Living together in diversity
The CEU Department of International Relations and European Studies and the CEU Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology organize a conference "Living together in diversity" in Budapest on May 21-22, 2012.
The aim of the conference to explore how 'living together in diversity' is imagined, narrated, organized, justified, and practiced within contemporary national societies. With the stress on 'in' rather than 'with' diversity we want to move away from reifying the dominant 'majority' society perspective, which assumes diversity as something 'carried' solely by immigrants and something that the 'native' society has to cope with.
Some of the questions that we are interested in are:
- What makes multicultural societies circumscribed by state borders cohere together? What are the ways in which the nation becomes re-signified to accommodate the ethnocultural diversity of its populace?
- How do migrants position themselves in national narratives and political structures?
- What alternative modes and models of belonging are at work within present national societies?
- In which ways does the national continue to feature as a site of attachment?
- Is it necessary to have some form of common identification at the national scale to have functioning states in the first place?
Although we acknowledge that these questions are inescapably normative in character, we particularly welcome empirically-informed work. The privileged level of analysis we are interested in is the national scale, but papers focusing on sub-national and supra-national scales can also be welcomed inasmuch as they can offer insights regarding how living together in diversity works at the national scale. Regionally, the conference will focus on Europe, but contributions discussing other geographical contexts are also welcomed.
All potential participants are invited to submit an abstract (250-300 words) to Tatiana Matejskova (Matejskovat@ceu.hu) by December 31, 2011.