Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat

Bio: Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat is an academic researcher from University of Ljubljana. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social change & Cosmopolitanism. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 5 publications receiving 67 citations.

Mitteleuropa and the European Heritage

Abstract: The political significance of Mitteleuropa has grown in that much of it is now within the EU. Mitteleuropa is a discourse; it is not just a semantic term or a label to refer to a geopolitical region in which power and culture are interwined. Although people may identify with it, it is not primarily a term of identity but a cultural mode of interpretation. It can be called, along with other concepts of Europe, a conflicting field of interpretation. The concept reflects a civilizational context based on imperial models of modernity and cosmopolitan cultural resonances. Europe is an ongoing cultural battleground and the idea of Mitteleuropa is a reminder of a shift to the margins and the emergence of a multiperspectival Europe along with new notions of geopolitical space and historical-time consciousness.

The Predicament of Intercultural Dialogue: Reconsidering the Politics of Culture and Identity in the EU

Abstract: This paper examines the ‘intercultural dialogue’ paradigm to ask whether, as conveyed through EU discourses, its conceptualization is flexible enough to encompass the challenges of an increasingly ...

The globalization of gender: Ally McBeal in post-socialist Slovenia

Abstract: This article looks at the American TV series Ally McBeal and the meaning of the lead character for young college audiences in post-socialist Slovenia. Critical examinations of the series have pointed to the problematic construction of the character’s gender identity based on the notion of liberated femininity. This notion has been seen as especially problematic with reference to feminist politics. When discussing the character and its social portrait with sociology undergraduate students in Slovenia, however, the series’ construction of the post-feminist character attracts a different set of meanings. Rather than engaging in the debate with western feminism, the analysis suggests, Ally’s popularity in Slovenia may be understood from the way in which the character and the series allow local audiences, and women’s audiences in particular, to come to terms with their own social biographies in the period of transition.

Consuming European identity The inconspicuous side of consumerism in the EU

Abstract: • This article investigates consumerism in post-socialist Slovenia with respect to the formation of the shared European Union (EU) commodity market. It asks how, through forms of consumption, Europe is made present to the EU citizens in the post-socialist states and how political imaginaries of the ‘new Europe’ are being formed. It is argued that consumerism presents a cultural site on which the meaning of citizenship acquires its symbolic positioning. This positioning is then illuminated with respect to the emergence in post-socialist Slovenia of public discourses of ‘two Europes’, ‘two markets’, ‘first- and second-class’ EU citizens, which evolve around the perceptions that, after the two enlargement waves in 2004 and 2007, commodities in the EU differ in their origin of production and quality between the West and the East. The perceptions are linked to memories of socialism. However, this inconspicuous side of consumerism is also discussed as a selective mechanism by which the imagined community of the...

A Wandering Paradigm, or Is Cosmopolitanism Good for Women?

Abstract: Dieser Artikel enthalt einen feministischen Beitrag zur zeitgenossischen Kosmopolitismus-Theorie. Es wird dargelegt, dass ein feministischer Kosmopolitismus eine wichtige kritische Perspektive beinhaltet, die den sozialen Aktivitaten von Frauen eine weltburgerlich ausgerichtete ethische Basis ermoglicht. Die erkenntnistheoretischen Differenzen, die zwischen feministischen Autor/-innen haufig bestehen, fuhren jedoch zu verengten Problemdefinitionen; dies zeigt sich besonders in Fragestellungen, die sowohl die lebensweltlichen Erfahrungen von Frauen ausschliesen als auch die sozialen Machtbeziehungen, die die Bedingungen weiblicher Solidaritat bestimmen, ignorieren. Auf der Grundlage eines Vergleichs der kosmopolitischen Ausfuhrungen von Kristeva und Nussbaum mit kosmofeministischen Diskussionen wird ein multiperspektivisch-kosmopolitischer Ansatz entwickelt. Als Ausgangspunkt liegt diesem multiperspektivischen Kosmopolitismus das Konzept der Menschenrechte (Benhabib) zugrunde; es wird erganzt durch die feministische Ethik der Fursorge und Trauer (Butler).

The New York Review of Books

Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens

Abstract: The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. By Seyla Benhabib. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper. Between 1910 and 2000, the world's population more than tripled, from 1.6 to 5.3 billion. The number of persons who live as migrants in countries other than those in which they were born increased nearly sixfold, from 33 million to 175 million, and more than half of this increase has occurred since 1965. Almost 20 million of these are refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons. In her book, Seyla Benhabib grapples with both the political and moral implications of this rapid increase in transnational migration, arguing that the central principles that shape our thinking about political membership and state sovereignty are in tension, if not outright contradiction, with one another. “From a philosophical point of view,” she writes, “transnational migrations bring to the fore the constitutive dilemma at the heart of liberal democracies: between sovereign self-determination claims on the one hand and adherence to universal human rights principles on the other” (p. 2). She argues for an internal reconstruction of both, underscoring the significance of membership in bounded communities, while at the same time promoting the cultivation of democratic loyalties that exceed the national state, supporting political participation on the part of citizens and noncitizen residents alike.

We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship

Abstract: We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Etienne Balibar. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 2004. ISBN: 0691089906 (paper) and 0691089892 (cloth)

The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory

Abstract: Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.