borne out in the results: Unspecified sources—that is,
tweets with no explicit mentions or links outside of personal expression or conversation—were
the second most common source type in the coded sample. Broken down by orientation to
refugees, however, negative tweets tended to rely more heavily on unspecified sources than
positive tweets did. Additionally, many tweets (57% overall, 76% among most retweeted) were
coded as commentary, expressing personal opinion and perspectives.
Also notable along these lines was the presence of deleted and suspended accounts in the
dataset.
6
In the wake of intense public scrutiny, Twitter recently conducted a massive purge of
millions of automated and fraudulent accounts and has taken a firmer stance against hate speech
and inflammatory content. In this dataset, approximately 10% of tweets were identified as
deleted at the time of analysis and another 5% were from suspended accounts. The proportion
was somewhat higher among the 75 most retweeted posts, with seven deleted and another four
from suspended accounts. While the specific content of these posts cannot be reported, such
deletions or suspensions are typically associated with content that violates the platform’s
standards against inflammatory or hateful speech – in this case, often associated with extreme
antirefugee sentiment. Although reflecting a small proportion of the overall dataset, these results

6
Individual tweets may be deleted either by the user or by Twitter if deemed to violate the platform’s standards of
use. Twitter may also temporarily or permanently suspend an account for violations, effectively removing it from
the platform and blocking visibility of all past tweets. In each case, both original tweets from the account and
retweets by other users are removed, although they may be reinstated if a user successfully appeals the decision.
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point to the outsize influence that extreme views that might otherwise be excluded from
mainstream discourse can achieve through social media amplification.
Conversely, refugee voices were virtually absent, with a striking lack of individualized
refugee experiences represented across the coded dataset. Indeed, more than 90% of the coded
tweets referred to refugees in generalized terms, continuing the trend of massification identified
in previous studies of news media representation, and none of the tweets in the sample was
posted by users who identified as Syrian refugees. This held true regardless of orientation toward
refugees, and even among NGOs—the most likely to feature individual stories and
perspectives—generalized references to refugees still accounted for more than 90% of tweets.
Certainly, language barriers would be expected as a significant factor in this regard, but it is
nevertheless striking given that Syrian refugees are highly connected and extensive users of
social media for information exchange and social connection (Alencar, 2018; Dekker et al.,
2018; Kutscher & Kreß, 2018). Also, members of the Syrian diaspora have been identified as
significant “cultural brokers” in providing Western audiences and journalists with alternative
perspectives and narratives; and studies indicate that activists can be adept at using social media
as a bridge to mainstream media (Andén-Papadopoulos & Pantti, 2013). This analysis found
little evidence of such bridging functions achieving any significant influence. The potential for
more direct refugee voices to enter mainstream discourse thus remains largely unrealized on
Twitter; they are still spoken for or about by others in largely anonymous terms.
Framing
Most tweets had a compelling positive or negative orientation toward refugees, with
neutral tweets accounting for only 5% of the coded dataset. In terms of how the refugee issue
was framed in the discourse, the humanitarian–securitization tension previously documented in
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news media coverage was certainly present, cleaving along expected lines. The humanitarian
frame, dealing primarily with the needs, challenges, and experiences of refugees, tended to be
associated most closely with a prorefugee orientation, whereas the security frame, with its built-
in preference for negatively-valenced subject matter like violence, terrorism, and crime, was
associated more with antirefugee orientations. Interestingly, however, the two frames were far
from equally represented in the data. The humanitarian frame was dominant, accounting for
more than half of the coded sample. The security frame, by contrast, was the least represented, at
less than 7%. Considering the current status and context of the refugee issue, it seems likely that
the salience of the security frame, linked to perceptions of imminent threat and risk, has
diminished as refugee arrivals in the European Union and United States have slowed, although
targeted comparative research in the future is needed to confirm this speculation. Instead, in the
overall coded set, the humanitarian frame was followed by the political frame, then by other.
Closer examination of this other category suggested that many of these tweets might be
grouped under a theme of social identity, related to questions of culture, religion, and social
identity and values. In this regard, the data suggest that a politicized frame is ascendant, orienting
the issue largely as one of partisan identity, conflict, and ideology. In line with research
indicating that political posts tend to have greater shareability, politicized content was also more
prevalent among widely retweeted posts than among individual tweets, indicating that political
content motivated users to engage and share more, raising the visibility of such content.
Significantly, this politicization often took on moral dimensions, particularly in overlapping
humanitarian and political frames. Indeed, among the striking findings was the use of the issue to
charge political opponents with accusations of moral failing and hypocrisy. In the days following
the U.S. missile strike in Syria in response to chemical attacks against civilians in Douma,
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numerous high-profile tweets critiqued the military action as hypocritical in relation to the
humanitarian response and support for refugees, as in this tweet, shared more than 88,000 times:
So let me get this straight … We’re bombing Syria, because Syria bombed Syria, to show
Syria that Syria shouldn’t bomb Syria. Then, after we’ve bombed Syria for bombing
Syria, we still won’t accept Syrian refugees that are seeking refuge from the bombing.
Got it.
Similarly, another spike in attention followed the identification of the suspect responsible for a
series of bombings in Austin, Texas, as a young, White American. In this case, the event was
similarly seized on by many prorefugee users highlighting the politicized discrepancy between
an inflated perceived risk of terrorism posed by refugees as compared to domestic violence and
terrorism.
Austin bomber Mark Anthony Conditt was a DOMESTIC TERRORIST. FACT: Since
Trump took office, more U.S. citizens have been killed by domestic white male terrorists
than by immigrants, Muslims, refugees, or any of the other groups Republicans have tried
to falsely stereotype.
Likewise, topics that gained particular prominence—appearing both among the most shared
tweets and frequently in individual tweets—included a report that the United States had accepted
only 11 Syrian refugees in 2018 and a survey by the Pew Foundation that found that White
evangelical Protestants were least likely to support accepting refugees. These became key
arguments in discrediting conservative political agendas and values, sharing a position of
antagonistic critique rooted in charges of moral hypocrisy. Conversely, antirefugee posts
commonly highlighted a gap between rhetoric and action among refugee advocates, challenging
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progressive political correctness and multicultural inclusivity as superficial and disingenuous
performances with refrains along the lines of “How many refugees have you taken in?”
Discussion
The findings have significant implications for far-right and anticosmopolitan publics and
sentiment, most notably regarding the amplification of extreme xenophobic and Islamophobic
voices. These provide a stark reminder that connection in itself holds no guarantees; contact can
evoke fear, exclusion, and violence as much as it can solidarity. It is important to recall in this
regard that globally networked social media can provide powerful moments of articulation and
intensification in which public narratives and collective sentiment are condensed and
illuminated, but they do not in themselves constitute a cosmopolitan turn:
The moral-existential effort required to do anything with the experiences available via
media technologies has to come from other sources – ultimately from within the situated
lifeworld of the self. Without this, no amount of technological sophistication can make us
cosmopolitans. (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 204)
The prominence of anticosmopolitan collectivities and instances in this dataset deserve
significant consideration beyond the scope of this project, and although they are important to
contextualize the present discussion, dedicated attention to these findings will be reserved for
future papers. For the purposes of this project, the focus is identifying and clarifying the varied
frames and logics of cosmopolitanism in expressions of support for refugees that emerged in the
pro-refugee discursive environment of Twitter.
These logics are perhaps most evident in the framing of discourse, since frames serve as
interpretative packages that orient attention, interpretation, and evaluation of information and
events (e.g. Fisher, 1984; Goffman, 1974). Chapter 3 reviewed research on the news framing of
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refugees and displacement, highlighting the role of media frames in shaping public interpretation
of the “crisis.” Extending beyond news media, social movement scholars have also adapted
Goffman’s work on frame analysis to examine the work of activists and organizations in
constructing “collective action frames” to appeal to potential supporters and create templates of
meaning and action (Benford & Snow, 2000). Framing can thus be strategically deployed by
organizations to “articulate grievances, generate consensus on the importance and forms of
collective action to be pursued, and present rationales for their actions and proposed solutions to
adherents, bystanders, and antagonists” (Snow et al., 2008, p. 93). In the context of the social
media, despite the lack of centralized or discrete organizations, a parallel process can
nevertheless be tracked in the loose collectivities that emerge in broad support of refugees. The
frames that are constructed in this discourse thus provide significant insight into the
interpretative frameworks and logics that connect events and topics, identify protagonists and
antagonists, and suggest appropriate responses. Significantly, these framing processes are
inherently interpretive and agentic, open to contestation and competition:
The multivocal nature of discourse provides the means for challengers to find
gaps, contradictions, and silences in [the] taken-for-grantedness of hegemonic
genres. By exposing these, challengers can inject alternative meanings to
articulate their sense of injustice and moral authority for collective action.
(Steinberg, 1999, p. 748)
With this understanding of framing as active, agentic struggle to construct social
meaning, we return to the discursive logics found in the data. To begin, it is significant that much
of the prorefugee discourse remains very much rooted in national contexts and identities.
Certainly, there are instances of broad-based expressions of concern referencing universal
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humanity, but more commonly humanitarian concern is positioned in a moral and political
framework grounded in a national perspective. The basis for solidarity and action in these
instances thus becomes a matter of national interest, in the sense of having direct implications for
national policy or identity. In this regard, a notable selectivity exists in the cosmopolitan logics
of these arguments, rationalized as a matter of national responsibility, particularly regarding the
West’s role in the Syria conflict, rather than on a sweeping basis of global care and
universalizing moral concern. This is in keeping with findings that challenge the notion of a
cosmopolitan identity supplanting or unanchored to national identity. In a focus group study of
media audiences, for instance, Szerzynksi and Urry (2002) note that “few participants claimed an
identity as a ‘citizen of the world’ or to challenge existing conceptions of national identity” (p.
472). In short, little evidence indicated a dissolution or dismissal of borders in the service to a
putatively global identity or experience. Rather, the Twitter data point to an explicit
consciousness of interdependence and causality with national frames and identities intact: The
national becomes a frame through which to view the global, and global likewise a frame for the
national. This kind of orientation is present in mainstream media as well; what is distinct and
significant here, however, is the degree to which it is grounded in highly personalized and
emotional experience.
Here, care and concern for refugees is often positioned in terms of a national failing—or
more specifically, as a reflection of domestic political inadequacy and malattention, with
critiques cleaving along highly politicized lines. In these constructions, the issue of refugees is
often explicitly connected to other social and political issues, serving as a kind of flagship
indicator of moral identity and validity. Consider, for instance, the following tweets in which
Syrian refugees are part of a litany of conservative offenses:
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DEAR GOP: When you steal a SCOTUS seat, side with a hostile power’s cyberattack,
ban refugee kids, advocate child molesters for the senate, strip health care from sick
kids... to give tax cuts to billionaires, and smear child massacre survivors, YOU HAVE
NO MORAL COMPASS
Conservatives be like “we’re pro-life, because EVERY life is sacred!”
Black lives matter?
“Uhh, not THOSE lives.”
Children getting shot in schools, we need sensible gun control.
“Nope. Muh guns is sacred.”
Syrian refugees being slaughtered!
“NO ROOM HERE.”
So...EVERY life?
Notably, these critiques are premised on a resistance to a uniform national identity and dominant
national narrative, an approach that is common among volunteer and activist groups, who often
quite explicitly position themselves as counterforce to either or both the establishment response
by the national government and antimigrant forces in society (Hamann & Karakayali, 2016). In
doing so, they likewise reflect a kind of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” in which deep local
attachment and affinity can ground and strengthen concern for and duty to the wider world
(Appiah, 2006).
At the same time, however, it is significant that these expressions are based on a negative
and reactive logic, defined in reference to an antagonistic opposite—in the simplest terms, less
“we support refugees” and more “we condemn those who do not.” Such prominence of outrage
and blame in social media discourse is not in itself surprising; research has consistently found
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that social media thrives on heightened emotion, particularly negative emotion (e.g., Hasell &
