Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Multiculturalism, Identities And National Uncertainties In Southwest Europe: The Rise Of Xenophobia And Populism In Catalonia (Spain), Montserrat Clua I Fainé

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

The analysis of the discourses about the migratory threat takes a special feature in the Catalan case, where there is an historical strong nationalist movement that seeks to defend its own Catalan national and cultural identity against Spain. A nationalist discourse that has been self-defined as a "civic nationalism" because it claims that has historically receipted and integrated the different peoples that have arrived at its territory. But it has showed in some moments a clear xenophobic discourse against immigration, especially during the 60s and 70s, against the massive arrival of Spanish migrants that was produced at that time in …

French Far-Right Trajectories: Against A Multiculturalism That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Anne Friederike Delouis

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Clearly, France is a peculiar place as far as multiculturalism is concerned. With its official ideology of egalitarianism, the "indivisible" Republic claims universal validity. As a consequence, the existence of different ethnic or cultural groups on the French territory is hardly recognized in legal terms and official rhetoric.

However, the social reality of poor and mostly ethnic ghettoes in all major French towns became eminently visible when the 2005 riots brought them to international media attention. Living conditions and economic opportunities for suburban ghetto-dwellers have not improved since, nor have majority attitudes towards them changed significantly. On the contrary, the …

When Opportunity Moves Off-Shore: Multiculturalism And The French Banlieue, Beth Epstein

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Since the turn of this new century, problems of "culture" and "difference," diversity and multiculturalism, have made their way into public discourse in France. Across a dizzying array of polemics that includes social unrest in the country's disadvantaged suburbs, the rise of the National Front, post-colonial recriminations, and more, voices are being raised in favor of a more overt form of multiculturalist discourse as a means to think through contemporary social issues in relation to notions of race, identity, and discrimination. The integrationist French republican project, wherein racial or ethnic classifications are eschewed on the grounds that they enclose people …

The Intercultural Alternative To Multiculturalism And Its Limits, Katharina Bodirsky

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

Intercultural policies have gained salience in integration and regional development strategies in cities such as Berlin and in EU and European policy networks. Critiquing multiculturalism for having produced segregation by recognizing cultural communities, proponents of interculturalism (e.g. Wood and Landry 2008) emphasize the importance of intercultural exchange and an individual right to cultural identity combined with equality of opportunity as well as the political advertising of the value of diversity. This value, it is argued, is also economic, as intercultural exchange sparks creativity, which fosters innovation, which enhances competitiveness. Intercultural cities, it is posited, are moreover attractive to investors and …

Some Notes On Affect And Discourses Of Social Tense In Tense Times, Christopher Sweetapple

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

No abstract provided.

From The Intercultural Model To Its Actual Implementation In A Spanish Neighborhood, Jaime Palomera, Mikel Aramburu

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

The language of “interculturalism” has become part of the current doxa among policy-makers. It informs the ways in which new models of diversity governance are being designed, from supra-national organisms to local councils. In general terms, intercultural models tend to place high value on the question of “living together” or “conviviality”, and also on issues of equality and social justice. However, the evidence in this paper (based on fieldwork in a working-class neighborhood in Spain) suggests that in actual practice local governments do not see local “intercultural/community” projects as a means to promote social justice but as an end in …

Quebec’S Interculturalism Policy And The Contours Of Implicit Institutional Discourse, Samuel Shapiro

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

I approach the question of scales and political imaginaries through an exploration of how the Canadian province of Quebec is situated at the crossroads of several European and North American traditions. I discuss the relationship between the 2012 Quebec student strikes against the policies of then-Quebec premier Jean Charest and a welfare state model based on social protection, which is closer to that that found in France and several Scandinavian countries than in the rest of Canada. I then examine in depth how Quebec’s attempt to develop an alternative approach for the management of ethno-cultual diversity – often called interculturalism …

Not A Backlash, But A Multicultural Implosion From Within: Uncertainty And Crisis In The Case Of South Tyrol's "Multiculturalism", Dorothy Louise Zinn

EASA Workshop 2012: Working Papers

This paper considers a case in which a regime commonly identified as "multicultural", locally entrenched and stringently defended by hegemonic politics, is nonetheless undergoing crisis and uncertainty. In the autonomous province of South Tyrol (Italy), there is a heavy social, economic, legal and discursive investment in "multiculturalism", offering a case that is often celebrated as a model of social co-existence and minority protection, and even serving as a selling point in provincial self-representations. Due to the area's peculiar history—previously belonging to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire but annexed to Italy a century ago—a "separate-but-equal" system developed as a means of defending the …