Towards a Practical Cosmopolitanism

Claiming the airport as an exemplar of contemporary global space and the incessant logics of movement seen to be at the heart of globalisation, the introductory chapter asks what is it to move in the airport space? What is the choreography of the airport? Reviewing debates on critical cosmopolitanism, and the corporeal and spatial turns, this chapter argues for the need to further embodied analysis of global movement through a kind of kinaesthetic ethnography, which puts the wealth of thinking about moving bodies in space from dance studies into dialogue with mobility studies. Such an approach, the chapter argues, can lead us to important knowledge about the ongoing tensions between sameness and difference, national and transnational, self and other, as experienced in the transit spaces of global mobility—a practice of cosmopolitanism.