| Description |
"One of the most relevant challenges for European societies is to avoid the isolation, separation or withdrawal of groups from mainstream society. Contemporary events show that minorities in Europe can be marginalized in European society, and that this can make them prone to adopting separatist attitudes and beliefs.
The project investigates the importance of misrecognition in this process. Recognition is defined as the extent to which members of minorities feel that they are viewed by others as belonging to the nation. The project strives to understand the experiences which give rise to the sense of misrecognition and, more particularly, the role that surveillance plays in this. Moreover, it wants to understand the consequences of a state of misrecognition. When does it lead to a sense of estrangement whereby minority group members withdraw from participation and cooperation with others in the national community and with national authorities? When does it lead to becoming actively anti-community and anti-authority?
The focus will be on two significant minorities in different regions of the European Union: Muslims in the West and Roma people in the East. Recent models of intergroup relations are applied to address these questions. Estrangement is regarded as arising out of interactions between minority groups and authorities.
A multi-method approach is used to study these issues combing methods of experimentation and ethnography of everyday experience with interviews and surveys. Research is conducted in four Western European countries Germany, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France) and three Eastern European countries (Hungary, Serbia, and Romania). "
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