About the Talk:

For more than forty years we studied the participation and integration of people with migration background in diverse city contexts. The forgotten group in research up till recently were people without migration background. This one-sided perspective has translated in major empirical and theoretical flaws in how we study social processes in ethnically diverse contexts. Without studying the diversity attitudes and practices of people without migration background we miss out on the impact of the actions of the most powerful group in society. We developed the integration into Diversity (ID) Theory to measure the impact of people without migration background on the diversity climate in neighborhoods and cities. In the European comparative BaM project we compare their impact in three harbor cities (Rotterdam, Antwerp and Malmo) and in three financial service sector cities (Amsterdam, Vienna and Hamburg). The impact people without migration background have on the diversity climate and thus on the living and working climate for people with migration background is huge.

About the Speaker:

Maurice Crul is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His chair covers a broad range of topics on education and diversity. In the last 25 years he mostly worked on the topic of education and children of immigrants, first within the Dutch context and in the last 15 years in a comparative European and transatlantic context. He coordinated the International TIES project (The Integration of the European Second generation). The findings revealed that a sizeable group of second generation youth is either following a higher education study or already has a diploma of higher education. This finding was the starting point of a new international project: ‘ELITES: Pathways to Success’. In 2017 Maurice Crul was awarded the ERC advanced grant for the project Becoming a Minority (BaM) on the integration of people without migration background in ethnically diverse cities in Europe. The project is executed in the harbor cities Rotterdam, Antwerp and Malmö and the service sector cities Amsterdam, Hamburg and Vienna.