Cosmopolitan Currents
Cosmopolitan Currents is a curated audio archive of lectures, conversations, and critical reflections on culture in its broad global sense. Crossing disciplinary and geographic boundaries, the podcast brings together voices from philosophy, the arts, humanities, and social thought to explore how culture shapes—and is shaped by—our aesthetic, political, ethical, and embodied lives. Produced and directed by Hirbod Human, Cosmopolitan Currents is a project of The Center for Cosmopolitan Culture, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting intercultural understanding, resisting nationalist chauvinism, and contributing to global harmony through critical and creative cultural engagement. The Center was founded by the renowned philosopher Dr. Richard Shusterman, whose pioneering work in somaesthetics has influenced cross-disciplinary conversations on art, identity, and lived experience around the world. Rather than a single serialized project, Cosmopolitan Currents functions as a growing archive of cultural thought, with each event or featured topic unfolding over one or more episodes. From keynote lectures and scholarly panels to reflective dialogues and exclusive interviews, each entry is carefully curated to preserve the integrity of the original encounter—whether captured in a single session or extended across multiple installments. Whether you are a student, researcher, artist, or curious listener, Cosmopolitan Currents invites you to join a global dialogue that values complexity over certainty, coexistence over division, and reflection over rhetoric. Our goal is not merely to share ideas, but to curate moments of listening that open new paths of understanding between people, cultures, and traditions. To learn more about our work or to support the archive, visit us at CosmopolitanCulture.org and follow the podcast on your preferred listening platform.
Episodes
In this opening episode of Cosmopolitan Currents, philosopher and cultural theorist Dr. Richard Shusterman, founder of The Center for Cosmopolitan Culture, offers a brief but powerful reflection on the mission that guides this podcast and the organization behind it.
Drawing from his decades of work intercultural philosophy, somaesthetics, and the ethics of embodiment, Dr. Shusterman frames the urgent need for cosmopolitan dialogue i...
Contested Territories: A Panel on Art, Aesthetics, and the Artworld as frame was recorded in 2006 at theTate Britain, as part of a public program organized in collaboration with Chelsea School of Art and Design and Naked Punch Review. The panel brought together three major figures in contemporary aesthetic thought—Arthur C. Danto, Thierry de Duve, and Richard Shusterman—for an unmoderated dialogue on the shifting bounda...
In this episode of the Contested Territories series, Arthur C. Danto reflects on the intellectual and historical context behind his groundbreaking 1964 essay The Artworld, a foundational text in contemporary aesthetics. Delivered at Tate Britain in 2006, Danto’s talk explores the ontological shift that occurred in the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art and its challenges to traditional aesthetic boundaries.
Drawing on his firsthan...
In this episode of the Contested Territories series, Thierry de Duve presents a powerful rethinking of modern aesthetics through his work on Kant after Duchamp. Speaking from a deeply personal trajectory—from his early days as a design student in Ulm to his critical encounters with Pop Art and Duchamp’s Readymades—de Duve unpacks the transformation of aesthetic judgment in modern and postmodern art.
Positioned betw...
In this episode of the Contested Territories series, Richard Shusterman offers a compelling alternative to both Danto’s Artworld approach and de Duve’s theoretical framing by reasserting the primacy of aesthetic experience—not as detached contemplation, but as embodied practice ultimately grounded in the aesthetics of everyday life.
Reflecting on the philosophical limits of traditional Anglo-American aesthetics, S...
In this final episode of the Contested Territories series, Arthur Danto, Thierry de Duve, and Richard Shusterman engage in a spontaneous and often provocative dialogue that moves beyond formal presentations into direct philosophical exchange.
Topics range from Pop Art and religious metaphors in aesthetic theory to institutional critique, embodied meaning, and the politics of aesthetic judgment. The conversation—at times humoro...
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