Babylon

We focus on interdisciplinary and collective research efforts, in an attempt to explore the limits of current disciplinary frameworks. We focus on a broad range of research topics and areas, covering issues that occur at the strictly local level as well as on the global level, and creating a sound basis for comparative work and theoretical generalization, and we do so by means of paradigmatic orientations towards super-diversity, complexity and mediation, with an immediate contact with partners in the field.

In Memoriam

Fons van de Vijver (1952-2019)

It is with deep sadness that we received the news that Fons van de Vijver had unexpectedly passed away, at the age of 66. Fons retired from Tilburg University in June 2018, where he had long served as a professor of Cross-Cultural Psychology. He combined his Tilburg professorship with appointments at North-West University in South Africa and the University of Queensland, Australia. Fons was for many years the co-director of Babylon and was Dean of Research in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Fons made a tremendous impact on his field with landmark publications on survey methodologies capable of incorporating cultural differences across participants and was awarded the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology in 2013. He was a relentless researcher with a comprehensive grasp of the literature in his field (and beyond), who combined extraordinary methodological rigor with a tendency to push the limits of the field and to critically interrogate the theoretical status-quo. His research was a sustained effort to understand and reject the foundations of identity-based discriminations and methodological ethnocentrism.

Fons was a formidable academic, but he was also a superb colleague and a kind, warm and generous human being. He was greatly admired and appreciated by students and colleagues alike. And he will be missed by all of them. After his retirement, Fons and his wife Lona had moved to Queensland, a place they both loved. Not being cut out for post-retirement life in a rocking chair, Fons remained involved in several projects there and continued to supervise a final cohort of PhD students. He also loved to cycle in the countryside, and it was during one of these cycling trips that an intracerebral hemorrhage struck him. His death left all of us with a great sense of bereavement, mixed with gratitude for having had the opportunity to know such a wonderful human being.

Jan Blommaert

Director, Babylon

Babylon's research program 2018-2020

Superdiversity online and offline

Social life in the 21st century is increasingly led in online as well as offline contexts, with intersections between both structuring everyday activities as well as institutional ones. In the domain of social, cultural and linguistic diversity, the online world has become a dense new layer of diversification complicating both the phenomena on the ground as well as public debates about them and existing social-theoretical approaches to them.

Babylon puts the online-offline nexus central in its engagement with diversity in society and will focus over the next couple of years on several key issues in research.

The precise nature of new forms of social interaction in the online-offline world, with special attention to new forms of multilingual and multimodal practice;
The effects of online-offline social life on identities, both individual and collective;
The emergence and formation of new communities in the online-offline world;
The importance of learning practices and knowledge distribution in the formation of identities and communities;
The development of security as a key institutional format structuring the online-offline world;
The tensions and overlaps between moral orders and worldviews articulated in online-offline social practices;
The social-theoretical implications of all this, and the adequacy or inadequacy of existing theoretical and methodological frameworks for addressing the new forms of social life we observe.

Babylon will address these research issues in continued collaboration and dialogue with the partners in the INCOLAS consortium, with a number of new partners, and with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Department of Culture Studies

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