Start date: 01.09.1999 End date: 01.09.2003

Project description: The project is a philosophical one. How can we think or more aptly rethink society as pluralistic with a shared sense of living together: belonging-together-in-difference? This is a many-sided question, which can be approached from many angles. On a political level, the question is what sorts of policies, values and measures that can help us in encouraging a culturally plural community that both reflects and transcends the particular differences of all its minorities. What are the possibilities of maintaining a pluralistic culture of different identities and minority cultures while retaining the civil and political practices that sustain liberal civic life in a multicultural setting? Sociologically this amounts to asking how one can go beyond simple multiculturalism, since the phrase "both reflects and transcends the particular differences of all its minorities" cannot mean a mere numerical plurality or a mere juxtaposition of cultures in their segregated togetherness. On a pedagogical level the question is what kind of education can play a role in preparing people for life in multicultural society, supporting values and attitudes concerning tolerance, respect, sympathy and providing them knowledge about others by neither erasing their otherness absolutely nor making them absolutely other. On a philosophical level the question is how one can arrive at a dynamic, flexible understanding of identity and culture. What can philosophy say about the values of a multicultural togetherness, about the possibility of pluralism and the idea of civil society as a ground for being-together-in-difference? Identity and identity construction has a heavy presence in the discussion between liberalism and communitarianism. This project's aim is to go beyond and over this dichotomy and show the relevance of such transcendence to some central concepts and theorisation in the field of IMER by using ideas of Richard Rorty. Central in his understanding are the notions of 'society as conversation' and 'community of irony'. This might help us in constructing a notion of community or communality, which does not fall prey to absolutism and essentialism. The concepts in this connection I shall be focusing on are diaspora, demos, ethnos, community, which today are commonly assumed to be the most important components of identity. Is there possibly another way of thinking about identity?

Planned output: Doctoral dissertation

Supervisor: Professor Arild Utaker (Department of Philosophy) Co-supervisor: Professor Yngve Lithman (IMER-BERGEN/NORWAY)

Funding organization: NFR (Norges forskningråd-The Research Council of Norway)