The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 923 "Threatened Order – Societies under Stress" at the University of Tübingen is organizing an international workshop about hybridity, assimilation, multiculturalism and indifference as concepts of ordering the social reality. The CRC investigates the manner in which various social orders change, especially when facing threats to their very existence. Orders are conceptualized as arrange- ments of elements that are related to each other in a certain way and that structure social groups or even whole societies. It is the Research Center’s view that orders are threatened when agents become convinced that their options for action are uncertain, when behavior and routines are called into question, when agents feel they cannot rely on each other, and when agents manage to establish a discourse about the threatening situation. One of the CRC’s projects “Istria: a Cultural Experiment? – Hybridity: a Threatened Order?“ studies cultural hybridity in Istria from the late 19th into the 20th century.

The workshop at the CRC focuses on the concepts of hybridity, assimilation, multiculturalism, and indifference. The main goal is to discuss these and other analogous concepts of the ordering of social reality as analytical categories in light of the Habsburg monarchy’s policy of multiculturalism and from the perspective of Istria ́s peculiarities.