Social Cohesion as a Global Guiding Concept

This year's annual conference of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) will explore the question of how social cohesion and its discursive production vary historically and regionally.
The formulation of the conference title “Social cohesion as a global guiding concept” takes up the observation that “social cohesion” and “societal cohesion”, together with their variants in many other languages, have gained prominence in recent years and have taken a remarkable ascent to become a basic social concept.
Our conference, which will mark three years of research within the RISC, will bring together talks and presentations which will highlight differences in the ways in which social cohesion is understood and practised, with the aim of exploring why so many different interpretations have been gathered under one (emerging) basic social concept. Which current transformations of regional, national, transregional or transnational scope are addressed by this, and how do actors within and between societies come to an agreement on what their social cohesion should look like? The relationship between the three RISC research clusters as well as the InRa study (“Institutions and Racism”) and the overall research question at the heart of our conference will be in focus.
The conference will also provide a space for bringing perspectives and research results from the RISC together with international cohesion research.

A second focus will be on dialogue with stakeholders from politics and civil society in order to discuss expectations regarding the RISC’s work and thus sharpen our goals for further development in this area. This exchange will take place in the form of a panel discussion with representatives from the RISC Practice Council. In line with these goals, we have developed a conference programme that reserves Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning for keynotes and focuses on scientific exchange on key topics in parallel panels on Friday.