The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity 9780197544938, 9780197544969, 9780197544952, 0197544932

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

SU P E R DI V E R SI T Y

The Oxford Handbook of

SUPERDIVERSITY Edited by

FRAN MEISSNER, NANDO SIGONA, and

STEVEN VERTOVEC

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meissner, Fran, editor. | Sigona, Nando, 1975- editor. | Vertovec, Steven, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of superdiversity / edited by Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, Steven Vertovec. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022038841 (print) | LCCN 2022038842 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197544938 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197544969 (online) | ISBN 9780197544952 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Multiculturalism. | Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM1271 .O998 2023 (print) | LCC HM1271 (ebook) | DDC 305.8—dc23/eng/20220915 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038841 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038842 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780197544938.001.0001 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments  About the Editors  Contributors  Introduction: Superdiversity and Complex Social Transformations  Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec

ix xi xiii 1

PA RT I :   DI S C I P L I NA RY DE V E L OP M E N T S 1. Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity: Complexity, Difference, Sameness, and Mixing  Mette Louise Berg

15

2. Mapping Superdiversity: A Geographical Exploration of a Relational Global Condition  Katherine Stansfeld

27

3. Superdiversity and Urban Planning  Simon Pemberton

43

4. The Urban Economics of Superdiversity  Max Nathan

59

5. Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity  Kristin Henrard

75

6. Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective  Marlou Schrover

89

7. Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity: Innovations and Challenges at the Online-Offline Nexus  Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert

107

vi   Contents

8. Social Policy and Superdiversity: An Agenda for Addressing Racisms and Inequalities  Jenny Phillimore

121

PA RT I I :   M E T HOD OL O G IC A L R E F L E C T ION S 9. Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective  Ralph D. Grillo

137

10. Ethnographies of Superdiversity  Susanne Wessendorf

151

11. Migrants and New Media: Digital Ethnography, Transnationalism, and Superdiversity  Monika Palmberger 12. Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business  Kiran Trehan 13. Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data: How the Decennial Censuses in Britain Are Responding  Peter J. Aspinall 14. Multidimensionality and Superdiversity: Some Reflections  Laurence Lessard-​Phillips and Veronika Fajth 15. Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity: Methodology, Methods, and Approaches  Rosalyn Negrón

163 177

191 209

225

PA RT I I I :   SPAC E S A N D S C A L E S 16. Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of the Intimate Kind in Home-​Spaces  Brenda S. A. Yeoh

247

17. Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space  Paolo Boccagni

261

18. Superdiversity, Young People, and Education  Elif Keskiner, Maurice Crul, Ismintha Waldring, Talitha Stam, and Frans Lelie

275

Contents   vii

19. Discreet Diversification in Latin America  Raúl Acosta

287

20. Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities  Laavanya Kathiravelu

301

21. Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and the Spatiality of Superdiversity  Sakura Yamamura

313

PA RT I V:   P OW E R A N D P OL I T IC S 22. The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity  Junjia Ye

329

23. Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity: From Single to Multiple Identities?  Dirk Geldof

345

24. “Not in a Relationship”: Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”  Steve Garner

359

25. The Governance of Superdiversity: A Complexity Perspective  Peter Scholten

377

26. Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit  Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane

389

PA RT V:   C ON C E P T UA L E N C OU N T E R S 27. Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change  Thomas Hylland Eriksen

403

28. Superdiversity and the Everyday  Amanda Wise

417

29. Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens  Julija Sardelić

435

30. Diversity Machines: Urban Popular Economies and Territories of Operation  AbdouMaliq Simone

449

viii   Contents

31. Superdiversity in Settler Societies: Toward a Decolonial Superdiversity  Paul Spoonley

465

32. Afterword: Superdiversity Futures  Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec

481

Index 

491

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for their invaluable support and feedback throughout all the phases in the development of this Handbook. At Oxford University Press, we are grateful to Molly Balikov, who showed great enthusiasm for this project from its inception and followed its initial development, and to Toby Wahl, for having accompanied us to completion. Fran would like to thank all the contributors to this collection for sharing their thoughts and expertise on superdiversity. Without their efforts—​in times that for many of us have been particularly difficult—​this collection would not have been possible. She would also like to thank the people who in her day-​to-​day life are invaluable mentors and friends. Nando would like to thank his family—​Matilda, Robin, and Julia—​for all their support and encouragement, and current and past colleagues at the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Research into Superdiversity, some of whom are also contributors to the Handbook, for having shared research ideas, findings, and doubts over many virtual and in-​person coffee meetings, seminars, webinars, and conferences. Steve would like to thank a wide set of scholars around the world who, over many years, have provided feedback, criticism, and ideas for development around the concept of superdiversity, both directly through personal communication and at numerous conferences and specialist workshops devoted to the topic. We have been especially grateful, in this way, to have benefited from the insights of the late, great Jan Blommaert: his scholarship and friendship are sorely missed. Finally, the editorial team would like to thank all the colleagues and friends who helped make this ambitious project possible—​those who contributed and those who helped in other ways. Special thanks go to Christiane Kofri at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. We thank her for excellent assistance in editing, managing communications with authors and publishers, arranging and sitting in at many editorial meetings, and, in general, helping us stay on top of this project throughout the chaos of multiple COVID-19 lockdowns. We dedicate this book to the memory of Jan Blommaert and Stephen Castles.

About the Editors

Fran Meissner is Assistant Professor of Critical Geodata Studies and Geodata Ethics at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Before starting at Twente, Fran was Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Leiden. Among other positions, she has previously held a highly competitive Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the TU Delft and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is also a long-​term research partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research focuses on contemporary urban social configurations and how, in times of datafication, these are transformed through international migration. Based on her expertise in complex urban diversities, her most recent work grapples with questions about how data technologies—​specifically geodata applications—​shape the way migrants get to access urban spaces and how those technologies exclude migrants from urban life. Her work aims to make visible the migration information infrastructures behind increasingly data-​mediated experiences of urban diversity. Nando Sigona is Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Nando is a founding editor of the peer-​reviewed journal Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and lead editor for the book series Global Migration and Social Change (Bristol University Press). His work has appeared in a range of international academic journals, including Sociology, Social Anthropology, Antipode, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Identities, Citizenship Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is author or editor of books and journal special issues, including Undocumented Migration (with Gonzales, Franco, and Papoutsi, 2019), Unravelling Europe’s “Migration Crisis” (with Crawley, Duvell, Jones, and McMahon, 2017), Within and beyond Citizenship (with Roberto G. Gonzales, 2017), The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (with Fiddian-​Qasmiyeh, Loescher, and Long, 2014), and Sans Papiers: The Social and Economic Lives of Undocumented Migrants (with Bloch and Zetter, 2014). He is Senior Research Associate at the ODI and has held visiting research and teaching positions at the University of Oxford and the European University Institute. Steven Vertovec is Director at the Max-​Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Honorary Professor of Sociology and Ethnology at the University of Göttingen. Before beginning at the Max Planck Institute, Vertovec was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of

xii   About the Editors the British Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). His education includes a Bachelor of Arts (magna cum laude) in Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado; a Master of Arts in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara; and a Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. In 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (social sciences) by the Université de Liège. Steve is currently co-​editor of the journal Global Networks and co-​editor of the Palgrave book series Global Diversities. For over twenty-​five years, he has engaged with a range policymakers, including the UK government’s Cabinet Office and Home Office, the European Commission, the G8, the World Bank, and UNESCO.

Contributors

Raúl Acosta is a social anthropologist working at the Ludwig-​Maximilians-​University of Munich. He was awarded his doctoral degree by the University of Oxford. His main interest areas are sociocultural diversification, political activism, urban ecologies, mobility, and transnational advocacy networks. He has conducted research in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Spain. In his most recent monograph, Civil Becomings, he theorized networked collaborations by nongovernmental groups to influence national and international policies. Peter J. Aspinall is Emeritus Reader in Population Health at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His publications include eighty papers on ethnicity categorizations, classifications, and health; two coauthored books on mixed race; and The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification, co-​edited with Zarine L Rocha. He was a member of advisory groups on the ethnic group question in the Office for National Statistics 2001, 2011, and 2021 Census Development Programmes. Mette Louise Berg is Professor of Migration and Diaspora Studies at University College London’s Social Research Institute. She is a social anthropologist with interests in migration, diasporas, and migrant transnationalism; urban diversity and conviviality; gender, generation, and belonging; and participatory methods. She is the founding co-​editor of Migration and Society, an interdisciplinary journal straddling the social sciences and the humanities. Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council’s HOMInG project (University of Trento). His research focuses on migration, transnationalism, social welfare, diversity, and homemaking. He has recently done fieldwork into the lived experience of home and the contentious views, emotions, and practices associated with it, particularly in majority-​minority relations and among immigrant and refugee newcomers. Allan Cochrane is Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at the Open University. His research is focused on the politics of, and life in, cities and urban regions. He is coauthor, with Sarah Neal, Katy Bennett, and Giles Mohan, of Lived Experiences of Multiculture (Routledge, 2018). Maurice Crul is Distinguished Professor at the Vrije University Amsterdam holding the chair of Education and Diversity. In the last thirty years Crul has studied the

