Beyond groupism?

IMES/Sociology Seminar

Lecture

This semester’s second sociology seminar has a special setup. In collaboration with IMES, we are happy to invite you to a discussion with Rogers Brubaker and Bowen Paulle

Rogers Brubaker: Moving beyond groupism

In his work over the past two decades, Rogers Brubaker has been among the leading scholars arguing for a more nuanced understanding of how ethnicity, race and nationalism should be treated together, and “as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world.”

In this talk, he focuses primarily on the need to move beyond groupist assumptions and towards empirical investigations of the circumstances under which people do (or do not) feel and act as members of specific ethnic/racial/national categories. How does treating ethnicity as a process—as a way of seeing the world that sometimes happens rather than as a thing in the world that one has or is—influence the ways we formulate questions and conduct research? 

Bowen Paulle: Implications for research on integration in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the ethnicity-first impulse—all too often rooted in a form of what Brubaker calls ‘groupism’—has become second nature to countless qualitative and quantitative researchers alike. While calls for inclusion of people’s emerging (ethnic) self-identifications are on the rise, and while attacks on the top-down incorporation of migrants’ offspring into the allochton/autochton divide gains currency, the present debate threatens to hide from us the need for a more comprehensive and dramatic paradigm shift.

What is called for now, at least in the Netherlands, is research on integration and exclusion which relegates ethnicity to a phase of analysis preceded by the use of first-order, more objective categories—a move which can usefully be conceptualized in terms of Elias’s work on established and outsider dynamics. 

Chair: Barak Kalir, co-director of IMES

Published by  AISSR