Weeks, 2016; Jaidka et al., 2019). The point of interest here is what this kind of outrage
orientation encouraged on social media means in this context of prorefugee discourse.
In his typology of distant suffering, Boltanski (1999) describes a “topic of denunciation,”
in which the spectator goes down “the road of indignation, denunciation and accusation in his
sympathy with the resentment felt by an unfortunate towards a persecutor” (p. 77). In the
language of cosmopolitanism, we might similarly identify a kind of cosmopolitanism of
antagonism, rooted in reactive affective frameworks of outrage and blame. Significantly, such a
framework shifts attention inward, often creating further distance from the human-scale, material
conditions of the crisis in the process. Crucially, these antagonistic, internally oriented positions
also have the effect of reinforcing the massification and marginalization of refugees, even as they
ostensibly seek to position themselves as the opposite. These findings would find purchase in
persistent critiques in distant suffering and media ethics research and also echoed in charges
against social media “slacktivism” as empty performative signifiers that “make [users] feel very
useful and important but have zero social impact” (Morozov, 2009, para. 4). Critiques of the very
concept of cosmopolitanism have likewise cautioned that it risks slipping into self-congratulatory
and uncritical indulgence (Parker, 2003) or nonreflexive cultural dilettantism (Jenkins et al.,
2013, p. 275).
And yet, as numerous scholars have countered, there is value and power in the
performativity of speech acts (Boltanski, 1999; Papacharissi, 2015), and empirical evidence
points to a broadly positive relationship of social media use translating into greater offline
political engagement (e.g., Boulianne, 2015; Kwak et al., 2018) and small-scale actions
achieving greater impact when refracted through social networks (Earl, 2015; Earl & Kimport,
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2011). Indeed, taking on the question of slacktivism in the specific context of the death of toddler
Aylan Kurdi, Smith et al. (2018) found that sharing responses to the tragedy online created
sustained expressions of solidarity for refugees weeks later. Accounts of slacktivism, the authors
conclude, are “overly simplified; they do not take into account the way in which communicating
opinions about social issues and events relate to the nature of later communications” (Smith et
al., 2018, p. 630).
As for the outrage underpinning so much of this discourse, anger itself can be a powerful
motivating force for action and attention (Calanchini et al., 2016; Castells, 2012; Nabi et al.,
2018). Anger, is this sense, provides an outlet and expression of social and political critique that
is in fact central to the kind of critical cosmopolitanism described by Delanty (2012) as
“phenomena that are generally in tension with their social context, which they seek to transform”
(p. 336).
These findings reveal a prorefugee discourse on Twitter predominantly rooted in logics of
reactivity and antagonism in the face of disproportionately visible and voluble xenophobia and
antirefugee sentiment. These logics construct a framework of reactive op Although these results
seem to broadly confirm many of the pitfalls and substantive critiques of an antagonistic, ironic
spectatorship detached from the material conditions and personal experiences they purport to
support, they also affirm the power of these networked forms to create alliances and challenge
dominant social forms and political narratives, with the circulation and exchange of content
“constituting bids for meaning and value” in the public discourse (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 44).
We are left, then, with deeply ambivalent processes and implications in relation to
cosmopolitanism, at once enabling collective expressions of attention and concern and
constraining its transformative potential. These findings thus prompt further inquiry into how a
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contemporary cosmopolitan built around the infrastructure of networked social media embraces
new forms, challenges, and opportunities. These issues and dilemmas are revisited in depth in
Chapter 8, placing these findings in conversation with those of Study 2.
92
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CHAPTER 7
STUDY 2
Static Ideals and Active Negotiations of Cosmopolitanism: A Case Study of International
Volunteers in the Skaramagas Refugee Camp
This study continues the inquiry of the logics and limits of cosmopolitanism by
examining how individuals and groups conceive, construct, and practice cosmopolitanism as
simultaneously normative aspiration and contested practice. In a counterpoint to the mediated,
networked sites of community and encounter presented in the previous chapter on Twitter
discourse, here the research shifts to the grounded experiences of direct encounter among
international volunteers responding to the refugee crisis in Greece.
International NGOs and humanitarian volunteers provide particularly rich sites for the
study of cosmopolitanism. They serve in significant ways as “contact zones,” described by Pratt
(1991) as “social spaces where cultures meet, dash, and grapple with each other, often in
contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (p. 34). These are also groups and
individuals who would be identified as the exemplar of cosmopolitanism by the most
conventionally narrow definitions and metrics, and certainly such organizations typically model
themselves on explicitly normative cosmopolitan ideals: engaged with human well-being beyond
national borders and identities, articulating moral concern and social responsibility for suffering
others, and interested in intercultural encounter and engagement as an inherently valuable and
transformative endeavor.
Employing the most conservative and rigid conceptions of cosmopolitanism, therefore,
analysis might start and end at the point of simply identifying these articulated functions and
values of international NGOs and volunteers. Indeed, studies have operationalized
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cosmopolitanism in terms of charitable donations, volunteerism, and similarly quantifiable acts.
In a survey study, Lindell (2014), for instance, operationalized various dispositional, ideological,
and consumer dimensions of cosmopolitanism with indicators such as “contributing to global
humanitarian causes,” “inclined to buy ‘fair trade,’” “engagement in global crises and
catastrophes,” and “feeling at home in the world.” Such indicators have an understandable
appeal, offering a clarity and consistency of assessment that Lindell (2014) argues provides a
methodological intervention to guard cosmopolitanism from “a false intersubjectivity” (section
1.2).
The risk of such frameworks, however, is effectively stagnating or concretizing
cosmopolitanism, treating it as a static endpoint. Repositioning international volunteerism as an
entry point for inquiry, a site rather than a variable, allows for a far more active—and I argue, far
more theoretically useful and methodologically responsive—study of cosmopolitanism. This
study was thus designed to look beyond articulated cosmopolitan norms to consider what the
tensions and ambivalence experienced by international volunteers can tell us about
cosmopolitanism as active practice. How do tensions and dilemmas play out as narrative, affect,
and identity and crash into the structural and material realities of encounter? Grounded in the
refugee context, the study presented in this chapter examines how international volunteers
working at a refugee camp in Greece articulated and enacted their versions of cosmopolitanism,
and identifies key areas of tension where normative expectations and articulated ideals find
themselves in conflict with everyday practice.
Context: Humanitarian NGOs and the Refugee Response in Greece
As the focus of the response in Europe has shifted from the immediacy and visibility of
mass arrivals to the bureaucratic management and control of refugees following 2016, many
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refugees remain in administrative limbo and humanitarian instability in official and unofficial
camps. Most are vastly overcrowded, regularly holding more than three times their intended
capacity, and severely underresourced, with long lines to access even basic necessities. In this
precarious status quo, NGOs function as an ambivalent bridge between securitized control and
humanitarian care of refugees. These organizations rely heavily—often entirely—on volunteers
from across Europe and farther afield who donate time, experience, and labor to deliver
programs and services to refugees. Particularly when the salience of the issue has shifted and
significantly diminished in mainstream political and media discourse, the communicative
architecture of NGOs and among the volunteers working in them becomes increasingly
significant in shaping responses on the ground.
Greece in particular has been on the frontlines as a primary point of arrival for migrants
and refugees crossing the Mediterranean and seeking entry into Europe. Even as asylum
applications have declined in Europe overall, they have soared in Greece (Human Rights Watch,
2019). Given its major economic struggles and continued instability in the aftermath of the
global financial crisis of 2008, Greece has also been in an especially tenuous position as a host
country and has frequently called for Europe to more equitably distribute the burden of response.
As the visibility of migrant crossings into Greece shot up in 2015, ad hoc grassroots
organizations swelled to fill the gaps (Kitching et al., 2016). In 2017, control of refugees and the
migrant response transitioned to the Greek government and many NGOs downsized or left, again
shifting the humanitarian aid landscape (Oikonomou, 2018; Oxfam International, 2018).
Methods
Participant observation and in-depth interviews were conducted during a 4-week period
of intensive fieldwork with a European nonprofit organization—referred to in this study as Full
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Hearts—in the Skaramagas refugee camp, the largest camp in Greece and home to approximately
2,000 refugees at the time of the research.
I enrolled with Full Hearts as an international volunteer and was immersed in the day-to-
day activities of the organization alongside other volunteers and NGO staff members. Full Hearts
formally identifies its goal as to “provide support for people who are fleeing war and persecution
as well as to spread the word about the current situation for refugees and migrants,” adding,
“where appropriate, our main focus will be on helping children and their mothers.” Volunteers
work in the camp from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on
Saturdays, and they often spend time together after hours as well. The immersive nature of
participation allowed for engagement and encounter to provide richer insight into the everyday
experiences of volunteers and the broader cultural and communicative architecture of the NGO.
In addition to participating in day-to-day volunteer activities, I observed two half-day orientation
sessions for newly arrived volunteers. After-hours social events among volunteers were also
treated as important sources of insight into the social relations, speech and behavior norms, and
the subjective perspectives of volunteers, and were particularly valuable to this study as these
were times when volunteers often spontaneously reflected on their experiences. Throughout the
day, handwritten field notes recorded research interactions, observations, and visual mapping of
relevant sites and relationships; these notes were expanded each evening into more
comprehensive accounts.
Participant observation was paired with in-depth semistructured interviews with NGO
volunteers and staff members. Formal interviews were restricted to organization staff members
and international volunteers; some residents of the Skaramagas camp also volunteer with Full
Hearts. Interactions and observations with these “resident volunteers” (RVs) were included in
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fieldnotes, but at the request of the organization and in consideration of higher potential
vulnerability related to identification and psychological distress, they were not interviewed or
identified in the data.
Interviews typically lasted between 30 and 45 minutes, although due to the varied
availability of the participants, they ranged from 15 minutes in the shortest instance to 75
minutes in the longest. Due to scheduling conflicts, two interviews were conducted remotely via
video chat; the remainder were conducted in person. Interviews were audio recorded and
subsequently transcribed using a combination of the online NVivo transcription service and
manual transcription. To the extent possible, transcripts recorded the interview verbatim; limited
edits have been made to quotes used here in the interests of clarity and comprehension.
Interview questions progressed through three broad areas: (a) issue involvement and
perceptions (e.g., “Can you recall when you first became aware of the refugee issue?” “Is there a
particular moment that stands out to you that made you want to volunteer?”); (b) volunteer
experience (e.g., “In your own words, what do you see as the role of a volunteer here?” “Can you
describe a time when you felt it was difficult for you or others to fulfill that role?”); and (c)
imagined futures (e.g., “Looking ahead to the future of the refugee issue, do you feel generally
optimistic, pessimistic, or something in between?” “What makes you hopeful or anxious about
the future?”). The semistructured nature of the interview also allowed the conversation to
organically explore other areas raised by the participants, which in some cases were integrated
into subsequent interviews if deemed relevant. Interviews recordings and transcripts were
supplemented by handwritten notes taken in real time. At the end of the interview, participants
completed a short demographic questionnaire (see Appendix).
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Of the 26 volunteers and coordinators present at the site during the fieldwork, 21
participants were interviewed, representing a high response rate of 80%. A summary of interview
participant characteristics is provided in Table 7.1.
Table 7.1. Characteristics of Interview Participants (N = 21)
Characteristic n
Position
International volunteer 14
Staff member or coordinator 6
Local volunteer 1
Gender
Female 16
Male 4
Nonbinary 1
Age
20–29 15
30–45 3
> 45 2
Not Provided 1
Employment status
Student 11
Employed full time elsewhere 3
Employed full time with Full Hearts 6
Self-employed 1
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In addition to field observations and interviews, textual materials such as volunteer
recruitment and guidance materials, public reports and documents published by the NGO, and
relevant social media content were included as secondary data to further contextualize fieldwork
and interview observations. Combining these various modes of analysis—immersive participant
observation, interviews, and document analysis—provides an important element of triangulation
in data collection and analysis (e.g., Deegan, 2001; Denzin, 2017). All data were analyzed in
qualitative analysis software NVivo 12. In line with grounded theory recommended practice,
analysis proceeded through iterative stages of open, axial, and selective coding, accompanied by
