240208 SE Cultural Diversity (P4) (2013W)

This course focuses on the 'diversity' turn in public debates and scholarship to explore the multiple meanings and the genealogies of diversity. 'Diversity' means different things for a variety of institutions, groups and policies at different times and places. For example, social, cultural, ethnic, religious, generational diversities are embedded into different connotation fields targeting varying populations. While opening different pathways of possibilities, diversity policies and/or programs become part of complex registers of exclusions and governmentality. Many cities today highlight their diversities as part of the struggle through which they (re)position themselves in relation to other cities both within and across state boundaries. Thus cities are constantly reinventing their diversities (including their capacity to mobilize human resources with intercultural competencies and their diverse populations). Migrant populations increasingly become important actors of this process. In this context cultural diversity, place marketing and place making become intimately entangled. On the bases of case studies from different regions of the World, this course will analyse these interrelations and processes and will encourage the students to situate cultural diversity programs and the scholarship on diversity within broader social, economic and political dynamics.
In exploring the genealogies and transformations of 'cultural diversity', the course will focus on questions like 'who has been depicted as diverse, by whom, when and with what consequences and how do these groups changed in time?' In doing this we will particularly examine (cultural, social and urban) policies and institutions these diversities are anchored.