Beyond Consumption? The Mall as Everyday Space of Cosmopolitan Sociability in Beijing
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".