Dr Jose Jowel Canuday, Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines visited CASIC on 6th June 2018, to give a fascinating talk, titled 'Dancers, Terrorists,and Pirates: Cosmopolitan Sensibilities of a Marginalised World'.

Pirates, rebels, and terrorists beheading Asian, European, North American, and local captives seized while on tour in the pristine shores of Philippine, Indonesian, and Malaysian borders permeate the global media imagination of this remote region. Swept off these imageries, however, are lasting and deeply rooted cosmopolitan traits of openness, flexibility, and reception of ordinary constituencies to a great array of cultural flows streaming into and out of the Muslim enclaves of the Southern Philippines. The distinctive features of these cosmopolitan sensibilities are discernible in how such awareness are embodied in the blending of old and time honoured dance music traditions in contemporary pop-musical genre recorded and performed as part of everyday micro­ entrepreneurial productions of street-based musical videos.

Drawing from a year long ethnographic fieldwork hanging out and collaborating creatively with artists, wedding performers, and street vendors, this work presents enduring acts of attachment to local worlds and greater connection to our shared humanity that have been invariably described as every day, down-to-earth, pragmatic, interstitial, and practical cosmopolitanism.

Introduction: Professor Mihaela Kelemen, Director CASIC, Keele University

Discussant: Vassos Argyrou, Professor of Social Anthropology and Cultural Theory, University of Hull