Everyday multiculturalism: bringing the practice-turn into multiculturalism studies
- When?
- Monday 12 November 2007, 17:00 to 18:30
- Where?
- Room 04AD00, Department of Economics, University of Surrey
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Dr Giovanni Semi
Dr Giovanni Semi, University of Milan, Italy
Abstract
Living with and confronting diversity is often becoming a daily condition of western societies. We are testimony of a quick diffusion of a greater sensitivity for individual and collective specificity, which is transformed in a central rhetorical tool for both the formulation of new demands of inclusion and for the claim of rights and privileges. The sociological discussion about difference was often absorbed by the debate on multiculturalism. A debate which somehow remains narrowly limited either to normative issues – philosophical perspective, theory of justice – or to pragmatic issues – social policy, affirmative action. In both these perspectives a specific sociological point of view is missed: the one that allows to catch how difference is presented in actual empirical contests, how social actors use it in everyday relationships to make sense both of their actions and their realities. The concept of difference by itself, when it is used as an analytical tool, seems to be too confuse, compelled into the dichotomy “essentialism” versus “radical social construction” or used as a mere equivalent for identity.
In order to overcome this narrow dichotomy, my contribution proposes a more specific and sociological definition of difference. A definition able to highlight the character of situated resource for interaction, communication, identity and self-esteem that difference is assuming in the contemporary societies. The stressing of its aspects of situated resources allows an anti-essentialist deeply rooted in everyday life description of contemporary forms of representation of and confrontation with difference. The concept of “everyday multiculturalism” is introduced to put in evidence situations and contests in which the constant presence of otherness needs an active work of “domestication” of reified differences produced on the macro level. A mundane work that takes place in situation where power, capability and resources are differently distributed, not shared in condition of equity and equality. The concept of “everyday multiculturalism” intends to describe both a category of practice – the daily, mundane, (apparently) unproblematic relations in local contexts requiring a constant ability to recognise and use differences, to construct and deconstruct boundaries, to sustain and resist common representations of otherness – and a category of analysis – a specific sociological point of view oriented to detect how difference is constructed and contested, who use it, in what situation, to mark what kind of distinction, for what goal, with what results. As an analytical tool, everyday multiculturalism avoids either the fallacious reductions of considering difference as a static, uniform and essential reality or an endless mixing process, without stable solution and internal consistence. On the contrary, a more sociological definition of everyday multiculturalism allows the recognition of the status of social construction of difference without missing to put in evidence how the social constructions – to be effective, to aspire to become “doxa” – have to assume the consistence of social facts, which have real effects. The overall reflection is based on the collective work done together with Enzo Colombo (University of Milan), Ilenya Camozzi (University of Milano-Bicocca) and Annalisa Frisina (University of Padua) and on the book, Multiculturalismo quotidiano. Le pratiche della differenza, Colombo e Semi (eds), Milan, Franco Angeli, 2007.