frequent annotation and memo writing throughout the process (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lewins
& Silver, 2007).
Limitations
Several key caveats and limitations in this study should be addressed at the outset. First,
interviews were conducted in English, which may limit full nuance of expression and
understanding among international volunteers. This was not considered a major hurdle, however,
given that English is used as a common language in Full Hearts volunteer training, materials, and
programs and all volunteers were advanced or fluent English speakers. Second, the relatively
short 4-week period of fieldwork limited the scope of observation of longer-term trends and
evolution. Despite these limits, however, the immersive nature of participant observation and the
diversity of interview participants in terms of background and experience with the organization
were designed to maximize the depth of observation and understanding to the greatest extent
possible. In addition, the extent of my time there was comparable to the truncated stays
experienced by most international volunteers—indeed, I observed multiple instances of turnover
as volunteers cycled in and out.
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It is also important to emphasize that although the displacement of Syrian refugees
provided the social and political context for the study and thus deeply informed its orientation
and interpretation, the empirical focus of this study squarely was on the experiences and
perspectives of Full Hearts volunteers, and not the refugees and migrants in the camp at
Skaramagas. Although research on the lived experiences of refugees is tremendously important
and should be encouraged, as Chouliaraki and Georgiou (2017) observe in their study of
reception regimes on the Greek island of Chios, the “politics of reception often remain hidden
and under researched in many studies of Europe’s ‘migration crisis’” (p. 165). Additionally, as
Gasiorek and Giles (2013) note, “Although considerable research has covered the topic of
volunteering across disciplines, very little has addressed the communication inherent in and
implicated by participation in volunteer activity” (p. 2661). This study’s focus on communication
and cultural frameworks in an NGO provides a unique contribution to the literature in this
regard.
Site and Program Description
Eleven kilometers west of Athens in an old shipyard near the Pireaus port, the
Skaramagas refugee camp is the largest in Greece, currently housing approximately 3,000
migrants and refugees. Syrians make up the largest group in the camp, accounting for about 30%
of residents at the time of research; others are primarily from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Congo, and
Cameroon. Unlike first-response camps like those on the islands of Lesbos and Samos, where
migrants crossing the Mediterranean arrive and require emergency humanitarian aid, Skaramagas
is a long-term residential camp, where residents are transferred from emergency camps and
remain for months or years as they await processing. Shortly before I began my fieldwork, 500
new residents transferred to Skaramagas. In a darkly ironic microcosm of global tensions, their
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arrival was reportedly met with intense resistance and anger among some current residents. Soon
after their arrival, a fire broke out among the temporary tents set up to house them. The scorch
marks on the ground were pointed out to us during the volunteer orientation, and the account was
relayed to us as a warning to be conscious of simmering tensions and dangers in the camp.
Although I could not confirm this in official reports, we were told the blaze had been set in an act
of protest and aggression against the new arrivals by some current residents, apparently fearful
that their housing and resources would be compromised.
A chain-link fence surrounds the camp. Entrance is through a double-security gate where
Greek police check camp IDs and register visitors. The Greek Navy has official authority over
the camp, but administration is managed by the Danish Refugee Council. Residents are free to
come and go at will, but are srequired to carry camp identification to enter the camp. In the
induction, we were told that the gate is to keep unauthorized people out, rather than residents in.
Inside the camp, the first impression is of a barren and remote space, grey on grey on grey—a
swath of asphalt lined with rows of identical metal shipping containers, cranes, and dock
equipment dotting the outskirts of the camp beyond the fence. The “residential area” consists of
converted shipping containers, each with a bedroom, living space, kitchenette, and bathroom and
equipped with electricity and air conditioning, sometimes shared between two families. In
reference to these basic necessities and comforts, an often-heard refrain was that this is a “good”
camp, the “best” in Greece.
Moments of color are made all the more striking against the bleak backdrop—the blue of
the ocean on the western boundary of the camp, laundry hanging to dry in the sun, and bright
murals painted on the sides of NGO containers. Children are ubiquitous; at the time of fieldwork
there were 900 in the camp, most of whom attended school in Athens for half-days in a
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government program to integrate them into the Greek public school system. At the start of
fieldwork, they were on a 2-week holiday break, and there was an air of weary but mostly good-
natured desperation among Full Hearts volunteers tasked with occupying bored and raucous
children. Some enterprising residents have set up businesses throughout the camp: restaurants,
coffee shops, and hair salons. A small playground has been erected in the center of the camp,
although the swings are removed from their frame at the end of each supervised session by Full
Hearts volunteers. A greenhouse is fenced off nearby, although apparently untended; the
organization that set it up hasn’t been present for months, and no one seems to know if or when it
might return. A small handful of other NGOs provide services and activities to residents, ranging
from football and music programs to educational services. In practice, Full Hearts volunteers
have minimal knowledge of other programs and virtually no contact with other organizations on
site, and snatches of information and discussion among residents suggest often scattered and
inconsistent services.
Full Hearts itself runs various programs and activities, ranging from kids activities and
adult English-language classes to a clothing distribution center and women-only space. With
only three paid staff members based in headquarters outside of Greece, the NGO is fully
dependent on volunteers to function. On-the-ground activities are managed by a small team of
coordinators, unpaid other than a small stipend toward living expenses, who oversaw programs
and supervised volunteers. Most volunteers are international, and Full Hearts proudly boasts of
having hosted thousands of volunteers from more than 35 countries. So-called RVs, recruited
from the camp through Full Hearts programs and relationships, serve alongside international
volunteers, providing language interpretation and community knowledge essential to the
functionality of the programs. Indeed, although RVs could not be interviewed for the study, the
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simultaneous centrality and marginalization of their role in Full Hearts became an important
point of insight and reference point that sharpened observations and analysis.
Like many other NGOs that sprang up in the same period, Full Hearts developed in an
informal, ad hoc, and deeply personal manner. It began with a single individual, having been
moved by coverage of the “crisis” to volunteer on the Greek islands to assist arriving migrants by
sharing posts on social media about her experiences and collecting donations from friends. That
evolved into a more formalized Facebook group, then to a registered NGO, expanding to
multiple locations throughout Greece and filling in the gaps of capacity or attention untended by
large international organizations. Following the EU–Turkey deal in 2016, the organization
shifted its focus from boat rescues and emergency response to longer-term services and programs
in refugee camps. Full Hearts prides itself on bridging the gap between small personalized
NGOs, which are often derided among staff members and volunteers as lacking professionalism
and promoting an overly sentimentalized kind of “voluntourism” among well-intentioned but
clueless do-gooders, and large international organizations, critiqued as cumbersome, inefficient,
and impersonal.
Volunteers pay a modest registration fee in addition to the covering the costs of travel
and accommodation. Participants were typically university students, recent graduates, and
retirees, reflecting broader trends in international volunteering that skew to populations that have
the financial capacity, time, and flexibility to dedicate to the program (e.g., McBride & Lough,
2010). Also in line with broader trends (Kurtzleben, 2013), Full Hearts volunteers were also far
more likely to be women: 17 female to 3 male volunteers were present in this fieldwork period.
The organization requires a minimum 10-day volunteer period, and in practice, this tends to be
typical for most international volunteers. Coordinators are on site longer—on the order of
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months rather than days—although without the stability and incentive of a salary, most average
fewer than 5 or 6 months. The result is a perpetual, churning turnover, which becomes a
(dis)orienting structuring principle as volunteers struggle to make choices and construct meaning
in their short-term roles in the camp. As one participant described it, “it’s the blind leading the
blind,” with constant and unrelenting ad hoc approaches substituting for stable institutional
knowledge.
Key Findings
In course of the fieldwork and analysis, three interconnecting themes emerged that map
with major dimensions of cosmopolitanism: obligation, proper distance, and efficacy. Each was
the subject of consciously constructed organizational values by Full Hearts and articulated
normative ideals by volunteers, and each unraveled in practice as a site of deep tension,
ambivalence, and ongoing negotiation and contestation. Full Hearts’ efforts to resolve these
tensions only led to new dilemmas, in the kind of conundrum described by Eliasoph (2016) in
her critique of empowerment projects as “like a game of Whack-a-Mole: Like the mole, the
dilemma pops up, the player whacks it down one hole, and immediately, a related one pops up
elsewhere” (p. 249).
Obligation
At its core, cosmopolitanism is fundamentally concerned with “the idea that we have
obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of
kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” (Appiah, 2006, Kindle
location 137). International volunteerism is among the most explicit enactments and visible
performances of such obligation. The object of such obligation, however, is not entirely self-
evident or uncontested. To whom or what is the volunteer responsible, and on what basis?
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Volunteers at Full Hearts were constantly calibrating and recalibrating a shifting balance of
allegiance to self and other.
“We help people help refugees.” In its public-facing motto, Full Hearts implicitly
establishes a tangled duality, indicating a simultaneous responsibility to self and other. As
Gasiorek and Giles (2013) note, “the notion of an ‘other’ or outgroup is implicit, if not explicit in
the construct of volunteering” (p. 2661), and the displaced residents in the camp were indeed
explicitly constructed and maintained in terms of the other. At the same time, charitable
volunteering “allows individuals to construct a moral identity” (Rogers, 2017, p. 231), and
international volunteering in particular is often framed as a unique personal experience and
avenue to self-discovery and evolution. Indeed, recruitment of volunteers in large part depends
on it. Tellingly, in its volunteer exit interviews, Full Hearts includes the questions: “Have your
attitudes changed?” and “What did you learn about yourself?” The NGO also identifies the need
to “ensure satisfied, returning volunteers who also contribute financially” as a formal
organizational priority, and boasted in its annual report that “the majority [of volunteers] took
with them new attitudes, less xenophobia and new friendships.”
Such notions of volunteering and compassion as a mode of self-expression and
development align most closely with the notion of cosmopolitanism as an individual disposition
and salient social identity (Grönlund, 2011; Thomas et al., 2017; Winterich et al., 2013).
Research indicates that volunteers tend to hold closely to a constructed moral identity based on a
sense of their own virtue as a “good” person (Blackstone, 2009; Stets & Carter, 2006). These
frameworks are perhaps most vulnerable to the critique of cosmopolitanism as a function of
privilege and a mode of social capital; this was certainly driven home in this context by the fact
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that these volunteers were overwhelmingly White and highly educated, with the financial and
social capacity to dedicate to the trip.
The younger volunteers in particular, although not exclusively, tended to more readily
connect their volunteer experience to personal growth and development:
I wanted it to give me more, better perspectives and maybe more gratitude on my own
life when I get back home. … I think it was just important for me to do to just get a little
different perspective on things. (Rebecca, Volunteer, F, 25)
This is also for me, like, to challenge myself to do something that I’m not used to.
Well, it’s also helping people, but I would also like to do something new and experience
new things. (Cecilie, Volunteer, F, 23)
My goals for this. … Ohhh [laughs uncomfortably and makes a vague shrugging
gesture], I think mostly I want to learn more about the immigrant situation to kind of
maybe wake up more and increase my engagement. (Ane, Volunteer, F, 23)
Interestingly, older volunteers tended to be somewhat more circumspect and reflexively
problematize their own motivations and participation:
I have issues with this, if it would be more useful to have sent the money I spent to be
here instead of actually being here. This is a big thing for me. I spent a lot of money to be
here these two weeks. And I can’t stop wondering if I sent this money to the organization
it would have been better. … But I’m not sure about this. I have mixed feelings about
this. (Tania, Volunteer, F, 40)
Staff members and coordinators were also more likely to frame their involvement in terms of
professional development, identifying Full Hearts as an accessible entry point and immersive
on-the-job training for the NGO sector. As coordinator Manoli (Local Coordinator, F, 26) put it,
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“it’s like a ladder up if I ever want to build a career on the humanitarian side.” Fellow
coordinator Giulia (Local Coordinator, F, 29) likewise explained, “Greece is a little bit of a
special case. You can get a lot of experience … Ideally what I would like to become is one of
those really experienced people who are in the in the pool [of humanitarian workers called to
respond to emergencies].”
On the ground at Skaramagas, however, such explicit acknowledgement of the self as
being a primary focus and obligation was actively discouraged and resisted. Indeed, the greatest
