Course Title: Multiculturalism, Conflict and Integration
This session will focus on theoretical and empirical approaches to multiculturalism, highlighting majority-minority relations and citizenship practices from a social-psychological perspective. In focus are the possibilities and challenges faced by multicultural societies in Europe today in terms of conflict and integration. Proceeding from critical discourse and narrative analyses as well as from psychoanalytical approaches, we highlight how issues of othering, xenophobia and Islamophobia are and have been constructed in many European societies and how such tendencies are related to minority politics.
Research Method: Narrative method and discursive approaches to identity formation
This brief presentation will discuss how narrative methodologies and discursive approaches to identity formation and conflict can be utilized in political psychology. What is a narrative; how can we study narratives; how do narratives form and construct self and identity, and; what can narratives tell us about political and psychological change? These are some of the questions discussed in this brief presentation together with some more general methodological concerns in terms of critical discursive approaches to identity construction.