xiv   Contributors school careers of the children of immigrants in education in a national and international context. He has published over a hundred articles and several books, including Superdiversity: A New Vision on Integration and The Second Generation in Europe: Does the Integration Context Matter? Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has published widely about the anthropology of global modernity, focusing on ethnicity and nationalism, cultural complexity, creolization, and accelerated change. His books in English include Small Places, Large Issues, Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change and Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast. Veronika Fajth is a PhD researcher at the School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham. Her work examines migrant integration and related social inequalities from a multidimensional, cross-​European perspective. Specifically, her recent work looks into the situation for second-​generation immigrants, and the links between host-​ country characteristics and migrant integration patterns. Veronika was previously a Research Officer at Maastricht University/​UNU-​MERIT, where she worked on topics of intra-​European mobility and refugee integration. Steve Garner is Professor of Sociology and Department Head at Texas A&M University. He has worked at universities in France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has published widely on race and racisms in an international comparative perspective, with a particular focus on the racialization of White identities. His most recent book is A Moral Economy of Whiteness (Routledge). He is currently working on projects about skin lightening, the racialization of democracy, and the state’s engagement in fostering racism. Dirk Geldof is Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Design Sciences at the University of Antwerp. He is Senior Researcher at the Centre of Family Studies (Odisee University of Applied Sciences Brussels) and Lecturer in the Social Work Program at the Karel de Grote University College (Antwerp). Ralph D. Grillo studied anthropology at the University of Cambridge (PhD 1968); he taught at Queen’s University Belfast and subsequently at the University of Sussex, where he was formerly Dean of the School of African and Asian Studies and founding Director of the Graduate Research Centre for the Study of Culture, Development and the Environment. He has done anthropological research in East Africa, Ireland, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom and is Honorary Member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. He was awarded the Lucy Mair Marsh Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, in 2016. Kristin Henrard is Professor of International Law at the Brussels School of Governance, which she joined in 2020. She had previously worked at the University of Groningen (until 2007) and then at the University of Rotterdam, where she became Professor of Human Rights and Minorities in 2010. She is the author of over 160 publications.

Contributors   xv A substantial number of these pertain to human rights and minorities, and she also elaborates on the role of international courts and concerns over their legitimacy. Laavanya Kathiravelu is Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received her PhD in Sociology from Macquarie University (Sydney). Her research focuses on the nexus of contemporary migration, ethnoraciality and urban studies, and focuses on sites in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her work aims to broaden understandings of contemporary cities with a focus on spaces outside the traditional centres of empirical inquiry and knowledge production. Elif Keskiner is Assistant Professor in the sociology department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has worked and published in the areas of sociology of education, ethnic and migration studies, and youth sociology, with a focus on reproduction and overcoming of social inequalities applying an intersectional lens. Frans Lelie is a fellow at the Department of Sociology at the Free University in Amsterdam in Amsterdam. She has worked on the topic of the education of the children of immigrants in two major international projects: the TIES project (The Integration of the European Second generation) and the ELITES, Pathways to Success project. Currently, she is the project manager for the European Research Council’s Becoming a Minority (BAM) project on the integration of people without migration backgrounds in majority-​minority cities in Europe. Laurence Lessard-​Phillips is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity in the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. She has led and been involved in projects and publications directly (and indirectly) linked to migration and social inequalities, especially across generations. She has a keen interest in conducting, and reflecting on, empirical work—​and how it can be approached from different methodological standpoints. Max Nathan is Associate Professor in Applied Urban Sciences at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London; an associate in the Centre for Economic Performance Urban Programme; and Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). He is an economic geographer with a background in public policy. His work looks at urban economic development, especially innovation systems and clusters; immigration and diversity; and public policy for cities. Sarah Neal is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her research examines urban and rural social life, ethnicity, racialization, and community. She is author (with Allan Cochrane, Katy Bennett, and Giles Mohan) of Lived Experiences of Multiculture (Routledge, 2018) and (with Carol Vincent and Humera Iqbal) of ‘Friendship and Diversity’ (Palgrave, 2018). She is co-editor (with Karim Murji) of ‘Current Sociology’. Rosalyn Negrón, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she is also Affiliate Faculty at the Sustainable Solutions

xvi   Contributors Lab and the Critical Ethnic and Community Studies graduate program. Rosalyn’s research examines the role of complex social environments on the decisions that people make for their social, economic, and physical well-​being: these include migration and health decisions, identity negotiations, and linguistic and educational choices. An experienced methodologist, she teaches research methods courses at all levels, with specialties in problem-​centered transdisciplinary, mixed methods, and ethnographic research. Her research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Monika Palmberger is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria, and an Associate Research Fellow at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on (forced) migration, digital ethnography, memory, and care. She is the author of How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-​War Bosnia and Herzegovina (2016) and the co-​editor of Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration (2018) and Memories on the Move: Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past (2016). Simon Pemberton is a professor of human geography at Keele University, United Kingdom. His research—reflected in numerous publications—has made internationally significant contributions on new migration and superdiversity, the importance of place in shaping migrant mobility and settlement, and urban and rural planning responses to migration-​driven population diversity. He leads the international EMPOWER Project, which focuses on empowering cities of migration to ensure equitable and inclusive urban transformations. Jenny Phillimore is Professor of Migration and Superdiversity the University of Birmingham and was the founding director of its Institute for Research into Superdiversity. Her research focuses on access to welfare and civil society actions in conditions of superdiversity and was most recently published in Exploring Welfare Bricolage in Europe’s Superdiverse Neighbourhoods. She leads the international SEREDA Project, which focuses on forced migration and sexual and gender-​based violence, and she is Principal Investigator of the New and Old Diversity Exchange (NODE) UK–​Japan Migration and Diversity network for the United Kingdom. Jenny is a social policy analyst and has advised governments across the globe on migration, gender, and diversity policy. Julija Sardelić is Lecturer at the Political Science and International Relations Programme, Te Herenga Waka–​Victoria University of Wellington. Her research and teaching encompass topics of citizenship, migration, nationalism, and human rights. Her recently published work includes the monograph The Fringes of Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2021) which received Harriman Rothschild Book Prize Honourable Mention. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-​Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and also held positions at the University

Contributors   xvii of Edinburgh, the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom), and the European University Institute (Italy). Peter Scholten is Full Professor in the Governance of Migration and Diversity at Erasmus University, Director of IMISCOE (International Migration Research Network), editor-​in-​chief of the journal Comparative Migration Studies, Director of the Leiden-​Delft-​Erasmus Research Center on the Governance of Migration and Diversity, and Research Director of Public Administration. Peter has published on research-​policy relations, multilevel governance, and urban governance in the field of migration and migration-​related diversities, among other topics. Marlou Schrover is Professor of Migration History and holds the chair of Economic and Social History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She publishes primarily on post–​World War II subjects related to migration and diversity. AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Key publications include For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities (Duke University Press, 2004), City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge, 2009), Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (with Edgar Pieterse, Polity, 2017), Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance for an Urban South (Polity, 2018), and The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture (Duke University Press, 2022). Paul Spoonley was Distinguished Professor and Pro Vice-​ Chancellor at Massey University, New Zealand, standing down from the latter position in 2019. He is the author or editor of twenty-​nine books, including The New New Zealand: Facing Demographic Disruption (2020) and Histories of the Radical Right and Intolerance in Aotearoa/​New Zealand (2022). He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2011, was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and is co-​chair of Metropolis International. Massimiliano Spotti is Associate Professor (in ethnography and digital literacies) at the Department of Culture Studies of Tilburg University, as well as Deputy Director of Babylon—​Centre for the Study of Superdiversity. His main research interests and publications are in the field of sociolinguistics, migration, and L2 learning education, with a focus on the implications of sociotechnological platforms in the construction of asylum seekers’ identities, and of digital means for learning Dutch as a second language in the setting of formal and nonformal integration courses. Recent publications include (with Ofelia Garcia and Nelson Flores) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a co-​edited book (with Jan Blommaert and Jos Swanenberg) on the contrast between top-​down language policies and bottom-​up language practices across Europe and beyond (Springer, 2022).

