Conference Workshops

Conference Workshops 2026

Our conference offers a diverse selection of workshops designed to bridge research, practice, and law, giving attendees actionable insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by multicultural families.

Delegates will have the opportunity to attend one workshop from each of the three sessions, ensuring a personalised and enriching experience tailored to your interests. When registering, simply select the workshop from each session that resonates most with you, allowing you to engage with the topics that matter most to your work or research. This format ensures that you gain the maximum benefit from the conference by focusing on the areas that will have the greatest impact on your professional and personal growth.

The Workshop topics are listed below.

Workshop Session 1 – Thursday 28th

What’s Love Got to Do With it? – The immigration law challenges faced by bi-national couples in Ireland and the UK

Presenters: Barbara Coll & Barry O’Leary

This workshop explores the challenges facing bi-national couples where an individual requires immigration permission to join, or remain with, their partner. It will look at the rules in Ireland and in the UK – identifying common themes between the two countries and highlighting where the two countries diverge on their approach.

It will provide an insight into how the rules impact on the ability of a bi-national couple to remain together. While the workshop will focus on Ireland and the UK, its objective is to use these examples to provide a basis for a wider discussion on the legal barriers that bi-national couples face, and the resilience they require, at a time when immigration is a very political issue in many European countries. It will be aimed at attendees without an immigration law background.

Exploring Mixedness in Postcolonial Europe

Presenters: Marianne Moyaert, Lieke Schrijvers, Deniz Aktas, Nella Van den Brandt

Over recent decades, the understanding and study of mixed couples, families, and unions in Europe has gained even more increasing attention, not only in the social sciences, but also in contemporary politics (Cerchiaro and Odasso 2021). Despite this growing interest, there remains a gap in comprehensive scholarship that addresses the nuanced experiences of mixedness and mixed relationships—those formed by individuals of differing racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds—in a postcolonial European context (Collet 2017).

This panel seeks to fill this gap by offering detailed accounts of how those in mixed unions navigate and reshape their relations, identities, and social expectations in contemporary Europe. Using “mixedness” as a multidimensional, contingent, context-dependent, relational, and historically (re)formed concept, this panel moves beyond traditional and binary understandings of “interracial” or “interfaith” couples, examining how “mixedness” is lived and experienced within postcolonial, and social frameworks, and how individuals in mixed relations occupy complex social positions based on different forms and grammars of difference (Collet and Santelli 2016).

The panel addresses a range of themes, including the impact of history and colonial legacies on present-day experiences of mixedness, the role of antisemitism and islamophobia, and configurations of race, religion, secularity, ethnicity, and gender. It additionally brings forward the ways in which individuals in mixed relations navigate societal prejudices and norms, construct perceptions on and formations of mixedness, as well as strategies for dealing with differences. By bringing together empirical studies from the Netherlands and Belgium, and research from diverse disciplines such as anthropology, history, religious studies, and gender studies, this panel provides much-needed multifaceted perspectives and conversations on the challenges and opportunities faced by mixedness and mixed relationships. 

Dancing Between Cultures – Growing with or Growling with Difference in Multiethnic Marriages

Presenters: Tsui-yee Dorothy Chow, Ruby C.M. Chau

Interracial couples often come from diverse cultural backgrounds, which can lead to differing values, beliefs, worldviews, and daily practices. These variations can significantly impact their lives together and may result in disputes and conflicts in important areas of marital and family life, such as lifestyle choices, communication styles, child-rearing, expressions of intimacy, and family roles.

Many people instinctively avoid conflict, associating it with hostility, chaos, and division. These associations can foster mistrust and suspicion, prompting individuals to defend themselves and confront the conflict. However, this process can serve as a catalyst for change, encouraging self-examination, a reassessment of relationship dynamics, and a commitment to improving the marital and family situation.

Culture shapes our identities and influences our behaviour and interpretation of relationships, including how we approach conflict. When individuals from different cultural backgrounds experience conflicts, they often link these disputes to their cultural identities, viewing the maintenance of the conflict as a way to preserve themselves. As a result, conflicts in interracial relationships tend to last longer and can be more difficult to resolve.

This workshop will explore the nature of conflicts within interracial families and their effects on the identity development of family members. Resolving these conflicts requires ongoing negotiation, self-reflection, reassessment, and redefining the relationships among individuals and their families. We will discuss strategies for transforming destructive aspects of conflict into constructive ones. Additionally, we will examine how individuals can move beyond their own cultural identities while embracing those of others, ultimately fostering complementary partnerships that create a unique family unity and identity.

Home Sickness project: Between Comfort and Pride

Presenter: Winny Ang, Laura Vargas & Nadia Babazia

The Red Star Line Museum, located in the historic buildings from which nearly two million Europeans emigrated, positions itself today as a place where past and present meet and where migrants and their families find recognition and resilience. Our three-year ‘Homesickness Project’ explores how feelings of longing and belonging continue to shape bi- and multicultural lives marked by migration histories and transnational ties.

