APA Monthly Webinar

Abstract

In a world polarised by migration, the harmony and cohesion of ever more diverse communities and societies is a central challenge in the world today. Intercultural harmony and the relationships between migration, diversity and social cohesion has been a longstanding topic of research, amplified by Robert Putnam’s (2006) ‘hunkering down’ or constrict thesis, in which people are hypothesised to withdraw from social and civic life in the face of diversity, degrading the collective social capital and cohesion of diverse communities. The large body of research since has focused on the second part of this thesis: the relationship between diversity and social capital and cohesion and the moderating role of the wider urban ecology, neglecting the first part: whether people are engaged and socially connected within diverse spaces or whether they withdraw and hunker down. In this presentation, James will draw on longitudinal survey data from Australia to quantitatively examine both aspects, analysing and projecting trajectories of pro- and anti-social behaviours and trust in linguistically diverse neighbourhoods. The results suggest that pro-social behaviours become more common the longer people have lived in diverse neighbourhoods, while hostility between neighbours decline. This intersection between individual residential trajectories and wider demographic structures is argued to be important for understanding processes of intergroup contact and the development of intercultural harmony. Indeed the results suggest that while an element of hunkering down in diverse spaces appears at play, this can with time and enabling conditions give way to greater neighbourhood sociability and cohesion in diverse spaces.

Biography

James O’Donnell is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Demography at the Australian National National University, a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council and the Principal Investigator and lead author of the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s Mapping Social Cohesion Study.