Hans GÖTTEL
Europahaus Burgenland, Austria, europahaus@bibliotheken.at
Geography in its educational enthusiasm quickly takes off with semantic spaceships like Spaceship Earth or One World for All etc. Such journeys are seemingly disconnected from cosmopolitan roots. In times of globalization let´s assume that new interpretations of nature, art and politics could benefit from a rich cosmopolitan heritage which obviously has been neglected or blocked by national ideologies and the respective worldview as even created by Geography. The first parliament of the world „Thingvellir“ ment to be a gathering of „things“. Not delegates of nations or interest groups met but people brought their problems, questions, desires together and created by thing-politics their world. Nowadays one might consider what our common things will be: one hint we can find in the 2015 UN-International Year of the
Soils! How can we develop an understanding of Thing-Politics in our days
– as a form of Earth Politics may be? However, new things often appear as old ones: This paper will explore the benefits of renewed awareness and a new interpretation of cosmopolitan ideas. It is about identifying traits of a cosmopolitical mindset and connecting it to geographical worldviews. By doing so this paper will contribute with some images of Global Citizenship Education.