scorn and judgment was reserved for volunteers in it for the “wrong reasons”—namely, personal
satisfaction and development, self-aggrandizement, and the emotional indulgence of saviorism.
We’re not giving you an experience. You’re here to help us achieve our goals, we’re not
here to help you achieve your goals. (Milli, Local Coordinator, F, 30)
There are so many reasons for volunteering. But there’s a lot of voluntourism or
volunteering for personal reasons, and it’s like, don’t bring that shit here. (Axel,
International Volunteer, NB, 56)
Self-discovery and evolution were to be lauded in the abstract, as secondary consequences that
should occur incidentally and naturally in the course of service; to acknowledge or explicitly
pursue them otherwise was seen as an exploitative and cynical form of benefiting from the
suffering of others. In this sense, obligation to the self was positioned directly in contrast to
obligation to the other—not necessarily incompatible, but in active and ongoing tension:
I feel like some of the volunteers, they really are only here for themselves. Which is not a
bad reason to start with. I mean it’s OK, but you have to understand that everything that
you do is not personal. And I feel like if you don’t have experience, then you don’t really
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see the damage that your personal attitude could have on residents and on programs.
(Manoli, Local Coordinator, F, 26)
Obligation to the other was described typically as a matter of moral duty, often tied to notions of
universal humanity and charitable service.
I believe that all humans have equal value, and that all humans deserve a good life. And
we who are rich, we should help the poor. So it comes naturally to do something here.
(Martin, Volunteer, M, 27)
Perspective taking and identification were also commonly invoked as part of the logic of
universal humanity:
I keep thinking it could happen to me. If there was a war or something and you had to
flee out of your country. (Tania, Volunteer, F, 40)
And in a utopic world, I would say that if we really want to do something, we
should first of all be more kind. Remember that as it’s them; it could be us. (Giulia, Local
Coordinator, F, 29)
Running alongside this more abstracted universalism was a more grounded and anxiety-laden
sense of obligation borne of guilt and shame, both individual and collective. Numerous
participants cited their deep discomfort with the national and regional role and response as a
motivating factor in their own action:
To know that people try to arrive in my country and they don’t save them makes me feel
like I want to die. I’m from Sicily, and people arrive every day, and it’s kind of terrible
now for me. (Lia, Volunteer, F, 27)
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I’m ashamed really to be Norwegian, I’m embarrassed really when I meet
refugees. Two, three, four, five years ago, it was cool to get to Norway because Norway
was such a good country. And now—. (Birgit, Leadership Staff, F, Age not provided)
I didn’t really find a way to channel this frustration that I have until quite recently
when I began to volunteer. … This frustration that Sweden changed drove me. We had
this—we were famous together with Germany to be open to migration, and then in late
2015, they closed our borders. Of course that is the most acute frustration. But I have
been frustrated with migration and Fortress Europe for a very long time. (Mikela,
Volunteer, F, 54)
Here, the volunteers articulate obligation as rooted in a critique of establishment failures
and neglect, echoing Chouliaraki and Stolic (2017) observations of broader humanitarian
regimes:
In combining the affirmative posture of conviviality, in ‘let them in’, with the critical
spirit of denunciation against ‘our’ decision-makers … [paradigms of] hospitality work
through a reversal of humanisation. In contrast to threat, which sets ‘us’ up against evil
‘others’, this one places ‘us’ in the position of the evil-doer; it is now ‘our’ politicians
who harm refugees rather than the other way round. (p. 1170)
The imbrication of self and other becomes particularly apparent, as obligation to the other
becomes an expression of obligation to self and vice versa. It is similarly notable that the
national and the global emerge as frames through which to understand and problematize each
other. These interdependencies and tensions offer especially rich sites for the theorization of a
dynamic cosmopolitanism, centrally addressed and developed in later chapters. For the moment,
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the key element to be underscored here is that identity and affect create both tension and blurred
lines in cosmopolitan obligation to self and other.
Full Hearts attempted to skirt around these tensions with a concerted and explicit shift of
focus away from affect and identity. I repeatedly heard volunteers describe Full Hearts as a
“serious” organization in reference to a prioritization of pragmatism and utility. Volunteers were
positioned as interchangeable components, sets of hands to be functionally deployed in service to
the pragmatic day-to-day functions of the organization.
This kind of depersonalization and desentimentalization was framed as a matter of
expediency, focusing on the practical tasks at hand, but it also carried a significant moral
valence. Humility, reflexivity, and self-control—particularly in relation to emotional
regulation—were emphasized as necessary to manage and maintain proper distance between
volunteers and residents of the camp.
Proper Distance
Silverstone (2007) describes “proper distance” as a balancing act that echoes these
tensions of self and other, recognizing difference while establishing bonds of solidarity:
Proper distance refers to the importance of understanding the more or less precise degree
of proximity required in our mediated interrelationships if we are to create and sustain a
sense of the other sufficient not just for reciprocity but for a duty of care, obligation and
responsibility, as well as understanding. Proper distance preserves the other through
difference as well as through shared identity. (p. 1094)
Silverstone writes in the context of media ethics, describing distance, intimacy, and
responsibility through mediated encounter; in the day-to-day interaction and direct encounter of
volunteers and camp residents, those same dynamics and tensions were amplified and
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crystallized. And indeed, a great deal of energy at Full Hearts was trained on trying to establish
and maintain a balance of intimacy and distance between the organization’s actors and the
migrants and refugees of the camp they intended to assist. In written volunteer guidelines, proper
distance was defined in reference to multiple overlapping and intersecting boundary regimes,
including boundaries related to legal–political, safety–security, cultural–social, moral–ethical,
and personal–emotional concerns. A range of formal rules and informal standards reinforced
these regimes, from explicit instructions not to socialize one-on-one with residents or engage in
substantive discussion of the displacement experience or asylum process to cautionary accounts
of uncomfortable or dangerous situations that might arise if professional distance were to be
violated. These were often conveyed in blunt terms:
It’s not okay to meet a refugee. I mean, I’m exaggerating, but if, for examples, if you are
in the bar and you are approached by a refugee—kindly just [ask them to] leave, go away.
Be polite and don’t interact. And the reason why we have [this rule], is because it’s us
and them, and we should be professional, and we should not be friends with the people
we are serving. (Birgit, Leadership Staff, F, Age not provided)
Such distance was constructed as a means of protecting the self and other from each
other, and by extension the reputation and efficacy of the NGO. Volunteers were continuously
reminded—by coordinators and other volunteers alike—that there are “so many ways that people
who want to help can hurt unconsciously” (Milli, Local Coordinator, F, 30) by becoming “too
close” with residents personally and emotionally. This rationale was rooted in a very explicit
assertion of difference, and acknowledgements of power disparities between volunteers and
residents were explicit and blunt. As one coordinator put it during the volunteer orientation, “We
are not at the same level. … We have power, freedom, papers, money, access. … You’re the
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White man, no matter how humble you are. Tough luck” (Emilia, Local Coordinator, F, Age not
provided). In such moments Full Hearts appears to acknowledge substantive critiques that
discourses of universality and common humanity serve as “a form of symbolic violence that
aspires to expand our sense of care and responsibility towards those who are not like ‘us’, yet
manages only to confirm our existing communities of belonging” (Chouliaraki & Orgad, 2011, p.
343). In this sense, an insistent reflexivity and positionality, particularly in relation to privilege
and social power, was used to actively resist the draw of an erasure of difference as a path to
solidarity.
In practice, volunteers struggled tremendously with the comprehension and maintenance
of prescribed proper distance, continually resisting, adapting, and negotiating the bounds of
intimacy and distance, similarity and difference. In almost every interview, participants
consistently identified the relational and emotional work of this balancing act as among the most
taxing experiences.
I made a conscious decision, like, I will still listen to people if they want to talk to me, I
will still, like, be here. But I will not become friends. Which is in a way very
counterintuitive, because the entire reason why I do this job is because I feel we’re the
same. And we should treat each other the same way. But I think the only way how I can
help the best is in this way. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, honestly, I don’t
know. That’s why I say I’m sometimes a bit in conflict with myself about it. (Tara, Local
Coordinator, F, 27)
In the beginning, I kind of emotionally kind of tried to reject [closeness with
residents], but it didn’t work. I think it’s so unnatural. (Ane, Volunteer, F, 23)
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In part, this discomfort was borne out of the social and moral identity of a volunteer, which
prizes intimacy and identification (Trauer & Ryan, 2005). Here again, the tension of self and
other manifests: This was not for any volunteer a purely utilitarian, dispassionate project separate
from the self, and identity and affect were inextricably bound up in assessments of propriety and
efficacy.
These boundaries and tensions of intimacy and distance became particularly fraught with
the RVs, who worked alongside volunteers, providing vital translation and local knowledge
without which Full Hearts programs could not function. Most had strong English-language skills,
allowing for more in-depth conversations, and international volunteers and RVs would regularly
spend all day together. During my time with Full Hearts, off-hour and weekend social gatherings
were also attended by both international volunteers and RVs. And yet, RVs were held at an arm’s
length, with added restrictions and cautions. In fact, socializing of any kind with RVs beyond
official program activities had previously been disallowed altogether, before the rule was
loosened to allow for limited sanctioned group activities. Birgit, a core member of the small
leadership staff, was frank about the contested balance with RVs:
It was the socialization part that the resident volunteers were struggling enormously with,
because resident volunteers and the international volunteers, they are equal. And they told
me, “You don’t treat us equal.” And I was thinking, “No, I don’t.” I really don’t treat
them equal, because we say keep the boundaries, do not socialize. But the resident
volunteers, they said, “But we are your volunteers.” Yes, but the problem is you are also
one of our beneficiaries. You depend on us. Yeah. So it’s the power balance. … But then
living in a refugee camp, working with refugees for months, you cannot avoid be friends.
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So now we have changed that to saying you can socialize, but not one-on-one. (Birgit,
Leadership Staff, F, Age not provided)
To be sure, while RVs may have chafed against the restrictions and volunteers sometimes
struggled with the rationale and maintenance of Full Heart guidelines, these policies were not the
sole barrier to intimacy. Volunteers’ own affective discomfort and moral ambivalence about
appropriate distance and intimacy were also very much at play, as in the following exchange
with volunteer Tania (F, 40).
TANIA: The resident volunteers were a good surprise. I didn’t know we would have
them. And as they can speak English, you can have a conversation and get to know them.
So I think it was good because I wanted that to get to know some of them and ask about
their stories. But at the same time, I feel weird. Because sometimes I want to ask, “How
did you get here? You came by boat, was it dangerous? Did you lose family?” But at the
same time, I feel like I should not ask that because it is such a sensitive issue. I’m really
not sure, but—I would like to know, and to ask.
INTERVIEWER: So have you asked?
TANIA: No, no. I’ve never asked.
Notably, at various points, RVs expressed or confided disappointment and resentment at feelings
of exclusion or marginalization in the organization, in some cases interpreting the added
restrictions and precautions as expressions of mistrust or bias. This striking disconnect between
articulated intention and received interpretation hints at a deeper contradiction and dilemma: As
operationalized by Full Hearts, proper distance is a one-sided affair to be decided and managed
by nonresidents on behalf of residents. In a paternalistic turn, this is articulated as a decision
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primarily “for their own good,” a means of protecting residents from the instability and impulses
of an ever-changing roster of volunteers:
The thing about the good and the—well, the bad things for the refugees, they cannot
leave, they are stuck here, and when they get friends—and they get friends all the time—
and their friends they leave and they keep seeing friends, losing friends, losing friends.
And that’s on top of what they have lost already. (Birgit, Leadership Staff, F, Age not
provided)
The concern is that you’re going to leave after a month. And I think that might be
more harmful if you built such a deep relationship, with kids especially, and then you
suddenly disappear from their lives. I feel sometimes it might sort of, like, trigger some
memories of like people leaving them. I think that is very harmful. And so I think with
kids, there’s always that fine line between being fun and friendly with them and also
trying your best to maintain that separation. Volunteers find it difficult sometimes. I think
it’s an ongoing problem, an ongoing obstacle that people face all the time. (Adriel,
Volunteer, M, 23)
In elaborating and attempting to formalize a standard of proper distance, Full Hearts is
responding to substantial concerns and critiques of a kind of superficial and potentially
exploitative intimacy often produced in humanitarian contexts (Conran, 2011; MacCannell,
2013; Trauer & Ryan, 2005). Coordinators also drew on a shared repertoire of cautionary tales—
examples of awkward or dangerous interactions, refugees unintentionally put at risk by a
thoughtless photograph posted on social media, romances and friendships turned sour between
