Cultural Conflict 2.0
Shedding new light on the conditions of co-existence in urban spaces.
The Cultural Conflict 2.0 research project concluded in 2018. It investigated in what ways and to what extent social media is reshaping social relations in culturally diverse areas of large and small cities in Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. We especially looked at how cultural conflict is created, circulated, handled and dealt with both on social media platforms and at their intersection with life in the physical city.
So far, our evidence suggests that mediatisation proceeds at a different speeds, depending on the size of the city and the strength of pre-digital media, such as local newspapers. In Kristiansand, a small town in the south of Norway, social media are very widely used, but local newspapers and forms of local leadership not dependent on social media remain important. In contrast, both have largely been replaced by forms of communication and leadership dependent on social media in Amsterdam.
We have examined how groups of individuals who experience high levels of cultural conflict on social media platforms respond, interviewing ethnic Danish converts to Islam who are active on social media platforms. We found that these individuals tend to deal with critical and abusive comment by not engaging directly, but rather by posting material which sheds light on their decision to convert, and on what their life as a Muslim means to them.
We have also been studying how social media reshapes users’ relationship with place, building on the initial observation that many young people largely navigate the urban environment through their smartphones. By examining the spatial distribution and content of posts we have found that users tend to form lifestyle clusters, and that users in clusters with greater access to prestigious or gentrifying locations in the city tend to highlight location more often, thus enhancing both their prestige and that of the location. This is one way in which the use of a widely accessible technology may unintentionally reinforce existing social divisions.
We have also studied the formation of clusters of users in cities which form part of much larger transnational networks, such as those formed by women interested in hijab fashion. While continental Europe’s largest cluster of such users in found in Rotterdam, this cluster and those in other Western cities are much smaller than the major hubs in South East Asia. This case study shows how our method can produce novel findings and suggest new lines of enquiry; for example, some of the cities with most users had not been identified by previous studies, while at a local level spatial pattern posts suggests that women in these networks do not live parallel lives in separate spaces to the ethnic majority, but rather intersecting lives with some shared spaces but distinct centres, such as restaurants and beauty parlours. In these kind of ways the project is shedding new light on the conditions of co-existence in multi-ethnic urban spaces.
Project Leader
Associated Researcher
Associated Researcher
Postdoctoral Researcher
Co-Principal Investigator
Postdoctoral Researcher