Homesickness is universal, yet strongly coloured by cultural background. In bicultural couples and families, sensory memories — especially smells — help partners navigate differences in language, religion, social norms, and values. These sensory anchors create shared frameworks that foster mutual understanding and connection. Together with artist Laura Vargas and psychiatrist Winny Ang, we developed a workshop that uses scents of ‘home’ to open dialogue and strengthen resilience.

During the presentation, participants create a personal “homesickness bag.” We reflect on how this approach supports bicultural families in adapting to diverse social environments, parenting ‘mixed’ children, and maintaining meaningful rituals across cultures.

The project demonstrates how museums can function as safer spaces that nurture connection, wellbeing, recognition, and pride in personal migration trajectories

Workshop Session 2 – Friday 29th

Supporting Family reunification of Refugee Families

Presenters: Alfredo Rizzo, Prof Pascal Debruyne

Under AFSJ, EU treaties have widened their scope to “qualified” third countries nationals such as refugees and refugee seekers. Under some respects, Family Reunification Directive aims also at the protection of minors in migratory status, including those asking to access EU for reunification purposes.

While UNHCR, on the one hand, has reckoned that, under some respects, that EU Directive supports a “most favourable rules” approach towards, in particular, minors refugees, it has given raise, on the other, to critical remarks on the several obstacles still existing throughout Europe in the family reunification process, leading to prolonged separation with significant procedural costs few realistic possibility of success at the end of relevant proceedings.

This workshop provides for institutional/legal overview of relevant case law (e.g. CJEU Case C-550/16), and a more practical approach by mentioning recent case studies brought to the attention of relevant stakeholders. A comparison to the position of those fleeing Ukraine (under decision 382 of 2022 purview) is provided.

1 Navigating Cultural Diversity and Resilience in Transnational and Multicultural Families
2 Between faith and silence: social and cultural participation in Indonesian-Turkish marriages

Presenters: Shared workshop: 1 Özgün Aykut, 2 Hicran Karatas

1 Multicultural and transnational families are increasingly shaping contemporary societies, bringing together diverse cultural backgrounds, migration histories, and social contexts. While these families often demonstrate strong adaptive capacities, they also face specific challenges related to acculturation, identity negotiation, parenting, discrimination, and access to culturally sensitive support systems.

This workshop explores the dynamics of bi- and multicultural families through a resilience-oriented and relational perspective. Drawing on research from education, social sciences, and family studies, the session examines how transnational ties, cultural expectations, and social environments influence couple relationships and parenting practices. Particular attention is given to self-regulation, communication strategies, and coping mechanisms that support family stability and well-being in multicultural contexts.

The workshop combines short conceptual inputs with guided discussion and reflective exercises, encouraging participants to share experiences from research, practice, and policy contexts. Participants will collaboratively explore strategies for fostering mutual understanding, managing intercultural tensions, and strengthening resilience among multicultural families. The session aims to generate practical insights relevant for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working with culturally diverse family constellations.

2 Transnational marriages between Indonesian women and Turkish men are often framed around shared religious belonging, assumed to facilitate social and cultural integration within family life. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with Indonesian–Turkish married couples, this paper examines how participation is negotiated in everyday marital contexts where a shared language is largely absent, focusing particularly on women’s experiences of visibility and belonging.

The findings suggest that Indonesian women’s religiosity is initially welcomed as a sign of moral compatibility, but this appreciation tends to diminish over time. Differences in the cultural contexts of religious practice—such as prayer routines, gender norms, modesty, and everyday expressions of piety—gradually become sources of tension rather than cohesion. Although religion provides a shared symbolic framework, its culturally embedded forms often remain non-negotiable due to linguistic barriers, limiting couples’ ability to articulate or adapt religious expectations in daily life.

As a result, women’s participation becomes fragile and uneven. Social participation narrows as women withdraw from wider interactions and rely primarily on their spouses for communication. Cultural participation often takes the form of “spectator participation,” where women are present in cultural and religious settings but excluded from active meaning-making. The study argues that participation should be understood as a lived, relational process shaped by language, culture, and gender.

Navigating the space between us: Towards diversity trauma and racism sensitive support practices for bi-cultural families

Presenters: Kim Lecoyer, Birsen Taspinar, Geert Schelkens

How do bi-cultural couples navigate the space between them? This workshop draws on qualitative research conducted at the Centre for Family Studies (Odisee), based on in‑depth interviews with Belgian bi‑cultural couples.

The workshop examines how these couples encounter complex realities such as intersectional identities, family expectations, migration histories, racial dynamics and personal differences. We also explore how these dynamics not only shape the couple relationship but also influence the therapeutic encounter, particularly when differences emerge between the cultural, linguistic, or social backgrounds of practitioners and clients. Attention is given to processes related to migration, power, intergenerational experiences, trauma, and racism, and how these can manifest—explicitly or implicitly—within couple interactions and professional conversations.

Starting from case reflections, we introduce broad, practice‑oriented principles for diversity‑, trauma‑ and racism‑sensitive work. Participants are invited to reflect on emerging themes, challenges, and possibilities in supporting bi‑cultural couples and families.

