B_05 Experiences of Marginalization and Expectations of Social Cohesion: Sociospatial Perspectives
Projects
- Sections:
- Bielefeld, Frankfurt am Main
- Disciplines:
- Psychology , Pedagogy , Sociology
Abstract
The concepts of order and ideals held by the majority society shape prevailing notions of social cohesion. The experiences and expectations of disadvantaged groups, however, are rarely given a voice within these concepts. This work package investigates how people who are considered “marginalized” experience social cohesion. These groups include individuals with low educational attainment, loss of occupational status, poverty, homelessness, or substance use disorders.
Social cohesion is often produced at the expense of disadvantaged groups through processes of exclusion, devaluation, and displacement, rendering cohesion an ambivalent category. This contradiction is reflected in political calls for cohesion: households with low levels of education are addressed as recipients of educational policy interventions, yet at the same time are framed as a “problem case” of the modern knowledge society. People affected by poverty, unemployment, homelessness, or substance use are likewise attributed an insufficient social “performance record” and are simultaneously marginalized both socially and spatially.
We examine how affected individuals perceive and interpret these attributions. Our focus lies on their group- and milieu-specific conceptions of cohesion and on their social and political responses to marginalization and devaluation. Group discussions and interviews capture their perspectives on social cohesion. The work package also explores whether respondents perceive the idea of cohesion as having a class-based character and how the relationship between integration and marginalization is negotiated. These qualitative approaches are complemented by discourse analyses and population surveys focusing on devaluing attitudes toward marginalized groups.
Transfer Activities
We discuss our findings with practice partners and with those affected. Formats such as podcasts are used to reach a broader interested public. Guided by the principle of “talking with rather than about people,” we also make the findings available to the groups studied through low-threshold knowledge transfer formats.
This work package (WP) examines the cohesion-threatening and cohesion-generating effects of social marginalization, with a particular focus on the tension between political invocations of social cohesion and subjective experiences of economic disadvantage and cultural misrecognition. Empirically, it tests a position controversially debated during the first funding phase of RISC, according to which the category of social cohesion constitutes an ordering concept originating from society’s “zone of integration.” Following this assumption, the stabilization of social order is achieved, at least in part, at the expense of disadvantaged groups, to whom the majority society attributes a deficient social performance record.
This interplay between integration and marginalization can manifest in a wide range of forms, from exclusionary norm-setting and prejudices to ideologies of inequality and outright exclusion from participation in social life, potentially even taking violent forms. The WP centers on the experiences of marginalization among disadvantaged groups and relates them to group-specific conceptions and expectations of social cohesion. Empirically, the focus is thus on groups affected by negative attributions, symbolic devaluation, and potential exclusion: households with low levels of education (often labeled “educationally distant milieus”), on the one hand, and unemployed and homeless individuals as well as people who use drugs, on the other. For at least a decade, social classes publicly described as “educationally distant” have been placed in the ambivalent position of being both the addressees of well-intentioned educational policy interventions and, simultaneously, a structural “problem case” of a flexibilized knowledge society. People affected by poverty, unemployment, homelessness, or substance use are even more strongly constructed as “others” at the level of group membership. They are framed as “losers” of society and subjected to stigmatizing attributions.
The WP adopts a sociospatial approach that refers both to a relational understanding of positions within the social structure and to locally and territorially grounded inequalities. We are particularly interested in the social—and potentially political—responses of peripheralized groups to practically experienced marginalization and subjectively perceived devaluation. These responses may take the form of reactionary expressions of voice that resonate with authoritarian attitudes and antidemocratic ideologies. Alternatively, they may appear as exit strategies vis-à-vis demands for loyalty emanating from the societal center—that is, as withdrawal from local social life and from socially dominant norms.
Such responses may be accompanied by processes of individualization, social isolation, and negative societal self-assessments, which restrict the social and democratic participation of those affected and, in turn, may further undermine social cohesion. In this sense, the WP also examines the extent to which respondents attribute a classist character to discursive appeals to social cohesion and whether such perceptions foster illiberal attitudes and resentful affect. At the same time, withdrawal from the norms and spaces of the majority society and the shared experience of marginalization may also give rise to new forms of loyalty oriented toward intra-group contexts. The solidaristic relationships that may emerge among members of a given group or across different disadvantaged groups could strengthen social cohesion overall or serve as a starting point for alternative, more inclusive conceptions of social order.