volunteers and the residents they inevitably left behind, volunteers returning home with burdened
with sustained psychological distress, camp residents boycotting programs over charges of
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inequity or favoritism—“Every single thing that is written in the guidelines has happened,” I was
told.
It is significant, however, that the logic of proper distance at Full Hearts is one that
consolidates control and bolsters power among volunteers, while resisting the agency of
residents to identity and act in their own interests. The logic of “proper distance” thus becomes
simultaneously a product and reinforcement of hierarchical symbolic and material boundaries.
As with mediated constructions of refugees (see Chapter 3), the effect is often to position
residents as objects of affective discomfort—whether compassion, pity, guilt, or anxiety—while
limiting their own agency in determining proper distance. Consider, for instance, the following
exchange with coordinator Tara, who described a personal decision to minimize intimacy:
TARA: I make very sure that I’m not becoming friends with the resident volunteers. That
sounds very harsh. I don’t want to be harsh. But I think it is a difficult friendship to have
for both sides. … There are a couple of people there that I became friends with. But when
you leave—because I did leave, I can leave—they can’t. I could go back and study. A lot
of them fled when they were in the middle of their studies. They would ask me, for
instance, “How’s your sister doing?” because she got married. Then she was pregnant at
one point, and they would be very nice about it. But they didn’t see their brothers and
sisters for like four or five years. That kind of thing.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that’s something that you just became uncomfortable
with yourself, or was there ever a point when they said something?
TARA: They would never say something. … They would never say anything because
they don’t want you to feel guilty. They want you to have a good life, and they are just
very happy for you. No. That’s why I say they’re wonderful people. Really.
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Resonating with Morley and Robins (1995) observation that “hierarchical orders of
identity will not quickly disappear … the very celebration and recognition of difference and
otherness may conceal more subtle and insidious relations of power” (p. 115), management of
distance is thus framed as a moral–relational concern, requiring the maintenance of a kind of
paternalistic concern that implicitly reinforces the power dynamic between volunteer and
resident. Notably, that same hierarchical control of distance was also associated with efficacy.
Proper distance, it was argued, was not only a mandate of professionalism and morality; it was
necessary to the functioning and success of the organization’s mission.
Efficacy
Efficacy was positioned as the overarching structuring principle of Full Hearts,
articulated explicitly in its organizational values and as justification for specific policies and
perspectives in day-to-day activities. Obligation and proper distance were both ultimately
assessed and rationalized in terms of a pragmatic consequentialism. Recall, for instance, local
coordinator Milli’s admonition that “you’re here to help us achieve our goals, we’re not here to
help you achieve your goals.” In practice, however, rather than providing clarity and definition,
the very notion of efficacy emerged as yet another tangle of contradictions and inconsistencies to
be navigated by volunteers.
Running beneath the cheerful pragmatism of Full Hearts’ day-to-day operations was a
striking sense of helplessness and inadequacy in relation to the vast political and structural
conditions of refugee displacement and reception. In the context of day-to-day activities, many
volunteers expressed doubt that their efforts were valuable or consequential:
“I don’t know if it’s useful, what we’re doing. I don’t know.” (Tania, Volunteer, F, 40)
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Of course, I can see that, yeah, for some people I made some difference. I taught
some people something. I learned something from someone, you know. And those
relationships, all those things that happened between human beings are most important.
But I don’t believe that I made a change by being here. (Mikela, Volunteer, F, 54)
Curiously, although volunteers almost universally identified the core issue as fundamentally a
political one and recognized the need for policy change to substantively improve the situation,
most resisted a political identity or purpose in their volunteering. Volunteer Ane (F, 23), for
instance, readily pointed to the need for significant structural and political changes:
I’m the sort of person, I want to be optimistic always. But I feel—I don’t know. It seems
like it will be just more and more refugees in the future. And then I think politicians in so
many countries have to do really big changes in how they handle it to get a positive
development. It has to be done—really big changes in how people in think of refugees, I
think. Especially politicians.
And yet when asked whether she considered volunteering a political act in this regard, she was
apparently surprised by the very notion, laughing, “Oh, actually I have not thought of it that
way!” Other volunteers echoed the sentiment, with variations on “I’m not that into politics”
(Eleftheria, Volunteer, F, 23) and “Personally? It’s definitely not political” (Mark, Volunteer, M,
23). The political and humanitarian were thus rhetorically delineated as separate arenas of
action—either by implicit exclusion, as for the previously noted volunteers, or by explicit
justification as operationally necessary, as was more common among staff and coordinators:
It is not my job to actually try to solve the situation and fix the situation. I know that we
should cure that disease and not the symptoms, But what I’m doing now is I’m actually
trying to alleviate the symptoms and make them better. It’s needed. … I want to focus on
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is actually help those in need, rather than be a political activist or something like that. …
Everyone has to do their bit. And my bit is this one. (Giulia, Local Coordinator, F, 29)
In the face of such limited scope and uncertainty—made all the more precarious by the
rapid turnover among volunteers—success became largely defined in terms of
compartmentalized affective moments of relief, satisfaction, and interpersonal engagement:
The most positive [I felt] was when I was in in the library. It was this group of four or
five Afghani girls. It was the first time I’ve seen them, and they were just studying. And
that to me was beautiful. And I thought that even if we are only helping these five girls to
study, then everything that we do is worth it. (Manoli, Local Coordinator, F, 26).
I could really tell that just playing football with a couple of kids for a while, it
does make them happy and it does make a difference walking into a camp and smile to
people and just be friendly and be like, “Hey, hello, how are you?” to people. And then
just seeing that their response and seeing how happy they are. Yeah, it sounds maybe a
bit stupid, but like that it does make a difference to them. (Tara, Local Coordinator, F,
27)
Such a personalized, affective, and performative construct of efficacy seems at odds with the
pragmatic, utilitarian ideal articulated by Full Hearts. As one volunteer ambivalently concluded
on their final day in the camp, “I feel neutral. I know I could stay here one more week, three
more weeks, and I would be needed, but I have to go. Now we have to think about what can be
done. I don’t know” (Axel, Volunteer, NB, 56).
The Milk Situation
These intersecting, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradictory tensions of
obligation, proper distance, and efficacy surfaced constantly in everyday interactions. In some
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instances, however, these dilemmas crashed against each other with particular force and
visibility. Such moments—“key incidents” in Emerson’s (2004) terms—provide particularly rich
opportunities to “[open] up new analytic issues and broader lines of theoretical development” (p.
27). During this fieldwork, the most pronounced such incident was distilled in what came to be
commonly referred to among volunteers as “The Milk Situation.”
Among Full Hearts’ programs and services was a dedicated space for relaxation and
socialization exclusively for women and their children younger than 3 years old. In the language
of empowerment, the space was framed as an affirmation of women’s dignity and a facilitation
of interpersonal engagement. Indeed, a number of volunteers identified the women’s space as
among the most rewarding assignments precisely because of this opportunity to engage one-to-
one.
The space offered an array of modest comforts aimed at creating a supportive and
welcoming space for women—coffee for the women, toys for children, a private diaper-changing
room, and, at the center of this incident, milk for baby bottles. This provision of milk in that
space of “empowerment” became among the most fraught volunteer–resident interactions.
Having budgeted for four cartons of milk per day, Full Hearts rationed servings to half a bottle
per child per shift (morning and afternoon). To maintain those limits, the Full Hearts policy was
that volunteers had to control the milk; mothers were not to fill bottles themselves, nor were they
to use any milk for their coffee. As a result, volunteers assigned to the women’s space were
constantly policing the milk, watching the fridge, trying to track how many children a particular
woman had brought in, jumping up to intervene when mothers went for the milk themselves, all
while trying to sustain an ostensible atmosphere of welcome, empowerment, and dignity. Even
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as they enjoyed the relative intimacy and personal engagement facilitated in the space, volunteers
regularly lamented the logistical and emotional strain of the effort of maintaining the policy.
During the fieldwork period, the issue came to a head when one volunteer assigned to the
women’s space confronted a woman about taking more than her allotted quantity of milk. The
interaction escalated into an argument that ended with shouted accusations, tears, and racially
charged insults directed at the volunteer—notably, the only Black woman of the group. A tense
detente was eventually brokered by a coordinator and an RV who was brought in to interpret.
Tara, a local coordinator, recounted the incident:
It was a misunderstanding. … She [the resident] thought they were calling her a thief
when she wasn’t, which I can understand would be upsetting, but, you know, you don’t
call someone a whore. I tried to explain that we all speak different languages, that it’s
very difficult to communicate and we’re trying. She was still angry and shouting, at some
point [the RV] stopped translating what she was saying, so yeah. I wanted to talk about
mutual respect, but I thought now is not the time. I think when she left, she was still
angry, but I tried to tell her she was always welcome.
At the end-of-day check-in volunteers were largely silent on the subject but were eager to
talk about it privately, a notable discrepancy that in itself likely speaks to a perceived lack of
efficacy to effect change in the organization. One volunteer, Rebecca (F, 25), had looked
especially distressed during the meeting and started to speak before firmly shaking her head and
muttering “I’m not going to say anything.” When I subsequently asked her about it, however, she
was less reticent:
I was so upset about it. I felt like they had been unfaithful to me. All these women I see
all the time. You know, I’m in the women’s space a lot. I just don’t understand. I mean, I
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understand, but I don’t understand. We’re trying to do something good. Like, I get that to
me it’s just some milk and for them it’s much bigger—it’s like their dignity. But I felt
like they betrayed me.
Particularly notable in these invocations of faithfulness, betrayal, respect, and
appreciation is the implicit reinforcement of a “moral economy in which the refugees must
always show gratitude” (Siapera et al., 2018, p. 2), highlighting competing obligations to self and
other, empowerment and service. The notion of betrayal is particularly striking here and speaks
to embedded logics of symbolic boundaries and hierarchies that underpin Full Hearts’
constructions of proper distance and efficacy as dependent on volunteers maintaining authority
and the sense of such structures as both morally and operationally necessary.
In an interesting counterpoint, Freya, the Somali-born volunteer at the center of the
incident, directed tremendous anger, anxiety, and regret squarely at Full Hearts’ policy and
culture:
They [Full Hearts] can’t put me in this shit. I’m not going to be the police. For me, it
wasn’t the solution to be controlling people, especially when it’s a communication
problem and it’s so hard for them to explain in a respectful way when they don’t
understand the language, you know what I mean. … [When I started in the women’s
space], I felt like we have to do this, we have to say no, and we have to go after them.
And for me I totally forgot what I was about. … You know, we are totally forgetting that
these people are people that are traumatized, that came from war, and I felt like the way
Full Hearts gave me the information about how to act when it comes to certain things, I
did not like it to be honest. … I felt so bad, and I had problems sleeping that night, so the
next day I did apologize to the lady, and the other day I treated her even more respectful
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to show her that that was so wrong of me, and when she saw another side of me, like
sometimes you have to come to in a bad terms to get along with someone. (Freya,
Volunteer, F, 32)
Freya thus explicitly challenged the logic of depersonalization and distance, rejecting the
definition of efficacy as one requiring control.
In each of these fraught responses to and interpretations of the encounter, Tara, Rebecca,
and Freya articulated a fairly distinct evaluation of causality, and blame, and yet they all
responded with similar distress and frustration regarding the inability to reconcile duties and
tensions of obligation, proper distance, and efficacy. Here, what Eliasoph (2016) described as a
whack-a-mole of dilemmas is painfully apparent, presenting constellations of values and
priorities that never quite align; to prioritize one is to undermine another. Following the incident
with Freya, the coordinators announced that volunteers would no longer be asked to control the
milk. They were to simply note that there was a limited supply and excuse themselves from
further monitoring or intervention. “Volunteers said they didn’t want to feel like police,” Tara
explained, adding, “We’re trying to be fair. But of course, it’s never fair.” Later, I was told that
such an approach had been in place in the months before and had been abandoned when uneven
access provoked complaints and concerns of equity and efficacy. Prior to that, the distribution of
diapers in the space had become so contested that Full Hearts had ended the service altogether. I
asked how this attempt would be different and was met with a helpless shrug. The cycle of
precarious balance and reactive negotiation was reset, postponed until the next incident and the
next crop of volunteers.

