SOLiDi · Solidarity in Diversity

Solidarity in Diversity

Over the last decade, liberal democracies in Europe have been shaken to their core by the rise of national populisms. This puts strong pressure on all forms of solidarity, especially as they cross ethnic and cultural boundaries. The challenge for European democracies is to identify the conditions under which solidarities in diversity can be nurtured, taking into account the social inequalities and unequal positions of power between various groups in society. The European Training Network “Solidarity in Diversity” (SOLiDi) develops a training and research program that is focused on how to generate solidarities across cultural boundaries. Rather than building solidarities on a presumed shared past and the imagined cultural homogeneity of nations and ethnic groups, we propose to start from the places that people share in diversity and the practices that they engage in. SOLiDi will provide an alternative to the prevailing pessimism around living in diversity or the lack of innovative ideas for local civil society and public actors. SOLiDi trains a cohort of professionals well equiped to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and professional interventions on living in diversity. The project has three objectives: (1) combine insights from the disciplines of sociology (solidarity and diversity), geography (place and practice) and social pedagogy (learning and education) to broaden our understanding of how solidarities can be generated across cultural boundaries. We combine a focus on the conditions under which intercultural dialogue and relations emerge with explicit attention to how social inequality and unequal power relations may work to undermine intercultural dialogue and relations. (2) develop public pedagogies and organizational and policy strategies that support place-based solidarities in diversity. (3) promote social innovation by training a group of European ‘solidarity in diversity’ professionals that combine academic research skills and knowledge with advanced thinking on ethics and the capacity to promote societal and organisational change in a variety of contexts. The action concluded that there is a need to deconstruct the notion of solidarity. We found that actually existing solidarities are not always resulting in mutual support, protection and cooperation for everyone involved. Solidarities are often racialized, gendered, classed or heteronormative and hence conducive to certain forms of social exclusion. We also found conclude that we need to move away from pre-conceived notions of diversity and analyse the differences that are at play in solidarity-building practices as socially constructed.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз