"Encounters with Diversity: How the Local Matters"

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For more details please contact adomeit@mmg.mpg.de.

This symposium brings together scholars from sociology, anthropology, geography, and critical migration studies around the theme of the “local” as a vantage point to research and theorize issues of migration-related diversity and social interaction. We take stock of a growing field of scholarship that has explored how people bridge differences, enact belonging, and maintain or erect boundaries in their everyday lives, focusing on communities both small and large, urban and rural, to capture place-based experiences and responses to diversification. At the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity these questions have been high on the agenda since its foundation.

Speakers will draw on their wide-ranging expertise in conducting neighborhood-based research as well as comparative cross-country studies to reflect on the perils and promises of theoriz-ing with and about local communities. How do specific places matter for our understanding of diversity and inequality in European societies? To what extent are certain places representative of broader dynamics – the “world in a grain of sand,” to say it with poet William Blake – and in what ways are they unique?

The symposium will feature three panels around the themes of the “superdiverse” metropolis; diversity experiences in small or remote places; and encounters in local contexts.

Participants include:
Nihad El-Kayed, Humboldt University Berlin
Birgit Glorius, TU Chemnitz
Jörg Hüttermann, Bielefeld University
Alexander Kenneth-Nagel, University of Göttingen
René Kreichauf, Vrije University Brussels
Elisa Lanari, MPI MMG
Christine Lang, Osnabrück University
Marco Martiniello, Université Liège and FRS-FNRS
Ruth McAreavey, Newcastle University
Farhan Samanani, King’s College London
Hannes Schammann, University of Hildesheim
Karen Schönwalder, MPI MMG
Steven Vertovec, MPI MMG
Susanne Wessendorf, Coventry University