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Conclusion
In Full Hearts is an organization whose brand is proximal to an abstracted ideal type of
cosmopolitanism, constituted in policies and articulated values that establish normative
frameworks of obligation, proper distance, and efficacy. And yet the struggles, doubts,
aspirations, and contradictions of Full Hearts volunteers illustrate the deep inadequacy of binary
conceptions and measures of cosmopolitanism that rely on exclusive indicators. Rather than
sorting the tenuous balances of affect, relations, and efficacy negotiated at Skaramagas into static
categories of “more” or “less” cosmopolitan, successes or failures, these experienced, vernacular
understandings and negotiations of volunteers can instead inform the theorization of an active
cosmopolitanism constituted in these very tensions and negotiations.

132
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CHAPTER 8 INTEGRATED DISCUSSION AXES OF ACTIVE COSMOPOLITANISM
This chapter takes a step back to bring the two studies presented in Chapters 6 and 7 into
dialogue, considering the through lines that can help to identify and clarify the elements of active
and ambivalent cosmopolitanism. To review briefly, Study 1 (Chapter 6) analyzed Twitter
discourse, combining big-data insights and qualitative coding, and found that the social media
discourse about refugees is largely structured around a highly emotional and politicized moral
antagonism, in which extreme voices are disproportionately amplified. The issue is often used as
a marker of political and moral identity, with little engagement with the material conditions or
human experiences of refugee displacement. In Study 2 (Chapter 7), participant observation and
in-depth interviews conducted with international volunteers at the Skaramagas refugee camp in
Greece further reveal deep ambivalence and contradictions in the articulation and practice of
rhetorical cosmopolitan ideals.
Although the two studies take up markedly different methods and scales of analysis, both
begin with contexts and conditions that meet the most basic or superficial criteria of
cosmopolitanism: individuals and collectives articulating moral concern and social responsibility
across national borders regarding the plight of suffering others. And in both, it becomes apparent
how slippery and contested these are when experienced and negotiated in discursive context and
practice.
Putting these two studies in direct dialogue, therefore, offers an opportunity for a more
critical, nuanced assessment of how cosmopolitan functions and takes shape in context,
interaction, and practice, shifting it from a static binary—is it cosmopolitan or
anticosmopolitan?—to an active and ambivalent practice that is neither assuredly inclusive nor
neatly progressive, and yet is deeply imbued with possibility and collective imagination. With
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this in mind, this chapter identifies the common underlying logics and limits of active
cosmopolitanism that emerge in both studies, establishing a basis for a dilemma-centered
approach to cosmopolitanism. In particular, three common axes emerge: networked collectivity;
efficacy, performativity, and participation; and critical imagining.
Networked Collectivity
These studies position cosmopolitanism as an active process embedded in communicative
practices of encounter, negotiation, and meaning making. In doing so, the spaces that enable and
shape such practice are drawn into relief:
In contrast to the elite view of cosmopolitanism, which rests on the good work of national
institutions and emergent forms of transnational governance, the version of
cosmopolitanism from below works from the practices and interests of citizens and
various movements of people to organise and effect their own transnational influence.
What must be included in such an account are not only the everyday sets of routine
cosmopolitan practices engaged in by individuals, but the means, media and networks by
which they accomplish, and are allowed to accomplish, such practices. (Skrbiš &
Woodward, 2013, Kindle location 1540).
In this regard, these two studies highlight the centrality of networked communication in enabling
these spaces of active cosmopolitanisms. To be sure, care and attention for distant others is by no
means a unique product of new media, nor does a globalized communication technology offer
any guarantee of an inclusive or progressive global conscience—as the proliferation of racism
and xenophobia in the Twitter dataset makes abundantly clear. But as Castells (2011) lays out in
formulating his theory of the network society, these sites enable the connection and creation of
meaning across time and space:
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The process of constructing meaning operates in a cultural context that is simultaneously
global and local, and is characterized by a great deal of diversity. There is, however, one
feature common to all processes of symbolic construction: they are largely dependent on
the messages and frames created, formatted, and diffused in multimedia communication
networks, (p. 417)
The centrality of social media in the case of the Twitter study may be largely self-evident,
but it’s worth remembering that Full Hearts, too—like so many grassroots organizations and
movements in this context—also exists as a direct consequence of social media. Recall that what
became Full Hearts’ embodied international network on the ground in Skaramagas began as a
single individual’s page on Facebook, itself an expression of her response to mediated encounter
of the refugee situation through hybrid systems of top-down and bottom-up media (Chadwick,
2013; Jenkins et al., 2013). The expanded reach, visibility, and active networking afforded by
social media provided the capacity and social momentum to transform that personal page into a
formal organization—one very much structured as a network of weak ties rather than a stable
community. The ongoing transnational operation and sustainability of the organization—
connecting on-the-ground operations across Greece with headquarters in Scandinavia and
volunteer and donor networks across multiple continents—are likewise enabled and shaped by
these global communication networks.
The forms that emerge from these systems in both cases are loose, ad hoc collectivities
that temporarily come together around shared interest and affect and then dissipate. There are
certainly relevant links here to digital social movements, a full accounting of which is not
attempted here, but readers are referred to the extensive and rich body of literature on the subject
(e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Castells, 2012; Earl & Kimport, 2011; McCaughey & Ayers,
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2003; Shirky, 2008). The sites and participants in these two studies, however, are far less stable
and less anchored to a conscious group identity than social movements as conventionally
conceived. In this, these fluid social forms in many ways bear more resemblance to what
Papacharissi (2015) describes as “affective publics” of shared sentiment and interest connected
through the sharing and storytelling networks of social media. Rather than uniting around a
singular identity or firm ideology, these collectives are connected through “soft structures of
feelings” (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 32) that can “help activate the in-between bond of publics, and
[also] enable expression and information sharing that liberate the individual and collective
imaginations” (p. 8).
If we take networked collectivity as fundamental in constituting contemporary
cosmopolitan forms in this regard, what are the implications for theorizing active
cosmopolitanism? There is, as Castells (2011) makes clear, tremendous power in the networked
form that is greater than the sum of its parts: Networks are inherently resilient, with “strength in
their flexibility, adaptability, and capacity to self-reconfigure” (p. 22). Individuals can drop in
and out of the network, participating temporarily, sporadically, or unevenly—whether that be
dipping briefly into the Twitter stream or volunteering abroad for 2 weeks—and the larger form
remains intact. This orientation insists on dynamism; a static notion of cosmopolitanism as an
individual disposition or fixed orientation simply cannot hold; networked cosmopolitanism is
inherently agentic, relational, and dynamic.
Attention to the networked structure of contemporary cosmopolitan forms also sensitizes
attention to dynamics of power and influence. As much as networks are constituted in
connection, they are also defined by disparity and exclusion: not all within a network are
similarly positioned “to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways
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that favor the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values” (Castells, p. 2011, 14). Fixed
dispositional categories of individuals or practices as “more” or “less” cosmopolitan are
empirically limiting and theoretically unproductive; we can, however, fruitfully examine the
distribution of more or less power and influence within a networked cosmopolitan collectivity. In
this project, for instance, it becomes clear both in the Twitter discourse and in the Skaramagas
camp, the Western observers and participants responding to the “crisis” – not the refugees
experiencing it directly– are more centrally positioned within their respective networks, and thus
more able to assert their interests and perspectives in defining the field of discourse and action.
Networks can certainly function to reinforce and replicate structures of privilege and
marginalization in this way. Crucially, however, networks are not deterministic, and their
fundamentally dynamic nature means they always have the capacity for resistance and change
that might challenge the status quo.
This dynamism brings us to the second major implication of networked collectivity: an
affirmation that rather than seeking a single model or ideal form of cosmopolitanism, it is more
fruitful to talk of an interacting constellation—indeed, a network—of multiple cosmopolitan
forms that are constituted in specific discursive contexts and articulated with varying logics of
inclusion and exclusion, identification and distinction. In their seminal 2002 interview study of
“ordinary cosmopolitans,” Lamont and Aksartova found significant variation in how blue-collar
workers in France and the United States justified solidarity with distant or different others—
ranging from criteria of hard work and meritocratic socioeconomic success to citizenship and
religious moral traditions as bases for inclusion. In the Twitter discourse of Study 1 and among
the international volunteers of Study 2, participants likewise articulated a range of logics in
dedicating attention and care to refugees, from the hyperpoliticized antagonism of Twitter users
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denouncing antirefugee policy and discourse to the hyperpersonal desire for self-growth and
humanist moral identity among young volunteers in Skaramagas. In short, no singular
cosmopolitan identity, ideology, or perspective exists, nor are these varied cosmopolitan forms
assuredly or unambiguously progressive. In fact, as partisan reactivity of Twitter discourse and
the fraught tensions embedded in the volunteer experience demonstrate, the distance between
anticosmopolitan and cosmopolitan logics and processes can be uncomfortably narrow. The
threads that distinguish and connect these collectivities, however, is a shared sense of global
interdependence and responsibility. And here again the dilemma of networked, active
cosmopolitanism is compounded: Its very strength in adapting and expanding also makes it
inefficient and tenuous, subject to competing and often contradictory interests and impulses that
make measurable outcomes and efficacy so fraught.
Efficacy, Performativity, and Participation
These wide and loose networks of transient transnational collectivities, connected by
shared interest, attention, and affect, enable active exchange and meaning making around shared
concerns. Just as networked communication comes with no guarantees of progressive dialogue
and community, cosmopolitan structures of feeling offer no assured template for action.
Papacharissi (2015) is careful to qualify that “the potentiality embedded in the term [affective
publics] is meant to emphasize how affect may connect to both action and inaction, as affects
typically do not connect to behaviors in a linearly causal way” (p. 13).
Indeed, both studies find individuals and groups wrestling with questions of what is
valuable and impactful in a context that doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of a clear agenda
or immediate optimism. What, after all, does it mean to be “effective” in this space of massive
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global displacement and disjuncture that simultaneously implicates and transcends national
borders and responsibilities?
Volunteers at Skaramagas shared a near-universally bleak vision of the future, with deep
pessimism, even fatalism, about the prospects for long-term structural change. Likewise, Twitter
is notoriously subject to critiques of passive clicktivism—not least from users themselves.
Interestingly, however, such futility and frustration seem to become a driver of expressive action,
a twist at odds with typical notions of efficacy as being vital to individual and collective action.
Why keep going? Certainly, affect is a reliably motivating force to do something, even if that
something is not assuredly or linearly linked to organized action:
At the individual level, social movements are emotional movements. Insurgency does not
start with a program or political strategy. This may come later, as leadership emerges,
from inside or from outside the movement, to foster political, ideological and personal
agendas that may or may not relate to the origins and motivations of participants in the
movement. But the big bang of a social movement starts with the transformation of
emotion into action. (Castells, 2012, p. 15)
The motivating force of identity likewise cannot be discounted. Indeed, a fundamental
principle of social psychology is a deep intrinsic need to maintain a coherent identity and an
impulse to mitigate or counteract inconsistencies that threaten a positive self-image (Steele,
1988; Steele & Liu, 1983). In this regard, posting on Twitter and volunteering in Skaramagas
both offer performative avenues to assert a social or moral identity. Similarly, many Twitter
users and volunteers used the public, performative nature of their acts to critique their national
governments and delineate their identity in opposition to antirefugee forces in politics and
society (e.g., Hamann & Karakayali, 2016). In sociopsychological terms, doing so may again
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affirm a positive self-image by establishing distance from moral transgressors in the in-group,
thereby soothing personal discomfort or collective guilt (e.g., Piff et al., 2012; Rothschild &
Keefer, 2017; Walter et al., 2016).
Such public expressions of affect and value can themselves constitute meaningful
participation well beyond the individual. Challenging easy dismissals of slacktivism, research
has demonstrated that small-scale actions can produce sustained and far-reaching effects. In a
longitudinal study of Twitter users who posted about the death of Alan Kurdi, for instance,
psychologists Smith et al. (2018) concluded that “processes of normative conflict and
communication can be intertwined in promoting support for social change,” explaining:
When people perceive a normative conflict—a discrepancy between the way the world is
(the descriptive norm) and the way they perceive the world ought to be (the injunctive
norm)—they are motivated to communicate the discrepancy to change that state of
affairs. Communicating about a normative conflict is a central, catalytic process in efforts
to promote social change. (p. 624)
Jennifer Earl’s research on online activism and social movements further explores how
small-scale and ephemeral actions can achieve greater impact when refracted through a network,
affirming the value of online and social media as an accessible entry point for many who might
otherwise remain disengaged (Earl, 2016; Earl & Kimport, 2011). This again highlights the
significance of networked collectivity as a key feature of contemporary cosmopolitan forms,
shaping both the affective performativity and social impact of these groups.
If affect and identity provide some impetus for continued participation or action in some
form, the question of cosmopolitan outcomes remains. Certainly, quantifiable metrics toward
progressive change in refugee policy and response has been slow and insufficient at best and
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regressive at worst, particularly now that the surge of public attention of 2015 and 2016 has
dissipated and shifted elsewhere. Twitter users and Full Hearts volunteers alike lamented
political and institutional inaction and apathy, often explicitly renouncing the political altogether.
Yet these ostensible failures of political efficacy may be more productively interpreted as
a push to rethink the notion of the political in the context of cosmopolitanism—and here, insights
from cultural studies are especially helpful. Writing in the context of popular culture, for
instance, Aswin Punathambekar (2011) asks, “What are the cultural and political implications of
a zone of participation that lasts a few weeks or months at best?” He goes on to suggest that
answers “are more likely to be found in the terrain of daily life, which, in turn, forces us to
rethink our understanding of public and private life in ways that are not beholden to
Habermasian ideals” (sec. 1.2). Likewise, the concept of civic participation advanced by Jenkins
(2019) proposes a more expansive and inclusive framework of what constitutes meaningful
participation beyond, or around, formal political institutions:
The word, “civic”, describes a set of social and cultural relationships between
“neighbors” or “fellow Americans” or “fellow members of the human race”. The Civic
refers to a shared set of norms, values, commitments, we make to each other as members
of a particular community. The Civic is the foundation upon which we resolve
disagreements. The Civic embodies a capacity to work together towards common goals
and shared interests. (p. 6)
The anger and frustration with the political establishment expressed in both studies is
particularly telling in this regard. Certainly, the antagonistic hyper partisanship of antagonistic
Twitter discourse highlights the pitfalls and limits of the political; as Jenkins (2019) notes, “the
Political, especially at the current moment, is much more partisan than the Civic, expressing
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those factors which divide us rather than those which bring us together” (p. 6). Meanwhile, the
apparent resistance to associating their work with politics among Skaramagas volunteers can be
read as a reorientation to the civic in the face of political inefficacy and division. Full Hearts
coordinator Tara touched on this distinction, expressing greater faith in social collectivity than in
formal institutions: “Politics-wise, I’m not really optimistic, but like, on the individual, like, side,
I am maybe a bit optimistic. If that makes sense.”
Just as networked collectivity alerts us to the diversity of cosmopolitan forms and
ideologies, here the axis of efficacy and action affirms that no single model exists of
cosmopolitan politics and participation. And again, there is power in the expanded accessibility
and diversity of participation, but just as this enables greater inclusivity, it also constrains its own
transformative civic potential. The power of civic engagement is in connection and relationships,
in the spaces “where people come together, form common bonds, and engage everyday issues
and concerns” (Jenkins, 2019, p. 6). Again and again in these studies, however, we see a
persistent tendency toward otherization and paternalistic distancing of the very individuals and
communities around whom these collectivities coalesce: refugee voices absent from the Twitter
discourse, Skaramagas residents sidelined in establishing norms and practices of engagement and
distance. And so once again we find cosmopolitanism in the push-and-pull of opposing forces
and impulses that cannot be neatly circumvented or resolved.
Critical Imagining
Emerging at the nexus of networked collectivity and participation among these
ambivalent and imperfect cosmopolitans is the active construction of meaning—not only in
terms of interpreting and responding to refugee displacement, but also in building shared visions
of alternative realities and possible futures. Cosmopolitanism, Delanty (2012) writes, is “by
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definition a transformative condition that is concerned with possibilities in the present” ( p. 336),
and from which “new cultural models that challenge the normative and cognitive assumptions of
society” can emerge (p. 334).
As such, the imaginary becomes a key arena for cosmopolitanism. This should not be
confused with a reversion to an abstract, philosophical theory of cosmopolitanism; rather, it
identifies the imaginary as a social fact and site of transformation (e.g., Appadurai, 1990, 1996).
Adding the notion of the civic imagination to that of civic participation, Jenkins et al. (2019)
offer this definition:
We define civic imagination as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural,
social, political, or economic conditions. The civic imagination requires the ability to
imagine a better world, to map the process of change, to see one’s self as a civic agent
capable of making change, to feel solidarity with others whose perspectives and
experiences are different than one’s own, to join a larger collective with shared interests,
and to bring imaginative dimensions to real world spaces and places. (p. 5)
Utopian and dystopian visions that resist the status quo are embedded in so many of the moments
and frameworks of critique that have been highlighted in both the Twitter discourse and among
Full Hearts volunteers. Volunteer Axel, like many others, described being “utterly pessimistic
about the state of the world,” and yet went on to imagine a radical restructuring of the global
economy and society: “The problem is the Western world. We don’t need the rest of the world to
upgrade, we need to downgrade to a reasonable way of living” (Axel, Volunteer, NB, 56).
Other volunteers went further in imagining a fully borderless world:
No countries, no nothing. Just people. Yeah, this would be my vision of a good world.
It’s not my country, it’s not my land, it’s everyone’s. It’s the Earth. We all belong here.
147
You should not have to be [limited] because you are “this” nationality. No, no. We have
cultures, but nothing like [national borders]. This is my utopia. I would like it to be like
this. No frontiers, no barriers. (Tania, Volunteer, F, 40)
I do not believe in borders, even if I know that that is kind of a utopian way of
thinking. I mean, it’s not that I have an idea that we could open the borders and then
everything would be fine, but if I were thinking how the world should be in my view,
then we should not have any borders. That dominating hegemonic thought that we
actually can manage and decide where people should be on this planet. It’s—if you look
at nature or the long history of this planet, it’s an outrageous idea that has been so
normalized and naturalized. So we almost see these borders and boundaries as natural.
Which is crazy. (Mikela, Volunteer, F, 54)
In this final instance, Mikela articulates perhaps the most profound dimension of civic
imagination in terms of cosmopolitanism: the rejection of the national as the assumed container
for collective identity, responsibility, and solidarity, expanding—in Benedict Anderson’s (2006)
terms—the “imagined community” to encompass the global. Jenkins et al.’s Civic Imagination
Project adds an important distinction of particular relevance here, shifting from the language of a
fixed “imagined community” to a more active notion of “imagining community:”
Imagining community [is] actively generating new cultural symbols to describe their
relationship with each other. Imagination is seen not as a product or a possession (not a
fixed identity or predetermined set of contents). Rather, we talk about imagining as a
process. Imagination is not something we consume or inherit but something we actively
produce together, something we do. (Peters-Lazaro & Shresthova, 2019, p. 11)
148
Imagining cosmopolitanism, therefore, becomes fundamentally a process of creation.
Popular culture, Lipsitz (1997) writes, “enables people to rehearse identities and social relations
not yet permissible in politics” (p. 152). The same might be said of the public critiques and
shared civic imagining circulating among these loose, expansive networks, which become new
templates of possibility. These templates are aspirational, performative, and symbolic, but they
create a scaffolding for alternate futures and social realities; and, as Beck and Sznaider remind
us, “the farther cosmopolitan rituals and symbols spread, the more chance there will be of
someday achieving a cosmopolitan political order. And this is where normative and empirical
cosmopolitanism do meet” (2006, p. 8).
A cautionary note is in order, however: Imagined futures will not “simply and effortlessly
dissolve away the solidity of inherited social structures, infrastructures and relations” (Morley &
Robins, 1995, p. 28). Cultures and identities are not indefinitely malleable and individualized;
they are built in relations with others, and as we see in these studies, they remain subject to
fraught structures of privilege, inclusion, and exclusion. But a cosmopolitan modernity is one in
which these contradictions must be grappled with and internalized because the conditions of
connectivity and encounter cannot be opted out of; there is no turning back. As Morley and
Robins (1995) write, in these conditions of disjuncture and ambivalence, “our feet must learn to
walk on both banks of the river at the same time” (p. 45).
In this spirit of walking on both banks of the river, the final chapter lays out an agenda
for future research premised on a dilemma-centered approach to active cosmopolitanism.

