'In medio stat virtus' : a qualitative exploration of synergic cosmopolitanism amongst university students

Abstract

This study uses a grounded qualitative methodology to examine the construction and practice of synergic forms of cosmopolitanism, amongst three academic courses located within the University of Malta. By conducting extensive in-depth interviews with students, lecturers and leading public intellectuals in Malta, this study explores how cosmopolitanism embodies different forms between social groups, which experience divergent forms of a synergic inter-play between local and cosmopolitan values and sensibilities within their value systems. This study demonstrates that as contemporary social changes catalyse the development of cosmopolitanism within society, group members oscillate between the demands of both local and cosmopolitan life-spheres; maintaining membership to 'identity promoting mechanisms' which enable actors to mediate and balance attachments and commitments to national or local systems of meaning, whilst also embodying and practicing genuine forms of practical cosmopolitanism. On this basis, this study demonstrates how national and cosmopolitan sensibilities are not inherently antagonistic, but that in contemporary society, both of these cultural articulations are intricately intertwined and balanced, by key social structures which possess latent functions that enable both fields to remain in play.