Cohesion and Conflict in Contemporary Living 
 
 

Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is concerned with developing a better 

understanding of social change and cultural cohesion in cosmopolitan societies. The four papers 

in this issue demonstrate in different ways what may be at the core of this concern.  

 

Both Froystad and Adami are interested in cultural and religious values in multi-religious 

societies and cosmopolitan spaces where individuals from different cultural contexts interact. 

Froystad throws the study of multi-religious sociality in Western context into relief by examining 

examples from India. For her, the key question is whether the current scholarship of 

cosmopolitanism has a monotheistic bias that should be accounted for. Adami suggests that 

human rights discourse can work in a cosmopolitan space where value systems meet in processes 

characterized by conflict and cohesion. 
 

Collins and Reid take as their starting point the increasing global mobility of professionals for 

their study of immigrant teachers in Australia. They show that forces of inclusion and exclusion 

are part of the everyday experiences as of these teachers as they settle in to their professional 

lives as new migrants. 
 

Bisen, Dalton and Wilson analyse media coverage of microfinance in the USA and India. Their 

study found that while there are some differences in subject matter and style in the newspaper 

articles, both sets of articles are dominated by business-oriented language, emphasizing the 

importance of the profit motive in microfinance schemes over the poverty-alleviation for which 

microfinance schemes were first recognized. 
 

Together, these papers show how cohesion and conflict, inclusion and exclusion, shared 

experiences and difference are an integral part of experiencing contemporary life; individually 

and collectively they add to the richness of scholarly and societal debates. 
 

Hilary Yerbury 

Sydney 


	Cohesion and Conflict in Contemporary Living