York Professor Warren Crichlow will discuss "Improvisation and Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Invoking Jazz’s Double Movement across Translocal Encounters and Uncommon Practices" today, from 3 to 5pm, in 286C Winters College, Keele campus, as part of the Beyond Multiculturalism: Back to Cosmopolitanism(s) series of informal talks and presentations.
Building on Anthony Appiah’s arguments for a "rooted cosmopolitanism", Crichlow will explore jazz improvisation as a generative approach for acting in concert and solidarity across difference. Improvised jazz is sustained by a spirit of collective inclusivity, cross-cultural agency and trans-national solidarity, that resists humanist hierarchies of truth and knowledge. In addition, when formed in the violence of global estrangements and displacements of late modernity, improvised jazz becomes a resource for thinking through new imaginaries of human interaction and communication affected by the lived post-colonial flux of exile and migration.
Crichlow, a professor in the Faculty of Education, has published a number of works on identity and representation in education. He is the former director of the Graduate Program in Education at York. His research interests focus on the sociology of education; cultural studies and education; pedagogy and learning in cultural institutions: art galleries, museums, zoos; globalization and the internationalization of the curriculum.
Cosmopolitanism, as a critical concept that brings together academic and political concerns, has featured prominently in contemporary scholarly debates, signaling a renewed attention to the complex ways in which globalization, nationalism and questions of citizenship and multiculturalism are being linked together in the context of a post 9/11 world.
Sponsored by York’s Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought, Faculty of Education and Founders College, the series brings together academic and political concerns in scholarly debate.
For more information, e-mail Professor Daniel Yon in the Faculty of Education at dyon@edu.yorku.ca or call ext. 88806.