Lenehan and Lietz Guest Post: The Need for a Cosmopolitan Perspective

Guest Posts
The need for a cosmopolitan perspective. Guest post by Fergal Lenehan and Roman Lietz.

The very malleability of the cosmopolitan concept – which can sometimes make it seem incoherent – is actually the great advantage of the notion. The concept has the potential to greatly help scholars, as we argue in our book Reimagining Digital Cosmopolitanism: Perspectives from a Postmigrant and Postdigital World, to conceive of the relationship between human beings, their cultural contexts, and the wider communicative world in relation to digital technologies, in new and interesting ways which can potentially advance scholarship. This may be seen in relation to the theoretical re-thinking of the internet as a global and connecting technology, in terms of analyzing of those who use the internet, while the cosmopolitanism discourse also helps scholars when theorizing about the online spaces of encounters and the myriad of digital connections contained by, and possible with, digital technologies.

Download the entire guest post as a PDF.

Roman Lietz Profile

Profiles

Roman Lietz received an MA and a PhD in Intercultural Business Communication from the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, in Germany.

Roman LietzHe gained seven years of practical experience in Berlin (Germany) managing the – at that time – second largest project for integration assistants (Integrationslotsen) in Germany. With this practical backing, he commenced an academic career in teaching and research. He was a researcher at various universities (the Karlshochschule of Applied Sciences, the Hochschule Karlsruhe of Applied Sciences, the University of Landau, and the Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz/Germersheim) carrying out several applied research projects concerning questions of integration, participation and intercultural communication. The latest project is the ReDICo project (Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively), carried out together with Fergal Lenehan among others. The ReDICo research co-operative also retains editorship of the book series Studies in Digital Interculturality.

His list of publications includes one monograph concerned with quality assurance in integration projects (2018, in German), and three co-edited volumes on the topics of cyber-utopia/dystopia (2022, in English), language and interculturality in the digital world (2024, German and English), and about the reimagining of digital cosmopolitanism (2025, English), and more than 30 articles, research reports and newer forms of science content communication, such as an educast and a podcast.


Work for CID:

Roman Lietz wrote a guest post for the Center, The Need for a Cosmopolitan Perspective.