xviii   Contributors Talitha Stam is a Haitian-​Dutch anthropologist and sociologist focusing on education. In 2018, Talitha obtained her PhD degree at the Erasmus University Rotterdam for her work on the aspirations of “White” Dutch girls in superdiverse vocational schools. As a postdoctoral researcher, she studied parental involvement in primary schools. Currently, Talitha works as a senior adviser for the Education Council of the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad) and cosupervises a PhD candidate on Syrian-​born children with a refugee background. Katherine Stansfeld is a social and cultural geographer and visual urbanist. She is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London and Associate Lecturer in Geography & the Built Environment in the Centre for Languages and International Education, UCL. Her work uses a creative and critical ethnographic approach to investigate everyday geographies of superdiverse neighborhoods with a focus on the production of place, social difference, and cultural coexistence amid urban change. Kiran Trehan is Pro Vice-​Chancellor for Partnerships and Engagement, and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of York. Professor Trehan is a key contributor to debates on leadership, enterprise development, and diversity in small firms. She has led several policy and business-​support initiatives, and has published extensively, including articles in high-​quality journals, policy reports, books, and book chapters, in the field. Her work has been supported by grants from a full range of research funding bodies. Ismintha Waldring holds a joint PhD in sociology from VU Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and the University of Antwerp and works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Becoming a Minority project. Her research interests include boundary strategies, subtle mechanisms of exclusion in organizational settings (the education sector in particular), and the role of education professionals in majority-​minority city contexts in Europe. Susanne Wessendorf is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University (United Kingdom). Before joining CTPSR, she held positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, University of Birmingham’s Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), and the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. Her work focuses on understanding processes of social inclusion and exclusion in contexts of immigration-​related diversity. Amanda Wise is Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, where she teaches urban sociology, race, migration, and “diversity.” She has published widely on everyday multiculturalism, urban diversities, migrant workers, and diversity at work. She is currently researching the nexus between the political economy of global cities and the everyday sociology of extreme urban marginality by looking at the leisure practices and working lives of migrant workers and stigmatized racialized minorities in Sydney and Singapore.

Contributors   xix Sakura Yamamura is Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Junior Professor at the Geography Department of RWTH Aachen University. She has expertise in migration studies, urban and economic geography, and her work focuses on the geographies and spatiality of transnational social and economic activities in contexts of urban diversity. She studied geography, sociology, and ethnology at the University of Hamburg, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-​ Sorbonne, and the University of California, Berkeley. Her works appear in journals, such as Urban Studies, International Migration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Comparative Migration Studies. Junjia Ye is Associate Professor of Geography at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie at the intersections of migration studies, urban diversification, and the political-​economic development of urban Southeast Asia. Her work has been published in the journals Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Her first monograph, Class Inequality in the Global City: Migrants, Workers and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), won Labour History’s annual book prize. Brenda S. A. Yeoh, FBA, is Raffles Professor of Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Research Leader, Asian Migration Cluster, at the NUS Asia Research Institute. She was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize for outstanding achievements in geography in 2021. Her research interests in Asian migrations span the themes of gender, social reproduction, and care migration; skilled migration and cosmopolitanism; higher education and international student mobilities; and marriage migrants and cultural politics.

I n t rodu ction Superdiversity and Complex Social Transformations Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec

Over the past three decades, there has been a global sea change in international migration. The shift has had a significant impact on local configurations and dynamics of diversity. Old and new immigration sites across the globe have experienced rapid and increased movements of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. This has resulted in a diversification of migration channels and legal statuses and, more broadly, in greater societal attention to identity politics. Worldwide, in concurrent but differing ways, these migration-​driven trends are transforming societies’ social, demographic, cultural, economic, and political structures in deep and complex ways. Now, across a range of disciplines and literatures, such complex transformation processes and patterns are summarized in 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 universalization 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 a neoliberal economic globalization that relied on enhanced international circulation and the interdependence of capital, goods, services, and supply chains. Along with goods and services, human mobility also grew, and with increased material and, more recently, digital connectivity, new destinations and routes became appealing, available, and affordable (International Organization for Migration 2021). Meanwhile, the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) 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 global growth of international and internal displacement, a trend that is now being further fueled by climate change and environment degradation as key factors in migration dynamics (Black et al. 2011).

2    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec International migration is both an effect and a driver of these developments. It crucially contributes to the establishment and consolidation of transnational networks and diasporic communities. At the same time, it is a key contributor to the diversification of host societies. In myriad settings around the world are people with more varied ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and legal-​status characteristics than ever before—​ each set of characteristics intersecting differently with the 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; and giving rise to a host of new nonstate actors who operate transnationally (Sassen 2006; Castles 2001). As evidenced by its ubiquity in the social sciences, superdiversity is one of the most prominent contemporary concepts advancing the 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 one another but have not yet been brought together in a single volume. The handbook fills this gap in the literature, offering students, educators, researchers, and practitioners a much sought-​after compendium of the central advances that have been made in studying complex social transformations through the lens of superdiversity. The chapters take stock of the advances in the field and lay out the importance of engaging with complex social transformations in light of migration-​driven change. We frame the discussions that follow by first elaborating the notion of complex social transformation and its resulting complexities, and then providing an overview of how we structured the book and the types of chapters you will find in the different parts.

Complex Social Transformation Regarding the meanings of social transformation, without the qualifier complex, some of the key works on that topic (such as Smelser 1998; Wiltshire 2001; Castles 2001; and Rosenau 2003) use social transformation to classify profound modes of change affecting multiple domains—​economic, political, social, and cultural—​across macro-​, meso-​and microscales. Such significant and widespread changes traverse a gamut of realms covering how societies are structured, how institutions and networks are organized, how everyday practices are conducted, and even how people think about themselves. In keeping with this general approach, Stephen Castles (2010) writes,

Introduction   3 I refer to these processes as social transformation, as a convenient label to facilitate discussion of the complexity, interconnectedness, variability, contextuality and multi-​level mediations of global change. . . . Social transformation can be defined as a fundamental shift in the way society is organized that goes beyond the continual processes of incremental social change that are always at work. This implies a “step-​change” in which all existing social patterns are questioned, and many are reconfigured. Social transformations are closely linked to major shifts in dominant economic, political and strategic relationships. (1566, 1576)

Global changes in migration and diversity dynamics are certainly part of these overarching social transformations. Shifting migration and diversity dynamics are both brought about by wider processes of change and, at the same time, contribute to those wider processes. As Anna Amelina and her colleagues (2016) describe it, a key task for scholars currently is to relate profound changes in the field of migration to the analysis of more general societal constellations . . . [including] how practices of migration and mobility are structured by changes in political-​economic orders of power and inequality, by political dynamics, and by ongoing struggles over identity and belonging. . . . [T]‌he focus on social transformation signifies more than just undirected and unsystematic social change. It directs our attention to the structural embedding of societal shifts, to globalized relations of power and inequality and to the complex interplay between social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics. (1, 3)

The linked and mutually conditioning kinds of change that are relevant here include the political, economic, and social changes surrounding such phenomena as the multiple and compound causes of migration; mixed modes of migration; changing legal-​ status regimes; diversification of countries of migrant origin; migrant’s changing gender and age profiles; the role of information technologies in migration, mobility, and transnationalism; and patterns of the securitization and criminalization of migration. Based on the definitions offered in the literature, it is fair to say that the kinds of changes taking place across a range of scales and sites are ones of far-​reaching social transformation. Why, additionally, might we emphasize calling such social transformations “complex”? Numerous social scientific works draw upon complexity theory in physics and mathematics to describe or analyze features of social organization and processes of change (for instance, Byrne 1998; Stewart 2001; Urry 2003; Jörg 2011; Page 2015). Drawing on complexity theory encourages social scientists to pay attention to what happens in (social) systems characterized by increases in the number of agents, the differentiation of characteristics among agents, and the interdependencies of those agents and characteristics. Such increases relate to other perspectives within complexity theory—​namely, a view onto dynamics that entail multiple causes; multiple nonlinear, disorderly, or unpredictable process trajectories; and multiple uncertain and highly contingent outcomes that sometimes include the emergence of new, self-​organized systems.

