Projects

In contemporary society, individuals navigate multiple and often competing identities. These identities arise from social structures, cultural norms, and shared commitments, and they are shaped both by direct relationships and large-scale systems such as markets and states.

Moral obligation and political solidarity frequently emerge from embedded, localized social relations. Yet ethical practices and political projects also call for transcending parochial viewpoints. This occurs through institutions and networks that connect people beyond their immediate circles—families, communities, movements, religions, and nations—under broader principles like fairness and hospitality.

Still, a tension remains between two broad categories of norms: those that govern direct interpersonal interactions, and those that structure impersonal systems like markets and states. Norms such as honesty may bridge both realms, while cosmopolitan ideals ask us to move beyond loyalty to particular groups.

Across different levels of scale, conflicts among values often arise. Particularly salient is the clash between group-based belonging—national, religious, or ethnic—and more universalist frameworks. In a series of related research initiatives, Dr. Calhoun examined how changing scales of interaction affect both solidarity and cohesion in modern societies.

Selected Publications

General

• Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Challenge of Difference

Community

• Community: Toward a Variable Conceptualization for Comparative Research
• Technology's Global Village Fragments Community Life
• Computer Technology, Large-Scale Social Integration and the Local Community
• Class, Place and Industrial Revolution
• Community without Propinquity Revisited

Nations and Nationalism

• Nationalism and Ethnicity
• Nationalism and Civil Society
• Nationalism
• Nationalism, Political Community, and the Representation of Society
• Nationalism and the Cultures of Democracy
• Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity, and the Cosmopolitan Dream
• Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
• Populism, Nationalism, and Brexit
• Imagining Solidarity

Cosmopolitanism and its Limits

• The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers
• Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary
• Variability in Belonging: A Response to Brubaker
• Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary
• Cosmopolitanism and Hegemony
• Beck, Asia, and Second Modernity
• Cosmopolitan Liberalism and its Limits
• Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere

Humanitarian Response to Emergencies

• A World of Emergencies
• The Imperative to Reduce Suffering
• Humanitarianism in Question: Power, Politics, Ethics
• The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)order

Religion and Secularism

• Religion, Secularism, and Public Reason
• Secularism and Social Transformation: Keynote Address to the European Academy of Religion, in EUARE Lectures 2019
• Religious Imaginations and Global Transformations
• Varieties of Secularism in ‘A Secular Age’
• Religion’s Many Powers
• Rethinking Secularism: Includes “Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere”
• Time, World, and Secularism
• Habermas and Religion
• Religion, Government and the Public Good
• Religion in the English Public Sphere