149
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153
CHAPTER 9 CONCLUSION: ADVANCING A DILEMMA-CENTERED APPROACH
TO COSMOPOLITANISM
Cosmopolitan has a long, rich, and fraught intellectual history, fairly critiqued and yet
insistently advanced for centuries. Its very resilience as a concept that we cannot seem to shake
speaks to the fact that it offers something that other frameworks simply do not. Even closely
related concepts like globalization and its many variations, multiculturalism, and hybridity—all
of which offer significant insight and conceptual order to global processes—somehow fall short
of capturing the full richness of transformation of society from both the inside out and outside in.
As mapped in Chapter 5, cosmopolitanism has been parsed and theorized in branching
paths—moral, political, cultural, structural—each of which attempts to wrest the unruly notion
into useful order. An integrative framework recognizes these as interacting dimensions rather
than exclusive types, constituting an active cultural process of meaning making. Following such
a framework, Delanty (2012) suggests that the aim of empirically grounded cosmopolitan inquiry
should therefore be “to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or
emergent social realities” (p. 25).
The studies presented in this project affirm how deeply intertwined these dimensions of
cosmopolitanism are. What also becomes evident, however, is that they are not comfortably knit
together—indeed, more often than not, the many modes, dimensions, and expressions of
cosmopolitanism are entangled in tensions and contradictions. Ambivalence and contradictions
are not new in cosmopolitan research (e.g., Chouliaraki & Georgiou, 2017), but they often tend
to be noted either as descriptive observation or interpreted as a failure of a kind of cosmopolitan
purity. And here is where I suggest there is an opportunity to continue to push cosmopolitan
inquiry productively forward by placing these dilemmas at the center of analysis rather than
154
attempting to resolve them. A dilemma-centered approach to cosmopolitan, I suggest, continues
important progress in moving cosmopolitanism away from a static disposition or condition into
active practice. In addition, such an approach can also further reveal dynamics that may
otherwise remain obscured, allowing for greater depth and clarity in articulating and studying
cosmopolitanism as a dynamic project rather than a static condition.
Sociologist Nina Eliasoph (2016) advocates for a dilemma-centered approach for the
study of organizational cultures, providing a useful starting point and model for such a
reorientation:
Why would an approach that looks for dilemmas be useful? For decades, scholars have
been saying that the only way interaction stays afloat anywhere … is that people manage
ambiguity, without ever resolving it (Burke, 1969 [1945]). Acknowledging the
inevitability of ambiguity and dilemmas allows us to ask a whole set of questions and
notice processes that a quest for coherence hides. In other words, admitting that reality is
nearly always full of unspoken dilemmas is more, well, realistic. (p. 265)
With this in mind, these final sections reflect on this research project to envision what a
dilemma-centered approach to cosmopolitan inquiry might look like and consider future research
direction to that end.
Toward a Dilemma-Centered Approach to Cosmopolitanism
What does it mean to place dilemmas at the center of cosmopolitan inquiry? Building on
existing theorizations and past approaches to cosmopolitanism research, it begins with a
recognition of cosmopolitanism as a dynamic and multidimensional response to global
entanglement that operates simultaneously on many scales—from the intimate and interpersonal
155
to the political and structural—and in multiple realms, including the material, symbolic, and
digital.
Rather than continuing with an approach that attempts to triage and separate those
threads, a dilemma-centered approach shifts primary attention to the very sites and subjects of
tension that resist resolution. To this point, the two studies of this project reveal common
dynamics and tensions related to: (a) networked collectivity as fundamental to contemporary
cosmopolitan forms; (b) efficacy, performativity, and participation; and (c) critical imagining.
With expanded and repeated research excavating and examining tensions across varied contexts,
a common framework—a “family resemblance” (Eliasoph, 2016, p. 249; Wittgenstein, 1953)—
of cosmopolitan dilemmas can come into greater focus. It may well be that these same tensions
are encountered repeatedly across diverse social, cultural, or organizational contexts, in which
case we can clarify and deepen understanding of the fundamental constitutive features of
cosmopolitanism.
In a scholarly environment already teeming with so many qualified cosmopolitanisms of
various emphases, there is understandable reluctance to introduce yet another iron to the fire. I
suggest, however, that this proposed approach can earn its keep not by replication or
competition, but by providing a novel and inclusive framework: This is not another discrete
“type” of cosmopolitanism to add to an already unwieldy list, but an orientation that preserves
the dynamism and diversity of cosmopolitanism without sacrificing the coherence and utility of
the construct. In bringing tension and ambivalence into focus, it may indeed help to demystify
cosmopolitanism, moving it from the realm of abstract aspiration to grounded, agentic practice.
Recall for a moment Pollock et al.’s (2002) assertion, previously noted in Chapter 5’s
review of cosmopolitan literature, that cosmopolitanism “must always escape positive and
156
definite specification, because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an
uncosmopolitan thing to do” (p. 2). A dilemma-centered approach to cosmopolitan inquiry, I
suggest, offers an alternative to resisting specification altogether without constraining
cosmopolitanism as rich, varied, and multidimensional. Unbound from fixed set of
characteristics, dispositions, or conditions, it offers productive theoretical and empirical space to
study cosmopolitanism as situated in specific discursive environments and local contexts,
remaining responsive to a diversity of “multiple” and “rooted” cosmopolitanisms (Appiah, 2006;
Lamont & Aksartova, 2002), while constituting a larger global social phenomenon.
As a matter of engaged scholarship, such an approach also allows the researcher to
explore the normative, aspirational promise of progressive cosmopolitan ideals while avoiding
the stagnation of either uncritical celebration or flat cynicism. In this regard, it may be useful to
consider dilemmas in terms of “cosmopolitan dialectics”—a generative process of working
through ambivalences and contradictions that is neither complete nor guaranteed, but
nevertheless open and available to progress. “A dialectical view of society,” Chatterjee (2016)
explains, “is one where we move away from causal interpretations to an interpretation in which
different constituting factors (sometimes co-aligned and sometimes contradictory) are co-present,
in their supportive or opposing ways, to produce reality” (p. 5). Cosmopolitan dialectics are
those dynamic tensions that don’t simply oppose one another as exclusive opposites, but
creatively and generatively pull, push, intertwine, and transform one another.
They also do not neatly cleave along exclusive dimensions, so that, for instance,
prorefugee Twitter discourse can advocate for progressive ideals of multiculturalism, inclusivity,
tolerance, and solidarity, while simultaneously playing into continued marginalization and
otherization of refugees and migrants. Likewise, volunteers can earnestly work toward
157
solidaristic engagement and encounter while still falling into hierarchical and paternalistic
structures of power and dependence. A dilemma-centered approach thus bridges critique and
possibility, providing a foothold from which to move forward.
Future Directions
With these possibilities in mind, this project provides an initial empirical and theoretical
exploration of cosmopolitanism as active negotiation and working through of ambivalences and
contradictions, significantly enabled and shaped by networked communication. It is envisioned
in this sense as a starting point of a continuing program of research that will extend in the future
to a variety of social contexts and multicultural perspectives to advance an active cosmopolitan
as a critical feature of global modernity. To this end, future studies can further elaborate on a
dilemma-centered approach to cosmopolitan inquiry, elaborating and clarifying the theoretical
framework with additional empirical study in a range of contexts.
Regarding the networked forms of cosmopolitan collectivities, significant room and need
remain to further clarify how specific affordances of new media variously enable or constrain a
productive working through of dilemmas. As noted in Study 1 (Chapter 6), for instance, Twitter
particularly encourages and inflames reactive discourse, limiting forms of more reflexively
engaged deliberation. Moving beyond critiques of spectatorship, therefore, future studies should
aim to better identify and clarify the conditions under which networked communication and new
media can encourage deeper, more sustained engagement and deliberation beyond partisan
outrage and blame. Similarly, building on insights of Study 2, further research of various
structures and forms of volunteer engagement will be valuable in illuminating and comparing
various modes and templates to work through the ambivalences and tensions of engagement and
solidarity. As Eliasoph (2016) suggests, identifying patterns in dilemmas in such projects and
158
organizations “lets us ‘see’ a field where before there were just thousands of disparate
organizations,” and perhaps “share solutions to those predictable problems” (pp. 247–248).
As noted early in the project, it is also vital that future research more directly engage with
migrant and refugee perspectives, considering how these dilemmas are worked through by those
whose experiences of mobility and encounter may be less voluntary and privileged than the
Western publics studied here. In particular, I envision a project that maps digital traces of
refugee displacement—such as social media, information sharing, and media coverage—
alongside the physical trajectories, community maps, and policy routes of movement and
suspension. Bringing these various conceptions and dimensions of mobility into direct
conversation will allow for a richer empirical and theoretical framework for migration that
extends beyond the physical transit of bodies across national borders and emphasizes the
connectivity, voice, and agency of migrants.
Finally, I suggest it will be valuable to broaden the scope of a dilemma-centered
approach to cosmopolitanism to likewise consider anticosmopolitan networks through the lens of
those same dilemmas. In existing literature, the cosmopolitanism of global social movements,
humanitarian care, and transnational communities of shared interest have often been presented—
whether explicitly or implicitly—as a kind of parallel alternative or tenuous antidote to
anticosmopolitan orientations and structures of anxiety, bias, and exclusion. As a result, much
scholarship to date reifies cosmopolitanism as an abstract and apolitical ideal, limiting the
richness and potential utility of the concept. A dilemma-centered approach may help to address
this gap by recognizing cosmopolitanism and anticosmopolitanism as expressions of common
impulses—namely, ontological insecurity in the face of shifting local–global dynamics (Giddens,
1991; Kinvall, 2005. In addition to advancing a richer empirical and theoretical framework,
159
understanding these connections can also inform responses to some of the most divisive forces at
a time of global polarization, insecurity, unrest, and opportunity.
Conclusion
Cosmopolitanism comes with no guarantees, no linear path or predetermined process
through which to achieve its normative ideals. The intense connectedness and interdependence of
our global modernity may just as well produce a reactive reentrenchment of parochialism, and
“the bleakness, the horror, the malevolence and the sheer inhumanity which find violent
expression when the boundaries between us and them lose their sharp contours” (Beck, 2006, p.
19). Now is not the time for a cosmopolitanism of abstract ideals, further dividing “us” and
“them” into categories of local and global, pure and impure, deserving and undeserving. We
need a theory and practice of cosmopolitanism capable of embracing and integrating the
ambivalence, the contradictions, and indeed, the deficiencies of global consciousness and
entanglement to be able to imagine and generate new social realities.