4    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec Such observations often stand in stark contrast with political narratives about controlling and predicting migration and its implications. An important way in which social scientists have drawn on complexity theory is regarding social inequalities—​indeed, sometimes called “complex” social inequalities. Sarah Walby (2009), in fact, insists that the study of complex social inequality must be at the core of contemporary social theory (cf. Walby 2007; McCall 2001). This arises in particular through greater attention to the interactions and intersections of modes of social difference (akin to the above-​mentioned increase in the differentiation of characteristics among social actors mentioned in complexity theory). As Walby (2009) points out, Traditional social theory addressed class inequality, but had difficulty when trying simultaneously to address gender, ethnicity, age, religion, nation, sexual orientation, and disability, and even greater difficulty in addressing their mutual constitution at points of intersection. Further, these social relations are more complex than class in that they involve not only inequality but also difference, thereby problematizing notions of a single standard against which to judge inequality. (2)

In this way, complexity, as the study of multiple overlapping and intersecting modes of difference—​and the outcomes in terms of various forms of inequality (material and economic, spatial, social, and symbolic)—​must be at the heart of attempts to understand social transformation. Looking once more at migration and diversity—​what we might call the terms of reference for describing social transformation—​complexity and complex social inequalities should all come into play. It is important to note that some branches of social physics see social complexity as resolvable through mathematical models and predictive analytics (Pentland 2014). Research work using a superdiversity lens is more likely to point us to conceptions of migration and its implications that highlight the autonomy of migration and the complex social, political, and economic entanglements that migration entails (Magazzini 2017; Mezzadra 2011). As many of the chapters document, and as we note in the afterword, this kind of appreciation of superdiversity highlights that relational understandings of the social are key, as are investigations that require the recognition of and use of multiple approaches to researching superdiversity (Meissner 2019). This also means recognizing that the term itself is used in different ways—​as a concept that stimulates research on complex social transformations linked to migration, but also as a research lens that helps researchers to continuously query the multiplex interconnections of factors that influence how diversity manifests in local contexts. If, as we argued at the start of this chapter, superdiversity can be understood as a concept that highlights complex transformations, then superdiversity as an observed social phenomenon will not be the same everywhere. It bears repeating that the “super-​” prefix is a modifier to “emphasize the sense of superseding” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 546). It hints at the temporal layering of diversities and the multidimensional and multiplex processes that shape migration-​related diversities. What is notable in many chapters of this handbook is that research engaging superdiversity keeps circling us back to what we

Introduction   5 previously referred to as the three Ss and three Ps of superdiversity: the Scale, Size, and Spread of migration-​driven diversification and the Politics, Power, and Policy conditioning the contexts in which diversification takes place—​together with their manifold interconnections (Meissner and Vertovec 2015).

Superdiversity and Complex Transformations Regardless of social scientific discipline, for many scholars—​especially those who work on topics surrounding migration and diversity, superdiversity has become a go-​to notion for invoking if not describing the kinds of complex social transformations they observe in their data. In this way, suggest Antonio López Peláez, Pablo Álvarez-​Pérez, and Victor Harris (2021), the concept of superdiversity, “with all the semantic breadth and defining ramifications that characterize it, has opened an interpretive door, and made possible an analytical framework that differs from the rest” (1). Steve Vertovec (2019) has addressed many of the ways the superdiversity concept has been invoked to address complex transformations. He points out that scholars have referred to superdiversity in connection with at least three fields in which complexifications are bringing about social transformation: globalization and migration; ethnic categorizations and social identities; and new social formations. The first field concerns changing migration patterns and processes in terms of new motivations, streams, trajectories, legal categories, and patterns of transnational belonging. The second field relates to the rise and impacts of fluid, multidimensional, and intersectional identities beyond those of mere ethnicity. The third field covers variable patterns of everyday social practice, interaction, and association, often arising from the first two fields of change. If complex social transformations are tied to multiple overlapping modes of difference and difference-​making, then superdiversity has, from its inception, been pushing our analytical lens toward those multiplicities. Some have critiqued the notion for describing an exclusively positive sense of migration-​related diversities. As a notion that becomes tangible through empirical investigations, superdiversity is not normatively loaded in this sense. As a number of the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, starting with a superdiversity lens in thinking about complex social transformations frequently points us to “the unfolding of a brutal migration milieu [that] reveals the connections between power, violence and diversification as profoundly significant” (Hall 2017, 1568). It is complex social inequalities that all too often are the empirical reality of processes of diversification. The sheer number of publications that have engaged with superdiversity since the notion was introduced in 2007 shows that there was a “demand” for rethinking migration-​ driven diversities from different angles and taking complex social transformations into

6    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec account. It is therefore not surprising or unwelcome that the notion has been subjected to scrutiny, skepticism, and outright criticism. Some of the critical responses claim that the notion of superdiversity does not describe anything new or that it is a mere slogan, that it does not take sufficient account of power, that it is Eurocentric or doesn’t reflect on colonial or postcolonial matters, that it underplays the dynamics of race and racism, that it overlaps with concepts of intersectionality, or, indeed, that it does not go far enough in addressing all kinds of social difference by focusing too much on migration. Some of these assessments, we believe, are helpful interventions that contribute to theoretical improvement. However, some are unwarranted because they are based on partial readings or misreadings of the original and subsequent literature. Still others are directed at what should be considered palimpsests, derivations, or reworkings of the concept. Many contributors address these critical readings head on; others present us with deepened or elaborated conceptual understandings of superdiversity that make several of these concerns less disparaging.

Structure and Overview of the Handbook This handbook spans the most relevant vantage points needed to achieve a rounded understanding of superdiversity and complex social transformations. The contributions in Part I shed light on how different disciplinary traditions have approached superdiversity within existing and long-​running concerns. They offer the state of the art in the disciplinary engagement with the concept, put superdiversity in dialogue with germane ideas in their fields, and consider the way forward for further intellectual advancements. They thus speak to readers interested in how complex social transformations matter to the core questions of their discipline and how research and concepts that consider superdiversity are relevant to those core questions. These chapters will also give readers insights into the truly interdisciplinary debate that is encouraged in studying superdiversity. Part I provides the much-​needed cross-​disciplinary knowledge that researchers and practitioners not trained in migration or diversity studies often lack when entering the field. Part I begins with a chapter by Mette Berg on anthropological perspectives on superdiversity. Berg argues that, while there has been some resistance among anthropologists to engage with it, superdiversity can be seen as growing out of a long-​ standing but minority lineage of anthropological work on urbanization, pluralism, cultural complexity, and creolization. Katherine Stansfeld’s chapter draws on key concepts such as space-​time compression (Massey 1993) to locate superdiversity within debates in human geography, spatial complexity, mobilities, and globalization. She highlights how superdiversity offers a useful lens to interrogate the power-​geometries of social differentiation. She also queries whether superdiversity is exclusively an urban phenomenon.

Introduction   7 That urban planning practice can certainly gain from a deeper engagement with superdiversity is shown by Simon Pemberton. Reflecting on urban planning as a discipline, he highlights key concerns, such as settlement structures, and possibilities for coproducing urban spaces that planners have to engage with in light of the implications of superdiversity. Max Nathan shows how determining the economic impacts of superdiversity presents significant methodological challenges. Producing even a simple production and consumption framework that takes superdiversity into account is complicated—​but it is necessary for an in-​depth understanding of the economics of superdiversity. This is because commonly used measures for migrant economic activity may not be differentiated enough to give the kinds of nuanced answers called for by superdiversity. Extending that thinking to the variations of other superdiversity variables, he shows that, for econometric analysis, superdiversity offers ample room for further exploration (see also the chapter by Lessard-​Phillips and Fajth). The chapter by Kristin Henrard considers superdiversity and the law. She uses the example of intersectional non-​discrimination case law to highlight some of challenges that thinking about superdiversity stimulates in terms of the implementation and understanding of the law in light of complex social transformations. Marlou Schrover explores whether and how superdiversity facilitates historians in asking new or different questions. In developing her argument, she links her thinking to a range of concepts that have been used to engage with the consequences of migration. The chapter by Max Spotti familiarizes the reader with the phenomenal impact superdiversity has had in the field of sociolinguistics, where it is helping to reshape the conceptual scaffolding, methodological approaches, and research questions. The online-​offline nexus, it is argued, is a fruitful site for future research in the field. The final chapter in Part I, by Jenny Phillimore, brings a social policy perspective to the analysis of social and economic inequalities in superdiverse populations and the policymaking challenges they pose. Part II shows the breadth of the different methodological considerations that are linked to superdiversity. The contributors focus on innovative ways of doing superdiversity research and highlight pathways forward by pointing out gaps in current research practice and assessing different epistemological starting points. Capturing and analyzing complex social transformations requires not just a new lexicon to describe and explain superdiversity but also new and repurposed tools and approaches for studying the implications of international migration. Part II begins with a recapitulation of what superdiversity is and how we might compare processes of superdiversification. Ralph Grillo provides comparative insights into thinking about migration-​driven diversity in three different temporal and geographic contexts. He shows and analytically engages with the contextually different layering of diversities to highlight how superdiversity as a social condition can be read differently depending on how the notion is operationalized in comparative research. Susanne Wessendorf ’s chapter offers an overview of social scientific scholarship concerned with the effects of globalization at the local level and illustrates how current ethnographies of superdiversity draw on long-​standing research traditions of urban neighborhood research (see also Berg’s chapter). Focusing on the rise of digital technologies both in terms of how migrants navigate their journeys

