This book is the fruition of five years’ work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.
This edited volume addresses the pressing imperative to understand and attend to the needs of the fast-growing population of minority students who are increasingly considered "superdiverse" in their cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds. Superdiverse learners—including native-born learners (Indigenous and immigrant families), foreign-born immigrant students, and refugees—may fill multiple categories of "diversity" at once. This volume helps pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators to move beyond the demographic backgrounds of superdiverse learners to consider not only their ways of being, motivations, and social processes, but also the ongoing systemic issues of marginalization and inequity that confront these learners. Challenging existing teaching and learning paradigms in the K-12 North American context, this volume provides new methods and examples for supporting superdiverse learners in a range of settings. Organized around different conceptual underpinnings of superdiversity, contributors identify the knowledge gaps and effective practices in engaging superdiverse learners, families and communities. With cutting-edge research on this growing topic, this text will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students in multilingual education, literacy education, teacher education, and international education.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this growing area, the linguistic analysis of interaction in superdiverse cities. Developed as a descriptive term to account for the increasingly stratified processes and effects of migration in Western Europe, ‘superdiversity’ has the potential to contribute to an enhanced understanding of mobility, complexity, and change, with theoretical, practical, global, and methodological reach. With seven sections edited by leading names, the handbook includes 35 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. The handbook adopts a truly interdisciplinary approach, covering: Cultural heritage Sport Law Education Business and entrepreneurship. The result is a truly comprehensive account of how people live, work and communicate in superdiverse spaces. This volume is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of Language and Superdiversity within Applied Linguistics, Linguistic Anthropology and related areas.
This volume explores linguistic diversity and complexity in different urban contexts, many of which have never been subject to significant sociolinguistic inquiry. A novel mixture of cities of varying size from around the world is studied, from megacities to smaller cities on the national periphery. All chapters discuss either the multilingualism or the pluricentric aspect of the linguistic diversity in urban areas, most focussing on one urban centre. The book showcases multiple approaches ranging from a quantitative investigation based partly on census data, to qualitative studies flowing, for example, from extensive ethnographic work or discourse analysis. The diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological approaches in the individual chapters are complemented by two chapters outlining the current trends and debates in the sociolinguistic research on urban multilingualism and pluricentricity and suggesting some possible directions for future investigations in this field.The book thus provides a broad overview of sociolinguistic research of multilingual places and pluricentric languages.
In accounts of ethnographic fieldwork and textbooks on ethnography, we often find the notion of rapport used to describe social relationships in the field. Frequently, rapport between researcher and researched is invoked as a prerequisite to be achieved before fieldwork can start, or used as evidence to judge the value and robustness of an ethnography. With few exceptions, and despite regular pleas to do so, ethnographers continue to avoid presenting any discursive evidence of what rapport might look like from an interactional perspective. In a sense, the uncritical acceptance of rapport as a fieldwork goal and measure has helped hide the discursive work that goes on in the field. In turn, this has privileged ideas about identity as portable rather than “portable and emergent”, and reports of social life as more important than how such reports emerge. Written for all those who engage or plan to engage in ethnographic fieldwork, this collection examines how social relationships dialogically emerge in fieldwork settings.
This volume introduces a strategic interdisciplinary research agenda on arrival infrastructures. Arrival infrastructures are those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated. Challenging the dominance of national normativities, temporalities, and geographies of “arrival,” the authors scrutinize the position and potential of cities as transnationally embedded places of arrival. Critically interrogating conceptions of migrant arrival as oriented towards settlement and integration, the volume directs attention to much more diverse migration trajectories that shape our cities today. Each chapter examines how migrants, street-level bureaucrats, local residents, and civil society actors build—with the resources they have at hand—the infrastructures that accommodate, channel, and govern arrival.
Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice. Taking Émile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkheimian social world in which we currently live. This new social world operates 'offline' as well as 'online' and is characterized by 'vernacular globalization', Arjun Appadurai's term to summarise the ways that larger processes of modernity are locally performed through new electronic media. Blommaert extrapolates from this rich concept to consider how our communication practices might offer a template for thinking about how we operate socially. Above all, he explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and social practice In Durkheim and the Internet, Blommaert proposes new theories of social norms, social action, identity, social groups, integration, social structure and power, all of them animated by a deep understanding of language and social interaction. In drawing on Durkheim and other classical sociologists including Simmel and Goffman, this book is relevant to students and researchers working in sociolinguistics as well as offering a wealth of new insights to scholars in the fields of digital and online communications, social media, sociology, and digital anthropology.
