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

Project Information

EmergentCommunity

Grant agreement ID: 946012

DOI

10.3030/946012

Project closed

EC signature date 3 November 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 814 886,00

EU contribution

€ 1 814 886,00

Coordinated by

TAMPEREEN KORKEAKOULUSAATIO SR
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EmergentCommunity (Coexistence and conflict in the age of complexity: An interdisciplinary study of community dynamics)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The EmergentCommunity project studies coexistence and conflict in the age of complexity, that is how people live together at a time when cities and societies are experiencing changes related to the fragmentation of identities, polarization, and rising inequalities. These developments splinter social realities and suggest new cleavages over identity putting peaceful coexistence under a strain. In such context, new ways of understanding and unpacking this dynamic are needed. The project responds to this need.

The project scrunitises the dynamic of coexistence through a focus on people’s everyday lives: through their everyday routines, encounters, practices, and negotiations. To produce knowledge on how societies hold together and how divisions emerge, the EmergentCommunity project studies socio-economically mixed urban neighbourhoods and their public spaces in Finland, France, and Sweden. Such combination of areas, cities, and countries presents intriguing similarities and striking contrasts to coexistence and thus bears potential in both furthering understanding of community dynamics and the promotion of social sustainability in the current context of societal and demographic change. The project asks what becomes of community when both its bounded nature and shared values, history, habits, and culture as its basis are tested?

The project exposes the pivotal nature of public spaces in bringing societal and political issues to the fore and in offering insight into everyday frictions and their adjustment. Public spaces are spaces of the common, where people negotiate their coexistence. In the current context, this commonness cannot be anymore conceptualized through identity- or place-bound approaches as in conventional understandings of community. This project develops an interdisciplinary research design that uses multi-sited ethnography, immersive virtual technologies, and psycho-physiological measuring to provide cutting-edge insight into community dynamics. Ultimately, the project develops a methodological and conceptual frame for the study of community dynamics through the notion of emergence.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project began with a desk study of all the research contexts, on neighbourhood, city, and national levels. The desk study culminated in the identification of broad themes, such as ethnic and economic segregation, marginalization and rise of inequalities for instance in education and housing that featured across the research contexts. The insights gained resulted in the creation of an ethnographic matrix designed to systematize the topics covered in ethnographic interviews, to determine the sites of data collection, and to focus observations. After the creation of this matrix, interviews with residents from various ‘groups’ and in diverse life situations started together with ethnographic fieldwork.

With the accumulation of ethnographic data, the broad societal and political topics discovered during the desk study gained local meanings and impacts allowing us to understand how they sometimes operate differentially. Using the everyday as a methodological tool to unpack the complexity that characterizes our research sites, the project identified the similarities and differences in local and everyday manifestations of inequality and segregation, and the meanings of belonging and diversity for people. The findings from different locations were then contrasted to one another pointing to similarities and differences across local and national contexts.

Fields such as urban studies and peace and conflict research have identified avoidance as a key element in negotiating tensions and sustaining “everyday peace”. Through this social practice, people shun away from potentially controversial encounters, people, and situations. However, there is limited understanding how avoidance happens and what is the role of affective responses in this decision, in other words, how the decision to avoid or approach is made in everyday life. To study this, the project conceptualized and executed 360-degree videos in Helsinki (FIN), Malmö (SWE), and Marseille (FR) that were based on thick description and ethnographic data.

The 360-degree videos form the foundation for the project’s experimental phase, and they can be considered as the project’s most significant intermediate results thus far. Their innovativeness lies in building the experimental setting on ethnographic data in a way that represent the diversity and ambiguity of everyday encounters and events in cities. This way, it is possible to study the emergence of affective responses in a naturalistic setting where multiple ambiguous stimuli are present and thus to unpack the meaning of affective responses to coexistence. The videos mark the culmination point for the interdisciplinary and methodological advances towards which the project aspires. Their successful realization speaks of the potential in bringing very different disciplines together and paves way for the development of methodological innovations in the study of coexistence.

As the main scientific output achieved thus far, the project has coined a research agenda for the study of coexistence in the everyday. The proposed agenda seeks to revise the idea of living-with-difference, that has dominated discussions around the living-together. This agenda is the first step towards retheorizing community in terms of emergence, which is the key objective of the project. Furthermore, the project has developed and published research-based “immersive” or panoramic comics that unpack mundane dynamics of coexistence in cities in an accessible and popularized way. The comics are made freely available through the project’s Instagram account and on the project webpages (https://societalsustainability.fi/emergentcommunity/).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Upon its start, the project set out to conduct an empirically grounded and conceptually innovative analysis of community dynamics in the age of complexity through a methodological strategy that combines multi-sited ethnography with virtual reality technologies to analyze the meaning of affective responses for coexistence. This objective emanates directly from the empirical and conceptual difficulties in coming to terms with and understanding how the on-going fragmentation of identities, sense of belonging, and social bonds together with demographic change affects our societies.

While the state of the art in community relations mainly discusses how to live-with-difference or how to ‘do’ togetherness, emotion theories focus on ‘pure’ emotions instead of exploring discrete emotions in ‘naturalistic’ or everyday settings. With the extant approaches, the role of emotions for social and political life and coexistence remains unclear. The EmergentCommunity project has made progress in creating an interdisciplinary avenue into studying the role of affective arousal for everyday coexistence and unpacking how difference and diversity are relationally constructed in relation to one’s positionality, but also to broader social and political discussions. This work is undergoing, but the preliminary results are promising, while further methodological development is still needed.

The methodological work done paves way to developing complexity into a new paradigm for the study of societal change through which it is possible to rethink community in terms of emergence, instead of identity-focused or place-bound accounts. The ethnographic data that has been collected enables the analysis and understanding of the mundane dynamics of coexistence in its complexity, in terms of its potential for both peace and conflict.

Methodological innovations are closely intertwined with the conceptual development in the project. These are also where the project reaches furthest beyond the state of the art. The theorization of community in terms of emergence necessitates also methodological innovation as established methods and concepts lack the nuance that could explain dynamics of coexistence in the everyday. While the project applies three relatively stable methods – ethnography, 360-degree videos, and psycho-physiological measuring – their combination under a single aegis has opened practical and disciplinary challenges (including, how to address appropriate research setting). This interdisciplinary work also paves way for significant methodological advances to understand the role of affects in shaping everyday life and its interactional dynamic. These steps are key in exploring the possibilities for peaceful coexistence in diversifying cities and societies.

By the end of the project, we expect to meet the conceptual and methodological objectives of the project by creating methodological avenues that refine existing conceptual and analytical frameworks and further current knowledge on the dynamics of coexistence in the age of complexity. The project results will benefit and be applicable to the promotion of social sustainability at a time of demographic changes, fragmentation of identities, and a rise in inequalities.