8    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec and the places where they live, Monika Palmberger calls on researchers engaging with superdiversity to more proactively recognize the growing importance of the digital mediation of social realities. She lays out strategies for combining contemporary “analogue’ ” research with digital methods to explore how complex social transformations grow out of an interplay of real-​life and online experiences. Kiran Trehan commences from the debates around superdiversity and small migrant business to point to the need to consider systems psychodynamic theory and practice as a useful avenue for advancing that area of research by highlighting unconscious dynamics, emotional responses, and social power relations. Moving from microscale analysis to more macro-​analytic concerns, Peter Aspinall uses case studies from census data to highlight that making sense of superdiversity is always going to be tied up with making sense of how we count and categorize people (who have been) on the move. Laurence Lessard-​Phillips and Veronika Fajth discuss another challenge that is specific to researching superdiversity with quantitative methods—​multiplexity. Their chapter explores different uses of this term and how they translate into implementable modeling approaches. Rounding off these methodological reflections, Rosalyn Negrón takes us through various questions of how else we might innovate studies that implore superdiversity. Starting from the view that in many settings superdiversity is crucial to the social organization of difference (Vertovec 2021), she sets up a methodological framework focused on the study of complex social environments. Negrón proceeds by matching different aspects of such complexity with useful methods that are available to researchers but often have not yet been applied in research focused on superdiversity. Having previously noted the importance of spaces and scales as well as power and politics to making sense of superdiversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015), Parts III and IV take up those themes, respectively. The purpose of both sections is to situate superdiversity debates, formulate forward-​looking agendas, and engage with criticisms by testing how superdiversity can productively be combined with more critical perspectives than the notion might have originally been linked to. Collating innovation and concerns over spaces and scales, Part III starts with two chapters that are concerned with the intimate scale of domestic settings. Brenda Yeoh asks the reader to consider the politics of encounter in home spaces. Picking up a highly prevalent theme in the superdiversity literature—​the encounter—​she considers the situation of live-​in domestic workers in Singapore as revealing manifestations of multiple axes of power that play into configurations of diversity. Seen from this angle, she argues that the home-​ space can be conceptualized as a site of struggle that requires more intense consideration in moving debates about superdiversity forward. Paolo Boccagni approaches the home from a more processual vantage point with a chapter concerned with practices of homemaking through a superdiversity lens. He notes that focusing on homemaking in public spaces acts as a metaphor for analyzing different normative understandings of superdiverse spaces. The chapter by Elif Keskiner, Maurice Crul, Ismintha Waldring, Talitha Stam, and Frans Lelie explores educational spaces. Those authors point to prevailing mono-​ dimensional approaches to school disadvantage, calling for a greater appreciation

Introduction   9 of the complexity of backgrounds of their students as an enrichment. The three remaining chapters in Part III consider different cognitive and spatial manifestations of superdiversity from multiscalar perspectives. Raúl Acosta argues that thinking through superdiversity in the context of Mexican cities fundamentally challenges how diversity is often conceptualized in other contexts—​instead of overt focus on processes of difference-​making, social actors more often emphasize sameness within the notion of “Mexicanness.” Grounded in diverse city-​spaces in Asia, specifically Singapore and Dubai, Laavanya Kathiravelu’s chapter argues that superdiversity can help to interrogate key empirical and political questions around stratification, inequality, xenophobia, and rising ethnonationalism. However, it is less able to speak to issues of domination and entrenched structural racism. Global cities are also the focus of Sakura Yamamura’s chapter, which demonstrates how local urban transformation is connected to the global phenomenon of societal superdiversity. It calls for further analysis of the contexts of superdiversity at different scales to clarify the diversifications happening in these cities in different socioeconomic classes of transnational migration. Even though questions of politics and power are difficult to tease apart from questions of space and scale, the chapters in Part IV focus intently on the former. Thinking about superdiversity in light of the increasing precarization of migrants and other marginalized urban dwellers, Junjia Ye examines the coproduction of precarity and diversification in the context of migration management in Singapore. Ye looks at measures introduced during the Covid-​19 pandemic. Dirk Geldof argues that a superdiversity lens can serve as a tool for moving beyond polarizing identity politics and identity reductionism by recognizing multiple identities. Steve Garner, focusing on the interplay of superdiversity and whiteness, uses a critical approach to propose innovative ways to broach gaps and jointly move the relevant fields of race and superdiversity forward. He thus sheds light on how to move beyond some of the criticisms of superdiversity. Peter Scholten’s chapter proposes a complexity perspective on the governance of superdiversity. He argues that failing to come to terms with complexity is one of the reasons why migration policies seem to derail so often. To conclude Part IV, Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane take as a starting point the fact that the political geographies of the pro-​EU vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum often overlapped with geographies of superdiversity and discuss the extent to which the Brexit project—​understood as a form of defensive English nationalism—​is unsettled and challenged by the lived experience of superdiversity. This suggests the prospect of a counternarrative that highlights the possibility of a politics of hope. Part V engages with emergent research themes that are bound to gain traction in the coming years and decades. It includes innovative case studies that enhance the reader’s appreciation of the relevance of superdiversity and complex transformation in different research settings and extend the global reach of the handbook. Thomas Hylland Eriksen opens with a thought-​provoking reflection on the nexus between the diversification of diversity and the process of “overheating” consisting in a series of unintended, and interrelated, consequences triggered by global neoliberal deregulation, global

10    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec population growth, and technological developments that render communication instantaneous and transportation inexpensive. Amanda Wise situates superdiversity as an enriching paradigm for the concept of everyday multiculturalism and argues that the wider economic and institutional forces that underpin temporariness as an increasingly typical mode of migrant existence profoundly shape opportunity structures for convivial encounter, social relations, and the formation of communities-​in-​difference. Julija Sardillic’s chapter offers a novel perspective on the binary citizenship and statelessness, considering a range of factors that can contribute to the dissociation of citizenship from rights, as well as to the association of some rights to those who are stateless. AbdouMaliq Simone shows that looking toward southern cities can expand our vocabulary for tracing and processes of differentiation as continuously being reconfigured in light of the creation of territories of operation. Paul Spoonley then pertinently addresses significant issues surrounding the diversification of diversity in settler societies, like Aotearoa/​New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. Tackling some of the discontent with superdiversity, Spoonley suggests that the concept can be—​and has been—​expanded to address contexts marked by historical processes of colonization, white hegemony, and the marginalization of indigenous communities and nations. Adding to such contexts, more recent large-​scale migrations in these societies have created unique patterns of superdiversity and structural inequality. A superdiversity approach, he says, must include the coproduction of conceptual frameworks and policy options together with Indigenous scholars and communities. A final chapter written by the editors speaks to gaps in the present collection and the future of superdiversity and complex transformations.

References Amelina, Anna, Kenneth Horvath, and Bruno Meeus. 2016. “Migration and Social Transformation: Interdisciplinary Insights and European Perspectives.” In An Anthology of Migration and Social Transformation, edited by A. Amelina et al., 1–​17. Cham: Springer. Black, Richard, Stephen R. G. Bennett, Sandy M. Thomas, and John R. Beddington. 2011. “Migration as Adaptation.” Nature 478: 447–​449. https://doi.org/10.1038/478477a. Byrne, David. 1998. Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge. Castles, Stephen. 2001. “Studying Social Transformation.” International Political Science Review 22: 13–​32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512101221002. Castles, Stephen. 2010. “Understanding Global Migration: A Social Transformation Perspective.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36: 1565–​1586. https://doi.org/10.1080 /1369183X.2010.489381 Douzinas, Costas. 2007. Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gonzales, Roberto G., and Nando Sigona. 2017. “Mapping the Soft Borders of Membership.” In Within and beyond Citizenship: Borders, Membership and Belonging, edited by Roberto G. Gonzales and Nando Sigona, 1–​25. London: Routledge.

