Belonging, membership, affiliation

This international workshop is the second part of a project initiated in September 2023 at the Center for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge on new perspectives and current challenges in social history. This first event helped to bring to the fore an issue that is now central to much social history work: the study of “belonging”. Rogers Brubaker's and Frederick Cooper's proposal (Beyond Identity, 2000) to disentangle the notion of “identity”, by distinguishing the logic of identification and forms of belonging, or categories of analysis and categories of practice, is still relevant today. But it has to be said that identification practices - particularly those of states - have been more widely studied than forms of belonging. Returning to this notion seems to us to be all the more relevant from a scientific point of view, given that political debates remain saturated with questions of identity.