SCOOP Project: The role of dual identity holders for achieving sustainable cooperation among conflicting groups

People belong to multiple social groups (e.g., ethnicity, religion, sexuality), and those at the intersection of different group memberships can challenge the strict boundaries between them. For instance, the identities of a man who is both gay and Muslim could be perceived to be incompatible due to the conflicting values and norms of each group, and as a consequence, he could be rejected by both his gay community and his religious community. However, dual identity holders can also play an important role in reducing conflict by bridging the divide between these separate groups and overall improving harmony in society. Accordingly, this project aims to understand the role of these dual identity holders conceptualised as “gateway groups” in the literature (Love & Levy, 2019) in facilitating sustainable cooperation in society by focusing on both dual identity holders and the relations between these associated groups/communities. We take an intersectional approach to go beyond the existing research which looks at these groups as if they are discrete instead of belonging to the same domain of identity (e.g., being biracial or bicultural).