"Over the past three decades, there has been a global sea-change in the nature of international migration. In myriad places around the world this kind of deep shift has had significant impacts on the local configurations and dynamics of diversity. Old and new immigration sites across the world have experienced rapid and increasing movements of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. These movements have emerged along with a diversification of migration channels and legal statuses and, more broadly, greater societal attention towards identity politics Worldwide, in concurrent but differing ways, these migration-driven trends are deeply transforming societies in complex ways spanning social, demographic, cultural, economic and political structures. Now across a range of disciplines and literatures, such complex transformation processes and patterns are summarized by the concept of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007). As the world emerged from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we saw Western democracies promoting the universalisation of liberal democracy and its values (Fukuyama 1992). The consolidation of the international human rights regime, with human rights becoming the 'lingua franca of global moral thought' (Ignatieff 2001: 53), was part of this process (Douzinas 2007). That move provided the ideological scaffolding for neoliberal economic globalisation which relied on enhanced international circulation and interdependence of capitals, goods, services, and supply chains. With goods and services, also human mobility grew, and with increased material and more recently digital connectivity, new destinations and routes became appealing, available, and affordable (IOM 2021). Meanwhile, the 'end of history' and the consolidation of the post-Cold War geopolitical order didn't come peacefully and triggered a series of regional and international conflicts that in turn led to a growth of international and internal displacement globally, a trend that is now increasingly fuelled by climate change and environment degradation acting as key factor in migration dynamics (Black et al 2011). International migration is both an effect and a driver of these developments. It crucially contributes to establish and consolidate transnational networks and diasporic communities, while at the same time it is a key contributor to the diversification of host societies. In myriad settings around the world, there are people with more varied ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and legal status characteristics than ever before - each set of characteristics intersecting differently with others as well as with age, gender, and class. As a result, "the world is much more diverse on multiple dimensions and at many levels, typified by the salience of differences and their dynamic intersections" (Jones and Dovidio 2018: 45). Contemporary immigration societies have become increasingly diverse, layered, and unequal. Indeed, 'the processes of neoliberal globalization have gradually loosened labour protections, restructured the welfare system, delocalized state borders, and led to widening inequalities' (Gonzales and Sigona 2017: 3), putting pressure on the connection between state, territory and residents, transforming traditional notions of sovereignty and citizenship, while also giving rise to a host of new non-state actors operating transnationally (Sassen 2006; Castles 2001). As evidenced by its ubiquity across the social sciences, superdiversity is one of the most prominent contemporary concepts advancing current understanding of international migration and its social implications. The numerous social scientific debates, approaches and methodologies that have been developed in light of superdiversity speak to each other but have not yet been brought together in a single volume. This handbook fills this gap in the literature, offering students, educators, researchers and practitioners a much sought-after compendium of central advances made in studying complex social transformations in light of superdiversity. The chapters take stock of some of the advances in the field and lay out the importance of engaging with complex social transformations in light of migration-driven change. In this introduction we frame the discussions that follow by first elaborating the notion of complex social transformations and its resulting complexities, then providing an overview of how we structured the book and the types of chapters you will find in the different sections of this handbook. "--
Introducing Multilingualism is a comprehensive and user-friendly introduction to the dynamic field of multilingualism. Adopting a compelling social and critical approach and covering important social and educational issues, the authors expertly guide readers through the established theories, leading them to question dominant discourses on subjects such as integration, heritage and language testing. This second edition has been fully revised and updated, featuring new chapters on multilingualism in new media, the workplace and the family. Other key topics include: language as a social construct language contact and variation language and identity the differences between individual and societal multilingualism translanguaging flexible multilingual education. With a wide range of engaging activities and quizzes and a comprehensive selection of case studies from around the world, this is essential reading for undergraduate students and postgraduate students new to studying multilingualism.
** Winner of AAAL Book Award 2020 ** **Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2018** The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language is the first comprehensive survey of this area, exploring language and human mobility in today’s globalised world. This key reference brings together a range of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, drawing on subjects such as migration studies, geography, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Featuring over 30 chapters written by leading experts from around the world, this book: Examines how basic constructs such as community, place, language, diversity, identity, nation-state, and social stratification are being retheorized in the context of human mobility; Analyses the impact of the ‘mobility turn’ on language use, including the parallel ‘multilingual turn’ and translanguaging; Discusses the migration of skilled and unskilled workers, different forms of displacement, and new superdiverse and diaspora communities; Explores new research orientations and methodologies, such as mobile and participatory research, multi-sited ethnography, and the mixing of research methods; Investigates the place of language in citizenship, educational policies, employment and social services. The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language is essential reading for those with an interest in migration studies, language policy, sociolinguistic research and development studies.
