This international research network asks: How do people of conflicting worldviews, memories and future visions encounter each other? Cultural, civic and educational organisations are expected to create a platform for such encounters and their public value is increasingly assessed on how well they reflect societal diversity in their core activity, outreach and governance. While some improvement on diversity measures, such as gender, age, ethnicity or disability, is evident within these sectors, less is known on what meaningful engagement across and within these categories looks like, why and how it matters and what it takes to foster it. This is an urgent question in the face of disconcerting societal tendencies around the world: the coarsening of public discourse in increasingly divided societies, the rise of political and military activism fuelled by hostility and violence towards the other, or the fast-spreading epidemic of loneliness and mental illness across and within generations and social strata. This network is based on the recognition that genuine engagement with difference of any kind is necessary for building peaceful, sustainable and healthy communities. It also acknowledges, however, that success on diversity measures alone does not guarantee meaningful encounters with those who are not like 'us'. Such engagement requires effort, can be difficult to bring about, and sharing the same space is a necessary but insufficient condition for it to occur. The Network addresses this challenge by shifting the theoretical focus from diversity as a social category to difference as a quality that defines every human being. This shift implies that human interactions of any kind are meetings with difference. They are not made meaningful by emphasising sameness, but by exercising an ethical commitment to preserving difference while making a genuine contact. How individuals and communities practise this encounter with 'the other' across diverse contexts of human activity can have profound consequences for addressing some of the global societal conflicts. The Network brings together international artists, linguists and philosophers to examine aesthetic and ethical dimensions of communal meaning making across geographical boundaries and domains of social life: in music and dance rehearsal rooms, in museums and art galleries, in theatres, markets, service encounters, schools. We will study existing research and experiential evidence of these interactions and examine what genuine encounters with difference look like and what it takes to enable them. The resulting theoretical and methodological frameworks will advance inquiry across academic disciplines and creative practices. The practical guidelines will support public institutions in the UK and internationally in their commitment not only to reach diverse communities but to become catalysts for genuine encounters across divides of any kind. More generally, through engaging with one another's disciplines, cultural contexts, existing research data and ways of working, the Network will develop new conceptual frameworks, analytical approaches and practical proposals for researching and living in complex, changing conditions. The Network will be organised in two one-day seminars, a public assembly and a dissemination lab to consolidate Network outputs. The seminars will include short data-led provocations, keynotes, experiential sessions and moderated conversations. The public assembly will reach out to a wide range of stakeholders, including arts organisations, educational charities, local authorities, health and mental wellbeing agencies and social care sector. The material will be disseminated through creative outputs (interactive website and a digital ethnography blog led by a Doctoral Researcher in Residence), social media and professional workshops. The Network will facilitate the development of new partnerships and inform future inquiry into global challenges of societal conflict.