The multicultural society

Course goals

Content

A society is named 'multicultural' when it is comprised of various ethnic populations and/or various nationalities - bringing together a multitude of cultural, religious and/or linguistic practices. One of the main challenges for multicultural societies is to develop social cohesion out of this diversity, a process that often doesn't go without tensions and conflicts. While many newcomers succeeded in integrating into their new homeland without neglecting their cultural identity, conflicts between insiders and outsiders may not disappear. Inclusion and exclusion as well as integration / participation and separation / exclusion are processes social scientists research.

Our main question is: how does ethnic and cultural diversity as an empirical reality lead to new forms of integration and social cohesion or to nativist backlashes - such as nationalism, xenophobia and new racisms? To answer this question it will not be sufficient to regard only the 'foreigners' or 'aliens' as problematic; each society - including all its members - stands for the problem of creating a satisfactory form of pluralism in which various groups are able to live together successfully. This implies that it is important to look at the ways nation-states give access to citizenship and how claims of migrants are acknowledged, resisted, framed and/or re-negotiated. You are asked to (critically) examine the main question by using concepts and theories on multiculturalism derived from different disciplines. The subjects discussed within this course are: migration, multiculturalism, citizenship, refugees, settlement, acculturation, xenophobia and racism, (right-wing) populism, policies of integration, the challenge of Islam, migrant literature, identity, cultural diversity and welcoming spaces.