Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
"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. "--
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.
The concept of ‘super-diversity’ has received considerable attention since it was introduced in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2007, reflecting a broadening interest in finding new ways to talk about contemporary social complexity. This book brings together a collection of essays which empirically and theoretically examine super-diversity and the multi-dimensional shifts in migration patterns to which the notion refers. These shifts entail a worldwide diversification of migration channels, differentiations of legal statuses, diverging patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants’ human capital. Across the contributions, super-diversity is subject to two modes of comparison: (a) side-by-side studies contrasting different places and emergent conditions of super-diversity; and (b) juxtaposed arguments that have differentially found use in utilizing or criticizing ‘super-diversity’ descriptively, methodologically or with reference to policy and public practice. The contributions discuss super-diversity and its implications in nine cities located in eight countries and four continents. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
A first synthesis of work done in sociolinguistic superdiversity, this volume offers a substantial introduction to the field and the issues and state-of-the-art research papers organized around three themes: Sketching the paradigm, Sociolinguistic complexity, Policing complexity. The focus is to show how complexity rather than plurality can serve as a lens through which an equally vast range of topics, sites, and issues can be tied together. Superdiversity captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social ‘mixing’ and ‘fragmentation’ since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces have created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain–extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction–and conceptual challenges. Language and Superdiversity is a landmark volume bringing together the work of the scholars and researchers who spearhead the development of the sociolinguistics of superdiversity.
This new dictionary provides over 2,000 clear and concise entries on human geography, covering basic terms and concepts as well as biographies, organisations, and major periods and schools. Authoritative and accessible, this is a must-have for every student of human geography, as well as for professionals and interested members of the public.
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.
Immigration has transformed the social, economic, political and cultural landscapes of global cities such as London, Melbourne, Milan and Amsterdam. The term ‘superdiversity’ captures a new era of migration-driven demographic diversifications and associated complexities. Superdiversity is the future or, in many cases, the current reality of neighbourhoods, cities, countries and regions, yet the implications of superdiversification for governance and policy have, until now, received very little attention. First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this insightful volume brings together contributions from experts across Europe to explore the ways in which superdiversity has shaped the development of policy and to consider challenges for the future.
This book explores contemporary British multicultural multi-genre literature. Considering socio-political and philosophical ideas about British multiculturalism, superdiversity and conviviality, Ulla Rahbek studies a broad range of texts by writers from across the majority-minority divide. The text focuses on figurative registers and metaphorical richness in multicultural poetry and investigates the interlocked issue of recognition, representation and identity in memoirs. Rahbek analyses how twenty-first-century British multicultural novels both envision and reimagine an inclusive nation and thematise the detrimental effects of individual exclusion on characters’ pursuits of the good life. She observes the ways that short stories pivot on ambivalent encounters and intercultural dialogue, and she reflects on the public good of multicultural literature.
Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.
