Boris Nieswand studied sociology in Bielefeld and received his doctorate in ethnology in Halle/Saale. He worked, among others, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale) and at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen). Since 2012 he is a staff member at the Department for Sociology of the University of Tübingen, first as a junior professor and since 2017 as professor. Boris Nieswand’s research focuses on migration, diversity, morality, and cities. His methodological perspective can be characterized as reflexive and ethnographic.

Roundtable “Cultural Diversity?”

 29th May 01.00 – 02.30 pm | Monique Scheer, Boris Nieswand, Michael Boiger, Thomas Stodulka, Moderation: Birgitt Röttger Rössler

 In contemporary academic writings the term culture, which is not only central to anthropology but also to the social and cultural sciences in general, increasingly appears only in word compositions such as “cultural plurality/multiplicity/variety”, “cultural diversity”, “cultural heterogeneity”, or “multiplicity of cultural orientations”, “diversity of social and cultural backgrounds” etc.

The roundtable provides a platform to discuss what these adjectival collocations denote precisely? Provocatively, it asks whether culture as adjectival becoming has transfigured into a leftover-category that lumps together the conceptually uncanny and empirically enigmatic? Invited scholars from sociology, social and cultural anthropology, cultural psychology and cultural studies will critically debate the analytical value of the terms “culture” and “diversity” and their entanglements from different disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, they will pay attention to the affective dimensions of living in “culturally diverse settings”.