Resumen de "Conflicts and ""Convivencia"": An Ethnography of the Social Effects of ""The Crisis"" in a Small Catalan Town"
The main aim of the thesis has been to scrutinise the relations between cultural diversity and social conflicts, and to consider why some social conflicts are said to be inherently cultural. I have proposed to assess this through what I call an 'multi-scalar extended case study' of the social construction of a problem and its solutions. An innovative approach that sheds light on the multiple local-global processes inherent to the phenomenon starting from an urban ethnography of a small town in Northern Catalonia. I have analysed the simultaneously local-global transformation of migration and societies, connecting the local processes of production of space and place-making with the larger processes of migration, economic crisis and social transformation, and finally, the responses to these changes from the institutions, NGOs and social groupings. Social conflicts are here conceived of as a favourable analytical tool which allows for a deeper understanding of the complex social transformation that migration as a phenomenon is part of but also affected by, impulses and articulates culturally. I have focused particularly on the interaction between mobility and settlement, through a geographical-historical lens, and the socio-cultural processes at different scales that these are part of and play an important role in, as well as the way that they impact locally and globally, through the vectors of production and reproduction.
