Cosmopolitan practices in social contexts: Swedish skilled migrants in the Netherlands

Empirical work on cosmopolitanism has, to a large extent, focused on the preconditions for and character of cosmopolitan practices. Drawing on interviews with Swedish skilled migrants in the Netherlands, this article contributes to the cosmopolitan research by focusing on the socially structured variety of cosmopolitan practices. Based on an understanding of cosmopolitanism as an active and reflexive process of sociocultural identifications, this article argues that there is a range of cosmopolitanisms, built on an elective relationship to place of residence, country of origin and transnational socialities. Hence, there is no universal cosmopolitan logic but different sets of cosmopolitan practices that are related to migrants’ biographies and lifestyles and, therefore, expressed in different fields and contexts of social space.