Articulating Social-Cultural “Diversity” in Institutions:  An Anthropological Study Free University of Bolzano, Internal research Fund/October 2012-September 2014

The project draws upon current paradigms in anthropology in order to ethnographically study how institutions “think” and negotiate issues of social-cultural diversity. The project comprises two specific lines of research: first, the concept of “integration” in institutional thought and action, through the prism of the case of South Tyrolean Sinti and European Romani people; and second, the category of “foreign students” in the South Tyrol educational system as a meaningful site for viewing the social incorporation of migrants and the articulation of “multicultural” policies.  Rather than study the targets of institutional policy per se, the project will focus on the institutions themselves that are generating policies. The research will proceed from a social-constructivist stance that does not take “integration” and “foreign students” as natural, objective, unchanging and unanimously held categories, but instead conceives of both categories as constructed by the social universes within and through public institutions. The researchers utilize a context-sensitive ethnographic methodology, employing multi-scale and multi-sited ethnography in introducing and combining different qualitative research methods. Both lines of research feature a particular interest in the processes which have taken place over the last two decades, and in the project´s first phase the researchers will thus conduct archival research for this time period in order to trace how dynamics of permanence and change have been reframed, as well as those of ideology and practice. The project´s second phase will feature an ethnographic investigation relying on participant observation and open-ended and semi-structured interviews with key informants, and ethnographic work inside and outside institutions. Both lines of research constituting this project will address issues of policy-making concern for the local community.  On a broader level, the study will provide a new contribution to international debates on multiculturalism and multicultural policy.  

Prof. Dorothy Zinn
Dr. Elisabeth Tauber