Conference 2023: Nationalism and Multiculturalism
The 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) will take place on 3-5 April 2023. This year’s theme will be Nationalism and Multiculturalism. The Annual Conference will take place in Loughborough and is organised in cooperation with the Loughborough University Nationalism Network (LUNN).
The Ernest Gellner Lecture will take place on 2 April 2023 at 1600 followed by a reception.
Please submit your abstract by 7 November 2022 at asen.ac.uk/conference
‘Multiculturalism is dead, long live to multiculturalism’.
About ten years ago, key European leaders like Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced the death of multiculturalismarguing it had failed to incorporate migrants and their children into European societies. A decade on, we now live in times of rampant nationalisms, frequently imbued with anti-immigration if not overtly xenophobic positions. Yet, if multiculturalism as political rhetoric is dead, it is certainly alive and thriving as a demographic fact, through a range of cultural practices and even as a model of policy interventions in many contemporary societies.
The conference explores the tensions between nationalism and multiculturalism in order to reflect on demographic change in increasingly diverse societies.
By exploring how the nation changes when its population changes multiculturalism is not only understood in normative terms, as a political principle for integrating a diverse population, but also as a descriptor of the ‘transition to diversity’ (Richard Alba) which characterises many contemporary societies.