Introduction   11 Hall, Suzanne M. 2017. “Mooring ‘Super-​diversity’ to a Brutal Migration Milieu.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (9): 1562–​1573. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2017.1300​296. Ignatieff, Michael. 2001. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. International Organization for Migration. 2021. World Migration Report 2022. Geneva. https://​publi​cati​ons.iom.int/​books/​world-​migrat​ion-​rep​ort-​2022. Accessed February 2, 2022. Jones, James M., and John F. Dovidio. 2018. “Change, Challenge, and Prospects for a Diversity Paradigm in Social Psychology.” Social Issues and Policy Review 12 (1): 7–​56. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12039. Jörg, Ton. 2011. New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Dordrecht: Springer. López Peláez, Antonio, Pablo Álvarez-​Pérez, and Victor W. Harris. 2021. “Superdiversity: New Paths for Social Sciences in the Upcoming Future.” Current Sociology 70 (2): 161–​165. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​001139​2121​1021​934. Magazzini, Tina. 2017. “Making the Most of Super-​diversity: Notes on the Potential of a New Approach.” Policy & Politics 45 (4): 527–​545. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1332/​03055​7317​X149​7281​9300​753. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Power Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures, edited by John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner, 59–​69. London: Routledge. McCall, Leslie. 2001. Complex Inequality: Gender, Class and Race in the New Economy. New York: Routledge. Meissner, Fran. 2019. “Of Straw Figures and Multi-​stakeholder Monitoring: A Response to Willem Schinkel.” Comparative Migration Studies 7 (1): 1452. https://​doi.org/​10.1186/​s40​878 -​019-​0121-​y. Meissner, Fran, and Steven Vertovec. 2015. “Comparing Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–​555. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2015.980​295. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011. “The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles.” In The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, edited by Vicki Squire, 121–​142. London: Routledge. Page, Scott E. 2015. “What Sociologists Should Know about Complexity.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 21–​41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112230. Pentland, Alex. 2014. Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread; the Lessons from a New Science. Melbourne, AUS: Scribe. Rosenau, James N. 2003. Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smelser, Neil J. 1998. “Social Transformations and Social Change.” International Social Science Journal 156: 173–​178. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2451.00121. Stewart, Peter. 2001. “Complexity Theories, Social Theory and the Question of Social Complexity.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 31: 323–​360. https://doi.org/10.1177/004839310103100303. Urry, John. 2003. Global Complexity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30: 1024–​1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465. Vertovec, Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42: 125–​139. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1406128. Vertovec, Steven. 2021. “The Social Organization of Difference.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44: 1273–​1295. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1884733.

12    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec Walby, Sahra. 2007. “Complexity Theory, Systems Theory, and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37: 449–​ 470. https://doi.org /10.1177/0048393107307663. Walby, Sarah. 2009. Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities. London: SAGE. Wiltshire, Kenneth. 2001. “Management of Social Transformations: Introduction.” International Political Science Review 22 (1): 5–​11. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512101221001.

Pa rt I

DI S C I P L I NA RY DE V E L OP M E N T S

Chapter 1

Anthrop ol o g i c a l Perspecti v e s on Su perdive rsi t y Complexity, Difference, Sameness, and Mixing Mette Louise Berg

Introduction: Situating Superdiversity within Anthropology Throughout its history, anthropology has been interested in questions of the particular versus the universal. Anthropologists have documented the many different ways that people have organized themselves and made sense of the world, exploring and documenting human diversity, as well as “what it is that all humans have in common” (Eriksen 2017, 3). Diversity itself, however, was rarely a subject of research in the discipline; in the early to mid-​twentieth century, anthropology was dominated by the functionalist paradigm and was primarily focused on small, supposedly homogeneous cultures and societies, and preoccupied by concerns around cultural purity and authenticity. Yet even classic functionalist studies, such as Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961; first published 1922) about the kula ring captured circulation, mobility, and mixing. After Steve Vertovec coined the term superdiversity in an article in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the mid-​2000s (Vertovec 2007), it quickly gained traction across a number of fields, and has been applied to a very wide range of situations and places around the world (Vertovec 2017). The term can be seen as growing out of a long-​standing, but minority lineage of anthropological work on urbanization, pluralism, cultural complexity, and creolization. Superdiversity also has resonances with intersectionality and feminist anthropology in its concern with the complex interactions between markers of identity

16   Mette Louise Berg and difference, although this relationship remains somewhat underdeveloped (see Berg and Sigona 2013). Given anthropology’s foundational interest in human social and cultural diversity and the fact that a leading anthropologist of transnationalism had coined the term, it is perhaps surprising that major Anglophone anthropology journals have published hardly any work on superdiversity, not even critiques of it. In fact, they have barely afforded the concept recognition or acknowledgment.1 By comparison, sociologists have engaged with the concept much more extensively.2 But it is within the interdisciplinary field of migration studies3 that there has been most comprehensive engagement with the concept (see also, Vertovec 2017). Vertovec’s 2007 article remains the most-​cited article in Ethnic and Racial Studies,4 and the journal included superdiversity among the themes it selected for special discussion in its fortieth anniversary issue in 2017. Why has anthropology been so reluctant to engage with the concept, even though much of the writing on superdiversity has been by anthropologists? This is the first question this chapter seeks to elucidate, drawing principally, but not exclusively, on work by anthropologists who are based in the United Kingdom. I first situate superdiversity within the history of work on migration that has been done in anthropology, specifically, on the Caribbean. I then compare superdiversity with the trajectories of transnationalism and multiculture, two concepts that are semantically proximate. Transnationalism, like superdiversity, is a concept that was introduced and developed by anthropologists and had a transformative impact on the field of migration studies. Multiculture is in some ways semantically closer to superdiversity, yet it grew out of a different intellectual lineage and in the United Kingdom is closely related to critical race studies. From this contextualization and comparison, I discuss the challenges that superdiversity poses to anthropology, and then offer some reflections and suggestions about the potential for a dialogue between superdiversity and anthropology, including how critical anthropological work can contribute to refining the concept.

Superdiversity, Transnationalism, Multiculture One way of understanding anthropology’s reluctance to engage with superdiversity is to ask whether superdiversity has fared differently compared to semantically related earlier concepts, such as migration, transnationalism, and multiculture. Throughout the early and mid-​twentieth century, migration was never central to anthropology in the same way that it was to sociology (especially in the United States). Migration was an important feature of many of the societies anthropologists studied, but the discipline’s functionalist orientation and reluctance to grapple with social change and the complexity of societies meant that research on migration was relegated to the periphery of the discipline (Brettell 2000).

Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity    17 The Caribbean provides a telling example. The region is characterized by complex, historically embedded patterns of transnational and regional mobility and migration, including the violence of colonialism and forced migration via transnational slavery, early modernity, and incorporation into capitalist world markets (Mintz 1996; Olwig 1997, 20). The history and heterogeneity of Caribbean societies and their inescapable colonial nature meant that anthropologists could not rely on the dominant tropes of sedentariness and precontact authenticity of early and mid-​twentieth century functionalist anthropology (Trouillot 1992, 22). As a result, the region was marginalized within the discipline.5 However, the very same features made the Caribbean a perfect location for studying migration, diasporic identities, transnationalism, and creolization, which came to the fore beginning in the 1990s. The last of these terms, creolization, in fact originates in scholarship on the Caribbean (Mintz 1996, 300). A number of the pioneering scholars in the anthropology of migration started out as students of the Caribbean, including Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Nancy Foner, Nina Glick-​Schiller, Karen Fog Olwig, and Steve Vertovec.6 Work in and on the region had long grappled with these issues. An example is the Jamaican anthropologist M. G. Smith (1965), who described Caribbean societies as “plural.” The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz introduced the concept of transculturation in the 1940s in his major work Cuban Counterpoint (Ortiz 1940, 1995 [new edition in English]). It represented a sophisticated and nuanced attempt to grapple with social and cultural change in a society forged by transnational migration and characterized by diversity (Berg 2010). Yet, despite a prompt translation into English and early recognition, including an endorsement by Malinowski, Ortiz’s concept and work were quickly forgotten about in Anglophone anthropology (Coronil 2005). Still, transculturation could be seen as a subliminal lineage for both multiculture and superdiversity (see, e.g., Rhys-​Taylor 2013).

