Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue

最近，西方政界人士高调干预，宣称多元文化主义失败，这是他们毫不掩饰的背景，是对那些自殖民时代结束以来在西欧和美国不断增长的穆斯林社区的不信任。虽然这样的言论可能会被解读为某种程度的权宜之计和投射，但认为多元文化主义是一个有缺陷的实验的感觉--以及没有融入社会的穆斯林就是这一点的证据--也已经成为许多新闻和媒体报道的老生常谈。正在开展重要的工作，特别是在社会科学领域，以查明导致西方社会中穆斯林疏远的国内和国际因素。然而，到目前为止，信任的政治、文化和哲学问题--信任是如何建立的、如何运作的以及如何破坏的--基本上被忽视了，而是倾向于仓促做出判断，并呼吁采取这样或那样的果断行动。这一多学科项目将通过分析一些社会和文化生活领域的信任和不信任状况来纠正这一疏忽。因此，这将有助于细致入微地区分和促进全球不确定因素在意识形态和信仰方面的核心利益。它的形式是一个由学者、非学术合作伙伴和利益相关者组成的网络，在东伦敦大学的彼得·莫雷博士的指导下，他们将聚集在一起，探讨政治和社会、文化和艺术以及商业和金融领域的信任和建立信任的问题。地理上的焦点是英国和美国，在那里，关于少数民族和文化少数群体所在位置的棘手问题变得更加紧迫(有时还带有尖刻的)，尽管这些国家的穆斯林少数民族组成了各种各样的散居社区，这意味着我们也将与南亚和阿拉伯世界诞生的文化实践和价值观接触。通过研讨会、圆桌讨论会、学术出版物、展览、视频材料和互联网，我们将在理论和知识层面以及日常实践中建立一个关于跨文化信任的最新思考平台。一个互动网站将成为提供信息、讨论、传播调查结果和将活动存档的第一站。此外，我们将与大英图书馆一起建立一个关于穆斯林和文化间信任的网络收藏，这些收藏与其他成果结合在一起，将形成坚实和不断发展的经验和理论基础，以了解在当代多元文化社会中如何理解和实施信任。穆斯林、信任和文化对话致力于了解各种文化领域的现有做法如何以有助于我们摆脱误解和负面成见的方式在群体之间进行对话和谈判。它的目的是为深入研究的知识奠定基础，然后利用这些知识在社区组织和政策制定层面上建立和形成对话。我们将在关于不同文化间对话和信任问题的公开辩论中作出重大干预：探索如何建立信任，以及如何培育和破坏信任；增强利用各种公民参与机制的群体的能力；让那些参与政治和社会政策制定者更好地了解他们的活动如何影响他人，以及信任和对话如何使其更有效。

Recent high-profile interventions by politicians in the West declaring the failure of multiculturalism have had, as their very thinly disguised context, mistrust in those Muslim communities that have been growing in Western Europe and the United States since the end of the colonial era. While a certain amount of expediency and projection may be read into such utterances, the sense that multiculturalism has been a flawed experiment - and the idea that unintegrated Muslims are evidence of this - has become a truism of much journalism and media coverage too. Important work, particularly in the social sciences, is ongoing to identify the domestic and international factors leading to Muslim alienation within Western society. Thus far, however, political, cultural and philosophical questions of trust - how it is built, how it operates and how it can be undermined - have largely been overlooked in favour of a rush to judgement and a clamour for decisive action of one kind or another. This multidisciplinary project will serve to rectify this oversight by analysing the conditions of trust and mistrust in a number of areas of social and cultural life. As such, it will help to nuance and further the Global Uncertainties core interest in ideologies and beliefs. It takes the form of a network of scholars, non-academic partners and stakeholders, under the direction of Dr Peter Morey of the University of East London, who will come together to explore questions of trust and trust building in politics and society, culture and the arts, and business and finance. The geographical focus is on Britain and the United States, where thorny questions about the place of ethnic and cultural minority groups have taken on an added (and sometimes vitriolic) urgency, although the variety of diasporic communities that make up Muslim minorities in these countries mean that we will also engage with cultural practices and values born in South Asia and and the Arab world too. Through workshops, roundtable discussions, scholarly publications, exhibitions, video material and the Internet, we will build a platform for the latest thinking on intercultural trust, both at the theoretical and intellectual levels, and in everyday practices. An interactive website will be the first port of call for information, discussion, disseminating findings and archiving events. In addition, we will be building a web collection on Muslims and intercultural trust with the British Library which, taken together with the other outputs, will form a solid and evolving empirical and theoretical basis for understanding how trust is understood and enacted in contemporary multicultural societies.Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue is committed to understanding how existing practices in a variety of cultural arenas enact dialogue and negotiation between groups in ways that can help us move beyond misunderstanding and negative stereotyping. It aims to provide a foundation of thoroughly researched knowledge that can then be used to build and shape dialogue at the level of community organisations and policy making. We will make significant interventions in public debates about intercultural dialogue and questions of trust: to explore how trust is created and how it can be nurtured as well as undermined; to empower groups utilising the various mechanisms of civic engagement; and to provide those engaged in political and social policy-making with a better understanding of how their activities affect others and how trust and dialogue can make them more effective.