07.01.2025

Public lecture: Liberal Agentic Citizenship, its Global Reach and Limitations

Prof. Yasemin Soysal, Thursday, Jan 23, 16–18h c.t., Keplerstr. 2

Global sociologist Prof. Yasemin Soysal will be giving a talk on “Liberal Agentic Citizenship, its Global Reach and Limitations: Europe and China Comparisons” on 23rd January at Keplerstr. 2, Room 0.81. The event will start at 4:15pm. You may also join online via Zoom meeting ID: 987 1722 3673

She provided an abstract for the lecture: 

The post-war liberal world order, and its neoliberal transformations since the 1990s, supported a citizenship model that envisions agentic, right-bearing and globally oriented cosmopolitan individuals. This model unfolded and became standardized through several interacting dynamics including national and transnational courts (e.g. the European Court of Justice), instruments of international organizations (e.g. the International Conventions on Human Rights, the UN’s Human Development Index), and the expansion of education worldwide and a network of expertise around it. Drawing on a joint project (with Hector Cebolla Boado) and using a multi-sided, representative survey of internationally mobile and non-mobile Chinese higher education students (with control groups of European students), we analyze the reach and limits of this citizenship model. In the broader migration literature, international mobility and globalization are linked in two specific ways: (i) the experience of mobility is highly transformative and engenders individuals with broad agentic qualities (defined as transnational human capital) and open, tolerant, solidaristic affinities beyond “own kind” (defined as cosmopolitanism); (ii) those who are internationally mobile are a positively selected group on human and cultural capital and thus are already more agentic and inclined to cosmopolitanism than those who are sedentary. Our findings question both these propositions and support an alternative explanation that emphasizes the increasingly standardized and transnational nature of higher education, on the one hand, and the timing and context of China’s entry into the global world, on the other.

Her bio: 

Yasemin Soysal is Research Professor of Global Sociology at WZB, University Professor at the Free University of Berlin, and the Deputy Co-director and a leading Principal Investigator of the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence. Her research brings global and sociological–institutional perspectives into the study of the historical development and current reconfigurations of nation-state and citizenship, with a specific interest in the diffusion, enactment, contradictions, and contestations of global cultural frameworks.