160
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APPENDIX
Interview Guide
Volunteer

NOTE

The guide below outlines key topics to be explored and examples of the types of questions that
will be asked during in-depth interviews in this study. Interviews will progress organically;
questions may not be phrased in precisely the same way or asked in the same order. Interviewees
may raise unanticipated topics, which will be explored at the discretion of the researcher and
may be incorporated into future interviews if appropriate to the research.

Introduction
Thank you for agreeing to talk with me today. I would like to remind you that I will be recording
today’s interview for my own reference. Before we begin, do you have any questions about
either the consent form or the interview procedure?

I. Background
● Name
● Nationality
● Volunteer status
● Previous volunteer experience
188

II. Issue Involvement and Perceptions
● How would you personally define “refugee”?
● How did you become interested in this issue?
o Before volunteering here, where you involved in any other ways in this issue?
o Did you personally know any refugees?
o Do you know other people involved in this issue?
● There are so many important issues that you could choose to get involved in. Why were
you drawn to this one?
o Is there a particular moment that stands out to you that made you want to
volunteer?
● What do you think people tend to get wrong about this issue?
● How do you describe what you’re doing to friends or family at home?
o What was the reaction when you decided to volunteer? How did you respond?
o Did you do any kind of preparation before you arrived?

III. Volunteer Experience
● I’d like to hear more about your experiences volunteering.
o What was your first impression when you started? What surprised you? Has that
changed over time?
o Is there anything you felt unprepared for or required some adjustment that you
weren’t expecting?
o What kind of advice did you get from other volunteers when you started?
189
● Can you describe in your own terms what you see as the role of volunteers in this issue?
o Has there ever been a time when you’ve felt like it’s been difficult for you or
others to fulfill that role?
● How would you describe your relationship with camp residents?
o What do you find most surprising/difficult/rewarding about that relationship?
o If you could change anything about your interactions or relationships with camp
residents, what would it be? Why?
● Can you walk me through a typical day volunteering?
o What kind of interactions and activities did you participate in? How did you feel?
o How do you generally feel at the end of the day of volunteering?
● Can you describe a moment that was particularly rewarding?
● Can you describe a moment when you were uncomfortable or unsure? How did you
handle it?

IV. Imagined Futures
● How would you describe the status of refugees at the moment?
● Do you think generally things are heading in a positive direction or not? Why?
o What makes you hopeful, looking ahead?
o What makes you anxious?
● If you were to imagine the best possible outcome and ideal future for refugees in the next
couple of years, what would it look like?
● What do you envision as the most realistic future in the next couple of years?

190
Wrap-Up
● Is there anything else you would like me to know that we haven’t discussed?

191
Interview Participant Questionnaire

The following questions ask for some basic demographic information.
All responses will remain confidential.

1. In which country were you born?
(If different from above) In which country
do you currently live?

2. What is your gender?
 Male
 Female
 Nonbinary
3. What is your age?
4. What is your race or ethnicity?
5. What is your current employment status?
 Employed full time
 Employed part time
 Unemployed looking for work
 Unemployed not looking for work
 Retired
 Student
192
 Other

6. On a scale from 1 (very conservative) to 10 (very progressive), where would you place yourself
politically? Please mark the scale below.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Very Conservative Very Progressive

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Asset Metadata

Creator Demetriades, Stefanie Zoe (author)

Core Title Cosmopolitan logics and limits: networked discourse, affect, and identity in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 11/21/2020

Defense Date 05/06/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cosmopolitanism,culture,distant suffering,globalization,humanitarian,media,migrants,mixed methods,networked publics,OAI-PMH Harvest,refugees,social media

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Riley, Patricia (committee chair), Castells, Manuel (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

Creator Email sdemetri@usc.edu,stefaniedemetriades@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-396664

Unique identifier UC11666381

Identifier etd-Demetriade-9139.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-396664 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Demetriade-9139.pdf

Dmrecord 396664

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Demetriades, Stefanie Zoe

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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