Beyond Consumption? The Mall as Everyday Space of Cosmopolitan Sociability in Beijing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper engages with recent theorization of cosmopolitanism in practices and public spaces to explore everyday cosmopolitanism in the context of contemporary urban China. By broadening its original focus on transnational migration and mobility, I use cosmopolitan sociability as a lens to analyse how everyday cosmopolitanism takes shape in Taikoo Li, a large-scale inner-city open-air mall in Beijing. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the mall, I identify three aspects of cosmopolitan sociability: (1) passive sociability that enables Chinese mall visitors to cultivate open attitudes toward difference; (2) fleeting sociability through which they establish competencies to deal with otherness; and (3) routinized sociability whereby they demonstrate willingness to engage with cultural diversity. These findings move beyond viewing the mall merely as a space for consumption to highlight its role as a space where intercultural conviviality thrives. I argue that cosmopolitan sociability is not just what the mall offers to its visitors but, more importantly, what people do to make the mall a cosmopolitan canopy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it