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.
In a relatively short time, many European governments have been purposefully dropping the notion ‘multicultural’ or other references to cultural diversity in their policy vocabularies. More and more ...politicians and public intellectuals have criticized a perceived shift towards ‘too much diversity’. This volume goes beyond the conventional approaches to the topic offering a careful examination of not only the social conditions and political questions surrounding multiculturalism but also the recent emergence of a ‘backlash’ against multicultural initiatives, programmes and infrastructures.
Featuring case-study based contributions from leading experts throughout Europe and North America, this multidisciplinary work seeks to assess some of these key questions with reference to recent and current trends concerning multiculturalism, cultural diversity and integration in their respective countries, evaluating questions such as
Is there is a common ‘sceptical turn’ against cultural diversity or a ‘backlash against difference’ sweeping Europe?
How have public discourses impacted upon national and local diversity management and migration policies?
Are the discourses and policy shifts actually reflected in everyday practices within culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse settings?
The Multiculturalism Backlash provides new insights, informed reflections and comparative analyses concerning these significant processes surrounding politics, policy, public debates and the place of migrants and ethnic minorities within European societies today. Focusing on the practice and policy of multiculturalism from a comparative perspective this work will be of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines including migration, anthropology and sociology.
"In Western European politics, "the end of multiculturalism" has become a dogma. Here is finally a book that reopens the debate by distinguishing between political rhetoric, public opinion and public policies." - Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Florence
"Orchestrated predictions about "the end of multiculturalism" are shown, in this alert but finely-tuned collection, as emanating from a panic choir without a common score. Judiciously choosing seven European and two Canadian contrasts, it shows this empirically and deepens it theoretically." - Gerd Baumann, University of Amsterdam
1. Introduction: assessing the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf 2. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism? New Debates on Inclusion and Accommodation in Diverse Societies Will Kymlicka 3. British and Others: From ‘Race’ to ‘Faith’ Ralph Grillo 4. From Toleration to Repression:The Dutch backlash against multiculturalism Baukje Prins and Sawitri Saharso 5. ‘We’re not all Multiculturalists Yet’: France Swings Between Hard Integration and Soft Anti-discrimination Patrick Simon 6. Denmark versus Multiculturalism Ulf Hedetoft 7. Switzerland: A Multicultural Country Without Multicultural Policies? Gianni d’Amato 8. Germany: Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-conscious Country of Immigration Karen Schönwälder 9. Multicultural questions in Spain: the ambivalence of Spanish public opinion Ricard Zapata-Barrero 10. Multiculturalism: a Canadian Defence David Ley
Steven Vertovec is Director of the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen and Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology, University of Göttingen. Previously he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the Institute of Social andCultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and Director of the British Economic and Social ResearchCouncil’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS).
Susanne Wessendorf is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Max-Planck Institute for the Study Of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. She has previously been an assistant lecturer At The Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Berne, Switzerland.
Much of the literature on migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways that specific sociocultural institutions have been modified in the course of being stretched across the globe. Yet migrant ...transnational practices are involved in more deep-seated patterns of change or structural transformation. Such modes of transformation concern: 1) an enhanced 'bifocality' of outlooks underpinning migrant lives lived here-and-there; such dual orientations have considerable influence on transnational family life and may continue to affect identities among subsequent postmigration generations; 2) heightened challenges to 'identities-borders-orders' stemming from migrants' political affiliations in more than one nation-state; these particularly arise around questions of dual citizenship and nationality; and 3) potentially profound impacts on economic development by way of the sheer scale and evolving means of remittance sending; money transfer services, hometown associations and microfinance institutions represent three kinds of remittance-related organizations currently undergoing significant forms of adaptation with significant consequences for development. These modes of transformation, and the practices of migrant transnationalism surrounding them, both draw from and contribute to wider processes of globalization.
Over the last 30 years, as the CrossMigration project demonstrates, Migration Studies has been positively institutionalized in a number of ways. Further, a number of new theoretical interventions ...have significantly altered the ways we understand migration. What unfortunately has not changed, I believe, is the low level of impact that academic studies of migration has had on public understanding. For these reasons, we can call for a limited “two cheers for Migration studies”, but not the conventional three cheers.
Talking around super-diversity Vertovec, Steven
Ethnic and racial studies,
01/2019, Volume:
42, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The concept of super-diversity has been widely evoked - sometimes in highly misleading ways. Based on a survey of 325 publications across multiple disciplines, this special issue endword piece ...presents a typology of ways of understanding super-diversity. This includes addressing super-diversity as: a contemporary synonym of diversity, a backdrop for a study, a call for methodological reassessment, a way of simply talking about more ethnicity, a multidimensional reconfiguration of social forms, a call to move beyond ethnicity, and a device for drawing attention to new social complexities. Indeed, I believe the latter - the search for better ways to describe and analyze new social patterns, forms and identities arising from migration-driven diversification - is perhaps the most driving reason for expanding interests and uses, however varied, surrounding the concept of super-diversity.
A review of recent research across several disciplines not surprisingly finds a wide variety of descriptions surrounding meanings, processes, scales and methods concerning the notion of ...'transnationalism'. Here, several clusters or themes are suggested by way of disentangling the term. These include transnationalism as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of 'place' or locality. These and other approaches to transnationalism are being explored in a newly commissioned ESRC research programme on Transnational Communities (see http:// www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk).
Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be. Some thirty years of government policies, social service practices and public perceptions have been framed by a particular understanding of immigration ...and multicultural diversity. That is, Britain's immigrant and ethnic minority population has conventionally been characterized by large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or formerly colonial territories. Policy frameworks and public understanding - and, indeed, many areas of social science - have not caught up with recently emergent demographic and social patterns. Britain can now be characterized by 'super-diversity,' a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade. Outlined here, new patterns of super-diversity pose significant challenges for both policy and research.
We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is ...greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people.
Sociological notions such as social network, social capital and embeddedness have proven valuable when adopted into a wide variety of social scientific fields. This has certainly been the case in the ...sociology of migration. Similarly, certain concepts drawn from studies on different modes of transnationalism - for instance, research and theory concerning the global activities of social movements and business networks - might serve as useful tools for understanding transnational social forms and practices among migrant groups.
PDF
