Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RAISE (RECOGNITION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF INJUSTICE TO STRENGTHEN EQUALITY)
Période du rapport: 2024-05-01 au 2025-10-31
RAISE stands for Recognition and Acknowledgement of Injustice to Strengthen Equality
RAISE is a project funded by the European Union in the Horizon Europe program. This research project aims to understand better to what extent European citizens draw boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to what extent they are willing to acknowledge that inequalities are rooted in structural injustice.
Structural racism exists because of social constructions of group demarcations. Such boundary making processes are at the root of both structural and individual xenophobia and racism. This project therefore first aims to empirically map boundary making processes in people’s everyday life institutional contexts. Second, the project aims to provide empirical evidence for what actions as a response to boundary making processes will support equality.
RAISE draws on the assumption that to reduce structural racism, people (and the institutions they operate in) have to be aware of these underlying boundary making processes that reproduce structural racism and the role it has in lasting inequalities. Recognition and acknowledgment of these forms of injustice will contribute to social action for equality. The project is among the firsts in Europe to study empirically the awareness of boundary making processes in reproducing structural racism and what collective actions contribute to break through such boundary making processes.
RAISE is a project funded by the European Union in the Horizon Europe program. This research project aims to understand better to what extent European citizens draw boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to what extent they are willing to acknowledge that inequalities are rooted in structural injustice.
Structural racism exists because of social constructions of group demarcations. Such boundary making processes are at the root of both structural and individual xenophobia and racism. This project therefore first aims to empirically map boundary making processes in people’s everyday life institutional contexts. Second, the project aims to provide empirical evidence for what actions as a response to boundary making processes will support equality.
RAISE draws on the assumption that to reduce structural racism, people (and the institutions they operate in) have to be aware of these underlying boundary making processes that reproduce structural racism and the role it has in lasting inequalities. Recognition and acknowledgment of these forms of injustice will contribute to social action for equality. The project is among the firsts in Europe to study empirically the awareness of boundary making processes in reproducing structural racism and what collective actions contribute to break through such boundary making processes.
RAISE’s ethnographic fieldwork around schools shows that most parents only have limited and superficial contact with other parents. The boundary-making runs along lines of intersectionality. In several cases, boundaries are not only formed in relation to a single identity marker such as religion or ethnicity, but often occur in a matrix of various interlocking axes of difference. The findings suggest that facilitating spaces for and encouraging the practice of conversation and exchange may be the task and responsibility of public institutions (and not the individuals that circulate within them). The project produced a handbook and video for advocating boundary breaking practices; in Hungary in particular for the Roma community.
The presence of hate speech on official institutional channels, albeit in lower volume than on other channels, demonstrates that even professionally managed digital spaces are vulnerable to discriminatory narratives. Notably, it was found that none of the sports organizations examined undertook the responsibility of responding to hate comments on their YouTube channels. This absence of engagement further raises concerns about the lack of moderation and the missed opportunity to reinforce inclusive values in sports.
RAISE demonstrates that labour market disadvantages in Europe are shaped by complex interactions between immigrant status, ethnic minority identification, gender, and religiosity. Monitoring intersectional inequalities, we find that immigrants, minorities, and particularly religious or female members of these groups experience compounded barriers to both employment and high-quality jobs. Roma communities remain among the most marginalised groups, experiencing severe barriers to both employment access and job quality.
The new RAISE survey in 6 countries (Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland and Turkey) shows that overall the perception that minority members are disadvantaged was not very strong. In Turkey, it was systematically reversed (majority feeling disadvantaged) and in the Netherlands, this was perceived in the housing market. The findings do suggest that overall stronger Muslim and immigrant penalties are also perceived among the public. People tend to recognize the role of discrimination for understanding inequalities. The perception that structural discrimination plays a role was almost as strong supported as other forms of discrimination (institutional; individual). At the same time, the level of support for any justification based on discrimination was only moderate, indicating that people had on average no strong opinions. When assuming that weaker perceptions, with more people positioning themselves in the middle, are easier to change, this indicates the potential for political communication.
The role of political communication is studied in-depth in RAISE, experimenting what political narratives induce a common, uniting identity, contributing to supporting intergroup solidarity. We found that exposure to an inclusive working-class narrative to promote the incomes of the working classes makes people less willing to support the nationalist ‘own people first’ principle. An inclusive narrative does however not directly increase interethnic solidarity. Moreover, there is a backfire effect that mentioning ‘immigration’ in a narrative, increases immigration salience and makes people to prioritize to focus on ‘reducing migration’. In this part of the project, we’ll continue studying the role of narratives based on the conclusion that “Studies on narratives promoting solidarity profit from inclusion of moral dimensions, the role of recognition outside the economic domain and relying on everyday language to reduce the distance between messenger and receiver”.
The presence of hate speech on official institutional channels, albeit in lower volume than on other channels, demonstrates that even professionally managed digital spaces are vulnerable to discriminatory narratives. Notably, it was found that none of the sports organizations examined undertook the responsibility of responding to hate comments on their YouTube channels. This absence of engagement further raises concerns about the lack of moderation and the missed opportunity to reinforce inclusive values in sports.
RAISE demonstrates that labour market disadvantages in Europe are shaped by complex interactions between immigrant status, ethnic minority identification, gender, and religiosity. Monitoring intersectional inequalities, we find that immigrants, minorities, and particularly religious or female members of these groups experience compounded barriers to both employment and high-quality jobs. Roma communities remain among the most marginalised groups, experiencing severe barriers to both employment access and job quality.
The new RAISE survey in 6 countries (Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland and Turkey) shows that overall the perception that minority members are disadvantaged was not very strong. In Turkey, it was systematically reversed (majority feeling disadvantaged) and in the Netherlands, this was perceived in the housing market. The findings do suggest that overall stronger Muslim and immigrant penalties are also perceived among the public. People tend to recognize the role of discrimination for understanding inequalities. The perception that structural discrimination plays a role was almost as strong supported as other forms of discrimination (institutional; individual). At the same time, the level of support for any justification based on discrimination was only moderate, indicating that people had on average no strong opinions. When assuming that weaker perceptions, with more people positioning themselves in the middle, are easier to change, this indicates the potential for political communication.
The role of political communication is studied in-depth in RAISE, experimenting what political narratives induce a common, uniting identity, contributing to supporting intergroup solidarity. We found that exposure to an inclusive working-class narrative to promote the incomes of the working classes makes people less willing to support the nationalist ‘own people first’ principle. An inclusive narrative does however not directly increase interethnic solidarity. Moreover, there is a backfire effect that mentioning ‘immigration’ in a narrative, increases immigration salience and makes people to prioritize to focus on ‘reducing migration’. In this part of the project, we’ll continue studying the role of narratives based on the conclusion that “Studies on narratives promoting solidarity profit from inclusion of moral dimensions, the role of recognition outside the economic domain and relying on everyday language to reduce the distance between messenger and receiver”.
RAISE has generated an international dataset including measurements of perceived inequalities, attribution of inequalities to (structural) discrimination and direct measures of acknowledgement of structural racism. Moreover, the RAISE survey includes an experiment on the role of narratives for solidarity outcomes. Data are archive under DOI: 10.17026/SS/XRK8QV.