Education, Social Cohesion and "Living Diversity": Sociologies and Pedagogies of Belonging In a Polarized World

This open session aims to explore issues of children and young people’s sense of belonging and intercultural relationships in and through education under the conditions of increasing social diversity and polarization. Framing diversity as a lived and iterative reality rather than something that can be reified, performed and celebrated/demonized (i.e. what Gholami and Costantini [2025] call “living diversity”), and considering both the ideological and affective dimensions of polarization and their implication for schooling/education (Leiviskä 2024; Zembylas 2025), we invite papers from within and beyond the sociology of education that offer innovative, empirically-driven insights into the vexing questions around diversity, belonging, education, and social cohesion in the present and future world. We particularly invite papers that draw upon a range or a synthesis of sociological and/or pedagogical theories, and we are keen to have studies from a variety of national contexts not limited to the Global North.