Social Science Research Council

Models of Difference and Belonging: Refiguring the Social Study of Europe

An SSRC/Washington University Workshop
Monday, September 10, 2007
Saint Louis, MO

Participants:
Tahir Abbas, Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture, University of Birmingham, UK.
Christophe Bertossi, l'Institut français des relations internationales (Ifri), Paris.
John Bowen, Washington University-Saint Louis, USA.
Jan Willem Duyvendak, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Peter Sahlins, Social Science Research Council, USA.
Floris Vermeulen, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Mona Lena Krook, Washington University-Saint Louis, USA
And others from the St. Louis community.

Across a range of domains, from commemorating immigration to governing religion to combating discrimination, European public actors and social scientists are re-examining models of how to think about social difference and national membership. Two broad issues currently loom largest: controversies around the visibility and integration of Muslims, and measures to achieve equality and non-discrimination across differences in ethnicity and race. These issues involve “models” in three interrelated senses: 1) the frameworks used by social scientists to study these topics; 2) the public, “official” discourse invoked to justify national governmental policies; and 3) the perceptual and discursive frames of belonging used by ordinary people in everyday life.

That these models are different is in some ways obvious; that they are interrelated is the presumption of this workshop. The vagaries of terms such as “multiculturalism” and “assimilation” in a number of European states bear witness simultaneously to the profound historicity and the critical ways in which social scientists, politicians, and the media traffic in models, drawing distinctions and naming convergence across national and state boundaries. We are interested in these borrowings and transfers in political culture, in the ways such models (borrowed and original) underpin research and policy (considering, for example, the indices and measures of “assimilation,”), and in the popular and media reactions to crises (assassinations, bombings) that represent dramatic moments of official and vernacular modeling. Our collective inquiry, then, is framed by the transfers between official and vernacular models of belonging on the one hand, and on exchanges of models of belonging across state and national boundaries on the other.

We propose to begin a conversation on these issues in St. Louis on September 10, drawing on expertise from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Invited presenters will speak briefly on their own research as it relates to the issues set out above. In a second moment of the workshop we will move from these presentations and discussions to planning for the future. What directions of research would move these reflections forward? In what ways could trans-Atlantic research training build in these reflections?