Topics of the conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Organizing Committee is glad to announce that the CALL FOR PAPERS for the International Conference „Identity and Identity Needs Among Culturally Diverse Communities of the Eastern EU Borderland” is now open.

The goal of the conference is to establish what the real identity needs are of the culturally diverse inhabitants of the eastern borderlands of the European Union.

We are also open to experiences and approaches of other borderlands.

Planned topics of the conference

  • What are the real identity needs of the culturally distinct inhabitants?
  • What is the internal structure of the identity needs of the individual communities and the needs directed to intercultural interaction?
  • How much do identity needs diverge when considering the national majority there and the national ethnic and religious minorities present?
  • Which categories of needs or their elements in the consciousness of inhabitants are satisfied which are left unsatisfied and what social reactions result – both from the side of the majority and from the side of national and ethnic minorities?
  • What are the identity strategies applied by national and ethnic minorities especially inhabitants of the borderlands?
  • How the borderlands’ inhabitants use the category of ‘other’/‘foreign’?
  • A new question is how to establish the identity needs of those representatives of the majority living in the immediate vicinity of minority communities?
  • What is the role of creativity in the process of identity formation?

The answers obtained to the above questions will represent a point of reference to a more general question: What form does social and cultural diversity take in societies which exist in democratic conditions (diversity being a basic value of the European Union)? What barriers and limits exist opposing the realization of strategies for the satisfaction of identity needs of the inhabitants?