Coexistence and conflict in the age of complexity: An interdisciplinary study of community dynamics

ongoing

Polarization and inequality amongst citizens are on the rise across Europe. In a context of multiple, and intersecting forms of diversity, peaceful coexistence has been increasingly placed under sustained pressure. Crucially, the urgency of finding sustainable solutions to these developments is constrained by a lack of conceptual and theoretical nuance that inhibits critical thinking about emergent constellations of social and political life. This project explores how affective orientations and everyday practices of peace and conflict intertwine and influence societies. In this respect, the study adopts an interdisciplinary research design that uses multi-sited ethnography, immersive virtual technologies, and psycho-physiological measuring to provide cutting-edge insight into community dynamics. The study will provide new grounded knowledge on how societies hold together whilst social and political positions within and between communities multiply. Using complexity as an analytical angle, the project considers the relations, tensions, and forms of collaboration that unfold in the course of everyday life in nine urban neighbourhoods in Finland, Sweden and France. The three countries share a mix of similarities and differences through which the variations in community dynamics and their societal consequences can be identified. Through the adopted interdisciplinary approach, the project will generate beyond state-of-the-art insight into how community dynamic in contemporary societies develops. It will use this knowledge to rethink the notion of community. In the final stage of the project, the empirical, methodological and conceptual insights will be combined to feed into the process of building a theory of emergent communities through which changes to the form of social and political life can be understood. The project will have a high societal impact by providing policymakers and politicians with knowledge on how social sustainability and inclusion can be promoted.