2008 - 2009 | Stichting P&V
About the project
The project “Citizenship, Interculturality, Dialogue” was supported by the Foundation P&V and was, in addition, a module of an European project organised by PREFONDES (Pole Europen des Fondations de l’economie Sociale). The general aim of the project was to create spaces for exchange, participation and intercultural dialogue. The Belgian project aimed at an intercultural dialogue across the existing language boundaries. Since Belgium, as a multi-linguistic country, has a particular historical and social situation, it is important to construct a guided dialogue between its French and Flemish speaking civilians. It is not our purpose to make immediate and tangible changes, but merely to create an encounter between two, otherwise divided, communities. In this, we do not want to ignore the existing prejudices, stereotypes and clichés about the other language-community. On the contrary, we want to use them to investigate the different types of imaging about the ‘other-language-speaker’. To realize this we recruited 55 civilians to participate in 5 different meetings that were organized, in what we called, a storytelling forum. This means we offered all our participants the possibility to tell one or more stories about language diversity. Finally, all these stories were collected and examined using narrative analysis.