Embodied Encounters: Using Drama and Systemic Techniques to Explore Bicultural Couple Dynamics

Presenters: Damian Spiteri

This experiential workshop explores how drama techniques and systemic thinking can be combined to deepen our understanding of bicultural and multicultural couple dynamics. Bicultural and multicultural couples often have to find their way around complex layers of identity, migration histories, language differences, expectations from extended families, and wider social pressures. Traditional conversational approaches sometimes struggle to capture the embodied, emotional, and relational dimensions of these experiences.

Drawing on systemic family work and applied drama methods, this workshop introduces practical tools such as role reversal, sculpting, mirroring, and spatial mapping. These embodied techniques make visible the unspoken tensions, loyalties, cultural narratives, and strengths that shape bicultural relationships. Participants will engage in guided exercises that demonstrate how drama can help couples express relational patterns, experiment with new positions, and build greater mutual understanding.

By the end of the session, participants will have experienced—and be able to apply—several drama-based systemic interventions that support resilience, communication, and emotional connection within bi- and multicultural couples. The workshop is suitable for social workers, therapists, educators, and practitioners who work with diverse families and wish to enrich their practice with creative, relationally focused methods.

Workshop Session 3 – Friday 29th

Understanding Autonomy in Multicultural Families: Exploring Challenges, Resilience, and Navigation

Presenter: Ouissam Abattouy

Understanding autonomy as independence within family relationships in multicultural families becomes essential for practitioners and policymakers as it increasingly replaces traditional adulthood markers (e.g., marriage). This workshop draws on multi-method research examining autonomy at national and individual levels. Immigrant adolescents perceive lower family support than non-immigrant peers across 30 countries, especially when immigrants come from countries where obedience is valued over independence but live in receiving countries where the opposite is valued (Abattouy et al., 2023).

Aligning with previous research, this national-level finding suggests that autonomy may be challenging in immigrant families. Yet examining individual autonomy among Dutch youth transitioning to adulthood reveals a different picture. While youth with immigration backgrounds face more autonomy restrictions, report lower autonomy desires, and perceive greater mismatches between the autonomy parents grant and youth desire, these challenges do not predict poorer relationships as they do for non-immigrant youth. Autonomy mismatches relate less strongly to closeness for immigrant youth (Abattouy et al., 2025; forthcoming), revealing remarkable resilience.

Together insights from dyadic interviews with Moroccan-Dutch youth and their mothers, we explore how families can actively navigate autonomy to maintain this resilience. The workshop discusses how all insights inform diversity-sensitive support programs building on families’ own strengths.

Challenges and Opportunities: Navigating Disempowering Cultural Norms in multicultural Families

Presenter: Srilatha Juvva, Neena Barnes, Mahima Nayar

The geography and topography define India’s present diversity in terms of culture, class, language, religion, and food habits. This and the inherent caste dynamics underpin and shape the country’s socio-economic and political responses through everyday societal interactions, as reflected in today’s changing, identity markers, family structures and customs. Typically, families are formed by choice and not through an ‘arrangement by parents/elders’.  Such multicultural families typically encounter challenges posed largely by structures such as culture – language, caste, region and religion. While systems, structures and cultural norms maybe neutral and life-enhancing, much of the challenges are life diminishing or disempowering. This workshop aims to highlight these disempowering practices and strategies required to resolve them

The objectives of the workshop include:

  1. to explore the cultural practices that disempower multicultural families
  2. to design strategies that interrupt such disempowering practices and ‘isms’ using the Conscious Full Spectrum Response Model
  3. to develop strategies to create opportunities to navigate the everyday disempowering practices

Using the Conscious Full Spectrum Response Model, a radical model, developed by Monica Sharma, the workshop will take us through cutting edge neuroscience of the triple helix for transformation. It will take into account strategies of responding to the problems and realising the full potential of families to interrupt disempowering practices within and outside in order to foster wellbeing, peace and harmony.

“I Feel Expanded“: The Reconstruction of Social Support in Psychosocial Support Groups for Refugees and Migrants in Belgium

Presenter: Dr Sofie de Smet, Dr Lies Missotten 

Since collective violence, political oppression, human rights violations, and forced displacement profoundly disrupt family and community bonds, community-based psychosocial interventions in exile can play a pivotal role in restoring safe and trusting relationships within diasporic communities.

In this interactive workshop, we explore how community-based psychosocial support groups contribute to rebuilding social support structures and relational connections across (trans)national family and community networks—both in exile and in the countries of origin.

Drawing on research findings from a seven-session creative community-based psychosocial support program developed at the clinical center PraxisP (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium) since 2022 with diverse cultural and national migrant communities, we discuss how this intervention creates a “safe enough” space to express painful personal experiences and emotions. At the same time, it enables participants to engage in mutual challenges amid cultural and socio-political tensions— preventing escalation while fostering a new “practice of listening,” distinct from everyday dynamics of silencing, social isolation, and conflict avoidance. Special attention is given to the therapist’s role and to the use of creative modes of communication in rebuilding trust and social support within diasporic contexts.

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