Global careers, local belonging: How cosmopolitan ideals are enacted in everyday practices

This paper sets out to trace the multiple local and global attachments of globally mobile professionals, who have worked and lived extensively across different countries. By doing so, the paper counters the general depiction that internationally oriented professionals have weak local affiliations and are rather detached from the local communities in which they work and live. Instead, the paper explores the identity relevant attachments of global professionals, which appear to be both global as well as local. By analyzing this finding through cosmopolitan theory and the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ in particular, the paper indicates how people narratively arrive at a hybrid sense of self that sustains both a global and local sense of belonging. Theoretically, the paper contributes a socio-critical conceptualization of cosmopolitanism, which moves away from elite and abstract framings of cosmopolitanism as a normative-philosophical commitment to ‘world citizenship’. Instead, it theorizes cosmopolitanism as enacted in the everyday interactions of mobile professionals within their global/ local communities, namely as an ethical responsibility towards the other that aims for integration and inclusion.