Research on the contact hypothesis has highlighted the role of contact in improving intergroup relations. Most of this research has addressed the problem of transforming the prejudices of historically advantaged communities, thereby eroding wider patterns of discrimination and inequality. In the present research, drawing on evidence from a cross-sectional survey conducted in New Delhi, we explored an alternative process through which contact may promote social change, namely by fostering political solidarity and empowerment amongst the disadvantaged. The results indicated that Muslim studentsˈ experiences of contact with other disadvantaged communities were associated with their willingness to participate in joint collective action to reduce shared inequalities. This relationship was mediated by perceptions of collective efficacy and shared historical grievances and moderated by positive experiences of contact with the Hindu majority. Implications for recent debates about the relationship between contact and social change are discussed.
We derive a rigorous analytical formalism and propose a numerical method for the quantitative evaluation of the electrostatic interactions between dielectric particles in an external electric field. This formalism also allows for inhomogeneous charge distributions, and, in particular, for the presence of pointlike charges on the particle surface. The theory is based on a boundary integral equation framework and yields analytical expressions for the interaction energy and net forces that can be computed in linear scaling cost, with respect to the number of interacting particles. We include numerical results that validate the proposed method and show the limitations of the fixed dipole approximation at small separation between interacting particles. The proposed method is also applied to study the stability and melting of ionic colloidal crystals in an external electric field.
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