Race and Multiculture Like migration, race, racism, and urban multiculture were considered inappropriate or unsuitable topics for anthropological research and, accordingly, were marginalized during the discipline’s long functionalist phase. Anthropologists who did work on race tended to have a background in field research in former British colonies, and they approached the issue from an ethnicity or “race relations” perspective that is seen as neocolonial by later generations of scholars and activists (Alexander 2004, 136–​137). In studies of migrant groups in the United Kingdom, anthropological accounts tended to focus on the “culture” and “tribal features” of South Asian migration (Alexander 2018, 1039). In the 1980s, several pioneering anthropologists of race and multiculture who wanted to avoid these pitfalls found their homes outside the discipline, in sociology and, later, in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of migration studies. Les Back’s (1996) pioneering ethnographic study of urban multiculture and racism among young people in south London, based on research for his anthropology PhD, is a telling example. The book has become a landmark publication in the sociology of race and racism, and it

18   Mette Louise Berg was the subject of a conference in 2016 that marked the twentieth anniversary of its publication.7 It has been much less read within anthropology. An interesting contrast is Gerd Baumann’s (1996) Contesting Culture, based on fieldwork in a multiethnic and multicultural London suburb and published in the same year. Both Baumann and Back were critical of exoticizing and culturalist accounts of urban multiculture, but Baumann had done prior fieldwork in Africa and had linked his work to classic Africanist ethnographies; his book remains widely read in anthropology. Meanwhile, following the focus of his doctoral research, Back “couldn’t get a job in anthropology,” and says he had “no alternative but to leave the discipline in the 80s” although he “felt a strong link to anthropology” (pers. comm., September 2020). He went on to have a distinguished career in sociology. In the United States, some anthropologists of migration also found their intellectual home in sociology, where migration was a more mainstream issue (Nancy Foner, pers. comm., August 2021). The wider UK context for the discipline in the 1980s was a tough funding climate, a government that was hostile to the social sciences, and a belief by some that migration was not going to be an important issue. Anthropology remained an elite discipline, linked with colonialism, and centered in Oxford and Cambridge and the London School of Economics (Mills and Berg 2010). The discipline also remained reluctant to engage with urban, working-​class, and popular culture in the United Kingdom (Degnen and Tyler 2017; Leach 1984). As a result, in the United Kingdom, studies of race and multiculturalism developed separately from studies of migration and ethnicity (Alexander 2004, 137), with different intellectual genealogies, and institutional and disciplinary homes—​that is, mainly outside the Oxford-​Cambridge-​LSE circuit that so defined anthropology, and in cultural studies and sociology departments rather than anthropology. One could argue that the emergence of cultural studies was partly a function of anthropology’s colonial legacy, exclusionary elitism, and reluctance to engage with migration, multiculture, race, and working-​class culture.8

Transnationalism Things began to change during the 1990s, when anthropology engaged in important and necessary work on deterritorialization, flows, cultural fluidity, and mixing (Hannerz 1987, 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997a). This led to pioneering work on migrant transnationalism (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-​Szanton 1992; Rouse 1991), growing out of grounded ethnographic engagement in “migrant sending” areas, including the Caribbean, and on diasporic groups (Clifford 1994). This work greatly contributed to our understanding of migrant experiences, and helped counter the sedentarist bias (Malkki 1995), methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), and essentializing holism (Candea 2007) of anthropology. Literature on transnationalism and diasporas gave scholars the conceptual tools to describe and analyze migrant practices that had previously gone unacknowledged. It challenged sociological staples, notably assimilation, as

Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity    19 well as long-​held anthropological ideas about the isomorphism of culture-​people-​place, and led to a virtual explosion of innovative and creative anthropological and ethnographic work and a questioning of the foundations of ethnography (Coleman and Hellermann 2009; Falzon 2009). Yet the idea of ethnic communities remained intact (Glick Schiller, Caglar, and Guldbrandsen 2006, 613). Transnationalism literature was also, on the whole, weakly grounded in societies of settlement and had relatively thin accounts of interethnic relations in either the “home” or the “host” societies (Berg and Sigona 2013, 354). As mainstream sociology took up the concept of transnationalism, its grounding in political economy and structures of racism and discrimination waned, while the more celebratory aspects that foregrounded migrant agency were retained, diminishing the concept’s critical edge. From this work arose questions around how transnational engagement and “integration” related to each other, as well as an appreciation of the continued importance of space and place. These late twentieth-​century intellectual developments provided the ground for the neighborhood turn that superdiversity is part of. Transnationalism was a new term for a long-​standing social phenomenon that migration scholars had not previously noted because of their theoretical and conceptual bias toward sedentariness (Foner 1997). By contrast, superdiversity was presented as a new term for a new twenty-​first-​century phenomenon, although diversity in such cities as New York, for example, was also considerable in the early twentieth century (Foner 2017). Careful historiographical work may uncover further historical precedents (see also Schrover, this volume). Against this brief sketch of both recognized and non-​ canonical lineages of superdiversity and semantically related concepts, I now look at how superdiversity challenges anthropology.

How Superdiversity Challenges Anthropology Transnationalism left largely unexplored the experiences of conviviality and everyday encounters with diversity and difference that are commonplace in urban spaces in the twenty-​first century. It effectively limited itself to examining transnational “corridors” of engagement between migrants and their places of origin. Superdiversity, by contrast, changed the lens to a focus on assemblages of characteristics in urban social spaces and the related spatial dimensions of the politics of difference (Berg and Sigona 2013, 348). As such, the diversity turn in scholarship has provoked a return to studies of neighborhoods (Berg and Sigona 2013, 349), a staple of both sociology and urban anthropology traditions, which had been out of fashion because of their “groupism” (Brubaker 2002) and lack of attention to extralocal and transnational connections and mobilities. Early studies of ethnically diverse neighborhoods, such as Baumann’s (1996) ethnography of Southall in London, do not encompass any discussion or recognition of the

20   Mette Louise Berg connections that Southallians maintain beyond Southall. Such ties and connections would surely have existed and made themselves felt during Baumann’s fieldwork—​for example, for Sikhs in Southall—​his fieldwork took place during a period of intense conflict in Punjab, but such connections fell outside his scope. Brian Keith Axel’s (2001) monograph on the Sikh diaspora, published only five years later, gave a radically different account of Southall seen through a diasporic and transnational lens. Susanne Wessendorf ’s (2014) monograph on Hackney, also in London, one of the first full-​length monographs written within a superdiversity framework, gives a textured account of diversity in Hackney, but does not trace translocal or transnational connections (see also Hylland Eriksen, this volume). Studying diverse neighborhoods clearly presents anthropologists with profound epistemological and methodological challenges—​ namely, how to ensure that the insights from transnationalism are interwoven with a diversity focus in specific spaces and areas, so that translocal and transnational connections and relations and their importance in people’s lives are not overlooked. Additionally, in superdiverse settings, not only may residents be transnationally connected and mobile; such areas are also often characterized by high degrees of churn and transience, as well as multiple languages, fragmentation, and stratification (see also Berg 2018; Palmberger, this volume]. Conventionally, anthropological fieldwork has been conducted by single ethnographers who embed themselves in a bounded community. This ideal is difficult enough to honor in conventional settings; even small-​scale settled communities are marked by stratifications of gender, age, and other divisions, but in superdiverse settings, it seems impossible, even on the practical level (how many languages would be “enough”?). How do we identify the “locals” in areas of high churn, street homelessness, and high levels of census and service provider “invisibility”? (McIlwaine, Cock, and Linneker 2011; Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019). Put differently, how can we produce textured accounts that are both locally grounded and translocally attuned, open to and appreciative of the existence and importance of the transnational and diasporic practices and relations of urban residents (Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019; Gidley 2013; Galipo 2019). In superdiverse areas, “parallel perspectives, often utterly incommensurate, multiply,” (Gidley 2013, 368) and “multiple scales of difference and belonging” (Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019, 7–​8), including transnational and diasporic networks, make notions of bounded field sites inadequate, and hence challenge the central core of anthropology’s claim to knowledge. I note that these are not new challenges; questions of the local versus the global and how to bound the ethnographic field resonate throughout the discipline’s history and have contributed to its development and to enriching and enlarging our understanding of the diversity of human lifeworlds. An approach to superdiversity that is simultaneously attentive to local encounters and translocal connections would not only lead to richer, more layered accounts, but would also elucidate the significance and impact of diasporic and transnational connections for local relations and dynamics in superdiverse neighborhoods, and vice versa. New ethnographic approaches are needed for this to happen (see also Wessendorf, this volume).

Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity    21 One way forward is through collaborative, participatory, and team-​ based ethnographies, which not only have the potential to enrich and nuance depictions of local areas, but can also help to decolonize ethnography (Alonso Bejarano et al. 2019) and diversify the voices and perspectives of anthropology (Back and Sinha 2018). On the note of decolonizing, ethnographic exploration that goes beyond the usual global cities, with a deeper historical contextualization—​that is, accounts of superdiversity with different histories and genealogies—​could also helpfully reflect on the existing ethnographic record and suggest new questions for exploration. Anthropologists are well-​placed to contribute comparative perspectives, including different ways of conceptualizing, understanding, and interpreting diversification processes in different contexts at different times (see also Vertovec 2015; Grillo, this volume). Having considered the challenges that superdiversity poses to anthropology, I now consider potential areas for fruitful and mutually enriching dialogue between anthropology and the study of superdiversity.

