Queen’s Professor appointed Co-Director of new CIFAR research program on Boundaries, Membership and Belonging

Dr. Will Kymlicka, the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department, will be Co-Directing the new Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program entitled: Is it Possible to Have a World without “Us” and “Them”?–Boundaries, Membership & Belonging.

Working with Co-Director Dr. Irene Bloemraad of University of California Berkeley, Dr. Kymlicka will explore ways of re-drawing boundaries in our society while maintaining solidarity and the possibility of collective action. The program will investigate ways to create and empower groups without falling back on ideas that produce divisions and hierarchies.

Drs. Kymlicka and Bloemraad will work in collaboration with fifteen CIFAR fellows to make sense of membership politics and answer why membership matters in a globalizing world. Dr. Kymlicka explains that CIFAR support “allows a group of people who share interests to share some time together to figure out how to talk to each other” and then “be able to design some more specific collaborative research projects.” To learn more about the program, see the CIFAR video and/or program overview.

Dr. Kymlicka’s work has focused on democracy and diversity and, in particular, models of citizenship and social justice within multicultural societies. He is also Co-Director of the Multiculturalism Policy Index Project, which monitors the evolution of multiculturalism policies across Western democracies.