Travelling Concepts

Unlike premodern societies which took the community as their starting point and defined the individual in terms of it, it takes the individual as the ultimate and irreducible unit of, and thus conc- tually and ontologically prior to society. ‘Diversity’, understood in terms of culture, ethnicity, and of social stratification, is obviously a topic central to both the social sciences and cultural studies. In this context, Canada increasingly serves as a model to be critically assessed for an understanding of multinational and multicultural Europe. Taking the different debates in Canada and Europe and disciplinary discussions as a starting point, this volume brings together European and Canadian scholars from sociology, cultural studies, political sciences, philosophy, and literary studies to implement a productive dialogue about concepts of diversity and the way in which they ‘travel’ across the Atlantic and across the disciplines.