Ksenija Vidmar Horvat

This chapter investigates the idea of cosmopolitan patriotism. Since the original publication of the key reference work by Anthony K. Appiah, a fresh look at the cosmopolitanism and patriotism, if considered individually, may lead to a new, qualitatively different understanding of their respective role in the pair. A key assumption that needs to be reassessed, following Appiah, we argue, is the notion of the home, together with the idea of the "roots," and "cultural difference." Consequently, this analysis in the second part revisits both aspects: the "home" and "cultural difference" are critically approached from the perspective of patriotism and, by observing Appiah's own contribution to the field, postcolonial theory. In the third section, the findings are reexamined in light of contemporary development of transnationalism on the one hand, and xenophobic nationalism on the other, asking whether cosmopolitan patriotism still stands as a germane idea to challenge both.

G 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 EU citizens is being constructed. G

This paper examines migration from the perspective of border theory. It is argued that in the changed contexts of border situation, whereby modern concepts of national territoriality and cultural boundaries are being dismantled by processes of globalization, the usual view at migration as involving border crossing between two sedentary (state) entities no long-er is theoretically adequate. To the contrary, notions of migration and rootedness, mobility and stillness, fluidity and permanence have lost their power of concepts by which to frame the debates on migration. Moreover, while the modern nation-states are being transformed from culturally homogenous to ‘liquefied’ societies, discourses on immigrants, aliens and foreigners face a serious challenge in terms of how they organize their reference point. Namely: who, or what, is the norm against which the immigrant is conceptualized as another subject, an Other, no longer is a self-evident realm. Final-ly, if the borders themselves have become moving objects, either as extraterritorial administrative points of control (e.g. Frontex) or as tools of social segregation and exclusion within a given territory (e.g. zoning), what are the conditions by which one becomes a migrant: is the legal status of citizenship still the proper means of describing one’s relationship towards the state, or have other factors, such as economic, social or cultural capital and possessions, become more rele-vant in defining the status of belonging and identity?

________________________________________________________________________ _ This article investigates visual representations of refugees in the Slovene public sphere at the time of the opening of the "Balkan Road" refugee route in 2015. The article begins with a comparative historical view of media depictions of refugees after the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia. It is argued that the early depictions were region specific and dependent on European Union (EU) integration discourses of a post-socialist transition state. In contrast, in 2015 public memories of World War II and transnational solidarity were invoked. The paper then focuses on two cases, a newspaper series I Am a Refugee and a photograph entitled The Path, which diverge from the conventional institutional framing of the refugee. The analysis draws on critical theory of visual counter-narratives to investigate these documents' potential for re-humanizing the figure of the refugee in the EU.

This paper looks at the Thai massage service in Slovenia and its impact on the perception of Thai women workers among the users of the service. The arrival of Thai massage salons to Slovenia presents an aspect of global "body work", which has increasingly relied on the labour of migrant women from the global South. In Slovenia, however, the presence of Thai female labour is a relatively new development, as is migration from Asia, more broadly. In our analysis, we focus on the cultural aspects of the encounter between the providers and the users of the service, as unfolding in the micro setting of the massage salons. We argue that the closeness of the encounter between the two bodies, the worker's and the consumer's, complicates the concept of modern stranger, as usually attached to the (male) migrant in the public space. Moreover, the intimate contact with the migrant worker confuses the hierarchies of gender, race, and ethnicity as well as sites of power and vulnerability. Our findings are then placed in the broader frame of the contemporary post-socialist Slovene society to ask how this particular experience of body work may coincide with, or contest, local attitudes towards the global migrants.

This paper examines the sexual contract in the 21 st century. The analysis first focuses on the transformation in modernity from the liberal to the neoliberal social contract. This is then compared to the changes in the private spheres of home and domesticity. It is argued that the new gender composition of Western homes that consist of female migrant labour, contests the idea of the sexual contract as institutionalised in modernity. The work of Car-ole Pateman is taken as a starting point, while some new artistic interventions, as well as transnational motherhood and sham marriages, are used to inspect the future of the social contract in the 21 st century.