2025/04/15 by Minwoo Jung · 2 voices
Psychology · Social Sciences · #African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues #Anthropology #Conceptualization #Cosmopolitanism #Environmental ethics #Epistemology #Eurocentrism #Gender studies #Globalization #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Law #Mainstream #Meaning (existential) #Political science #Politics #Queer #Scholarship #Sex work and related issues #Social science #Sociology #Vision
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1468-4446.13217
published in British Journal of Sociology 76(4), 790-799 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2025/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
In the last decade, the "decolonial turn" has gained prominence across academic disciplines, challenging inherent Eurocentric knowledge paradigms. Extending these conversations, this paper critically investigates the notion of "the global" from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial scholars criticize the mainstream conceptualization of cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentrism and advocate for alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This paper builds on this decolonial scholarship and examines how various local actors make sense of and give meaning to the contested category of "the global" in understanding, articulating, and addressing their visions for social change. Drawing from ethnographic research on queer activism in South Korea, it identifies the coexistence and contestation between two forms of cosmopolitanism-metrocentric and provincial-and suggests that we understand non-Western activists as producers of anticolonial thought from below. By doing so, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and decolonial thought.