Due to migration and mobility, residents of many countries across the world are increasingly likely to encounter people who are not like them in their everyday lives. This reality challenges pre-existing forms of group loyalty and willingness to share resources. Many prominent social scientists as well as policy makers are worried that solidarity in diversity is a contradictio in terminis. Public debates on norms and values have turned into a battleground, which divide rather than unite citizens, and the possibility and desirability of extending solidarity to newcomers and migrants who embody different historical trajectories is openly questioned. However, new practices of solidarity and citizenship that explicitly take cultural and ethnic differences as their starting point are emerging. Existing paradigms and policies are ill equipped to register and support such innovative practices.

Against this background, this colloquium aims to put the spotlight on scholarship that develops conceptual and practical tools for interventions aimed at nurturing solidarity-in-diversity. In diverse urban settings, social workers, community organizers, teachers, volunteers, union representatives and other engaged citizens attempt to create solidarity among people who do not have much in common apart from the school, the park, the factory, the sports field or the neighborhood center they share. Possible intervention strategies include - but are not limited to - setting up spaces for encounter, encouraging underprivileged actors to speak up, mobilizing groups around claims for recognition, collaboration for the fulfillment of concrete needs or rights, cooperating with other organizations to spur innovation, creating new norms and values around the management of shared resources, building alternative learning communities or advocating policy change.

Hence, this colloquium welcomes contributions that explore why, when, where and how interventions generate solidarity-in-diversity. We invite scholars from various disciplines, including social work, sociology, geography, political science, educational sciences and anthropology to submit a paper that speaks to one or more of the following conference themes:

• community building and mobilizing strategies in diverse urban settings
• the role of professionals in fostering solidarity in diversity
• the relationship between policy making at various scales and solidarity interventions
• methodological interventions and action research on solidarity-in-diversity
• the conceptual and empirical linkages between solidarity, diversity and citizenship
• place-based expressions of solidarity and citizenship
• the learning dynamics involved in nurturing solidarity-in-diversity

Keynote speakers

• Halleh Ghorashi (Full Professor in Diversity and Integration, Free University of Amsterdam)
• Sharon Todd (Full Professor in Education and Interculturalism, Maynooth University)
• Jonathan Darling (Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Manchester)
• Roberto Gonzales (Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Practical information

The colloquium will take place on the 23rd and 24th of November at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Antwerp can be reached in less than 40 minutes by train or bus from Brussels airport. The city has direct train connections with Paris and Amsterdam as well.

The colloquium will consist of a combination of keynote lectures and parallel sessions in which researchers present ongoing research. We welcome presentations from early career researchers as well as established scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds. In order to support conference participation of scholars with limited financial means, we offer three bursaries (covering accommodation and travel costs). Other attendants are expected to pay for their own journey and accommodation. There is no participation fee.

If you want to present your work, you are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to Stijn Oosterlynck ([email protected]), Nick Schuermans ([email protected]) and Thomas Swerts ([email protected]) before July 1st. If you want to apply for the travel bursaries, we would also like you to submit a CV, together with a list of conferences and colloquiums you have been able to attend before and a brief statement explaining why you would like to be considered for a bursary. We aim to keep the group concise enough to allow for meaningful exchange of ideas and experiences. Therefore, we will select a limited number of papers based on their resonance with the main themes of the colloquium by July 15th.

This colloquium is hosted by a large inter-university research consortium ‘DieGem’ that has been carrying out extensive fieldwork on 30 cases of place-based forms of solidarity in diversity in Belgium (www.solidariteitdiversiteit.be/diegem_en.php) and the research network ‘Solidarity in diversity: Community, place-making and citizenship’, which gathers 24 Belgian and international researchers that do research on questions of solidarity in diversity. This colloquium aims to build on these research collaborations and organize further interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue around questions of solidarity in diversity.

For inquiries, please contact the organizers: Stijn Oosterlynck ([email protected]), Nick Schuermans ([email protected]) and Thomas Swerts ([email protected]).