This interdisciplinary project aims to provide a new way of learning from the past about strategies used in the South-Eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to overcome social tensions as a potential legacy of intercultural dialogue in the present European context. It will explore how in the multilingual imperial space of intensive cultural exchange and economic mobility the interethnic and social tensions were shaped by (trans)-intercultural communication and practices, both from above and from below. It focuses on accounts of plural belongings and hybrid identities that are geographically grounded, socio-economically situated and embedded in cultural and linguistic practices manifested by multilingualism and intercultural competence of social scripts and behaviour. The project will cover spatially and regionally confined patterns of interaction in the Croatian part of Istria, and the cities of Pula and Zadar under direct Habsburg influence and in the cities of Rijeka and Zagreb, politically bound to the Hungarian part of the Empire during the period 1870-1918. The main strains of research will focus on uncovering discourses produced through three social spaces, those of institutions (administration and education), associations (cultural, sport), and those visible in everyday life, through consumption practices and tourism. The analyses will encompass social practices in different domains of life, symbolic system (focusing on language) and the use of artifacts, or material life. The specific objective is to provide a contrastive reading of Austro-German, Italian and Slavic sources illuminating both the established discourses of knowledge production, emanating from imperial centres of Vienna and Budapest, and the counter-discourses, and their reception by common people in the periphery.