Reflections and Proposals for a Dialogue between Superdiversity and Anthropology With its sheer multiplication of axes of difference, including not just ethnicity and country of origin, but also immigration status, labor market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and service-​provider responses (Vertovec 2007, 1025), superdiversity has unleashed a range of innovative work that examines the complex diversification of difference in urban areas. This includes work that seeks to count and enumerate differences and construct typologies (see, e.g., Poppleton et al. 2013). Anthropologists are more likely to ask questions about the social texture, subjective experiences, everyday practices and interactions, and cross-​cutting relationships that superdiversity engenders. Superdiversity helpfully sharpens the ethnographic lens on assemblages of characteristics and their complex interactions and entanglements, but it is less helpful in capturing context, social texture, and relations. For this, the concepts of multiculture and multiculturalism (Hall 1999) and conviviality (Gilroy 2004), each with its own distinctive intellectual lineage, contribute different dimensions of sociocultural complexity. These concepts have grown out of critical traditions addressing power, racism, and racialization, which critics have found wanting in superdiversity (De Noronha 2019; Alexander 2018; Back 2015). Writing in 2021, and in light of events in 2020, which exposed the deadly consequences of racism in the form of higher Covid-​19 morbidity and mortality rates for Black and minority ethnic groups in both the United Kingdom and the United States (Sze et al. 2020), complex, mutually interacting links between existing inequalities, deprivation, Covid-​19 (Bambra et al. 2020), and anti-​Black police brutality, this critical tradition is more important than ever.

22   Mette Louise Berg In particular, we need to “moor superdiversity” to a “brutal migration milieu” to use Hall’s (2017) evocative phrase. As work on “the hostile environment” for migrants in the United Kingdom has shown, a central characteristic of today’s migration and bordering policies is the proliferation of migration statuses and channels, sorting migrants according to a racialized logic, with profound effects on livelihoods, labor market integration, and everyday lives (Jones et al. 2017). The complexification and concomitant stratified access to services creates inequities and exclusions, even within families; for example, siblings may have different immigration statuses, and children may have access to some welfare services (e.g., schooling) even when their parents are excluded (Benchekroun 2021). An important point here is that externalization policies and other bureaucratic and legal sorting processes produce characteristics and contours of superdiversity that have ramifications even before people start their migratory journeys. As Fiddian-​Qasmiyeh and Berg (2018) have noted, “Changing dynamics across social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental realms have influenced processes of migration and (im)mobility around the world in different ways, including by facilitating, forcing, preventing, normalizing, criminalizing, and securitizing the movement of diverse people and objects.” Early work in the anthropology of migration focused on processes of articulation “between the place whence a migrant originates and the place or places to which he or she goes” (Brettell 2000, 98). Systematically bringing this perspective to bear on diversification and channeling in the migration process and in superdiverse localities could lead to new, more expansive understandings of the differences that make a difference. This would include engaging with important work on the anthropology of deportation (De Genova and Peutz 2010; De Genova 2002; De Noronha 2020) and how deportability (De Genova 2002) is an especially violent and brutal form of differentiation and interacts in complex ways with other forms of differentiation. As in the case of the relationship between superdiversity and transnationalism, it seems more productive to think in terms of both and (superdiversity and transnationalism and deportability) rather than either or, and to recognize the complex mutual interplay and interactions between differentiating factors.

Acknowledgments I am profoundly grateful for the constructive comments and critique on draft versions of this chapter from Nando Sigona and Steve Vertovec. I also gratefully acknowledge the stimulating conversations and intellectual generosity of Claire Alexander, Les Back, and Nancy Foner. Finally, many thanks for editorial assistance to Chris Kofri.

Notes 1. I searched under the spellings “super-​diversity” and “superdiversity” to appear anytime between 2006 and 2021 in the following journals: American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, City & Society, Cultural Anthropology (all published by the American

Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity    23 Anthropological Association); Anthropology Today and JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute), Social Anthropology (published by the European Association of Social Anthropologists); HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Current Anthropology; and Critique of Anthropology. The highest number of mentions in any one of these journals was five, and several had no mentions or did not refer to Vertovec’s original article or any other scholarly publications about the term. Linguistic anthropology is the subdiscipline that has done most work to address this, but it has informed mainstream anthropology in a limited way. A discussion of why this is so, however, is not possible in this chapter. 2. I searched the Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, and Sociology. 3. In order of mentions from low to high: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Journal of Multilingualism, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Identities. 4. See the ongoing tally in Ethnic and Racial Studies, “Most Cited Articles,” https://​www .tand​fonl​ine.com/​act​ion/​showMo​stCi​tedA​rtic​les?jour​nalC​ode=​rer​s20, accessed July 10, 2021. 5. Apart from the ambiguities the Caribbean has presented in terms of fitting in to the disciplines of Western academia—​not quite White enough to fall within sociology, but not quite native enough to fit into anthropology either (Trouillot 1992, 20)—​the region was not geostrategically important enough to attract funding from major funding agencies (for the US, see Gupta and Ferguson 1997b, 9). See also Berg (2010). 6. Vertovec also cites work on pluralism in African societies as an inspiration for his thinking on superdiversity (2007, 1026). 7. See https://​newurb​anmu​ltic​ultu​res.wordpr​ess.com/​. 8. See Leach (1984) for a discussion of class as unmentionable in British social anthropology. See Back and Tate (2015) and Alexander (2004) for discussions of sociology as a segregated discipline and White sociologists’ reluctance to work on race and racism.

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24   Mette Louise Berg

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Chapter 2

Mapping Su perdi v e rsi t y A Geographical Exploration of a Relational Global Condition Katherine Stansfeld

Introduction In his pivotal essay “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault (1986, 22) recognized that “we are in the epoch of simultaneity: . . . of juxtaposition, . . . of the near and far, of the side-​by-​side, of the dispersed.” Foucault draws attention to the current era as one of spatial complexity. Reflecting this condition, there has been a wider “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities and, more recently, an increasing focus on the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller and Urry 2006). Thinkers including but not limited to Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Ash Amin, Teresa Caldeira, Mimi Sheller, and AbdouMaliq Simone have in different ways instantiated the role of space for analyzing contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. Consequently, social theory focused primarily on temporality, trends, and change has shifted to provide more nuanced accounts of the ways space and time are entangled (Massey 2005). This shift has been reflected in debates on globalization, which increasingly point to the relations, conflicts, and inequalities that “time-​space compression” (Harvey 1990) has caused (Eriksen 2016). It is in this context of spatial complexity and accelerated change that the concept of superdiversity has arisen (see Eriksen, this volume). Blommaert (2013, 6) argued that superdiversity is “driven by 3 keywords: mobility, complexity and unpredictability” that are related to forces of global migration and the diversification of urban demographics. The concept emerged in relation to London, a postcolonial, increasingly diversifying metropolis where living with difference is an ordinary feature of urban life (Gilroy 2004). Yet, as Vertovec (2017) has noted, it has been applied to cities across the Global North and, increasingly, in the Global South in order to appreciate the complexity of heightened mobility and plurality.

28   Katherine Stansfeld I approach the concept of superdiversity from a geographical perspective, arguing that the condition of superdiversity is inherently spatial, implying a “co-​existing heterogeneity” (Massey 2005) and “situated multiplicity” (Amin 2008, 8). Attention to this spatial approach widens the superdiversity lens, which is critical for researching the challenges complexity brings, in particular, in considering the multidimensionality of inclusion, everyday equality, conviviality, and belonging. I argue that within a wider focus on mobilities, scales, and relations, it is important to pair superdiversity with other geographical and social concepts that facilitate recognition of “uneven (im)mobilities across multiple scales at once” (Sheller 2018, 2). The chapter situates superdiversity within a wider geographical field that reconfigures the notion of spatial scales through a relational and networked approach. This approach means situating superdiversity within a global experience of mobility and “accelerated and intensified contact” (Eriksen 2016, 16). In this way, a superdiversity lens can recognize translocal relations and may increasingly have relevance and lived and affective implications in different kinds of localities across the globe. This chapter explores this spatial approach to superdiversity and its lived implications. It begins by asking the fundamental question of what superdiversity refers to, reflecting on the concerns of scales and taxonomies of superdiversity. The three main sections, themed along different spatial scales, attempt to answer this question. The first section considers how space-​time and “multiplicity” (Massey 2005) implicate both the mobile and the immobile in a global condition that superdiversity as a concept responds to. The second section moves from the global to question the extent to which superdiversity is an urban condition, engaging with debates on transnational urbanism, glocalization, and relational urban ontologies (Roudometof 2015; Thrift 2004; Amin 2007). The final section explores superdiversity as a local experience, drawing attention to the neighborhood as a translocal site, or as “folded space” (Stansfeld 2019). I argue that the neighborhood has rightly received much empirical attention in research on superdiversity, as it enables an attunement to the reality of multiple overlapping geographies in everyday life. Turning to the lived experience of this relational condition, I examine how superdiversity, by going beyond conceptual approaches, has an important political dimension in drawing attention to intersecting factors, identities, and oppressions that compound inequality. However, I note that, as critics have argued, the concept does not analytically address the tensions around inequality and conflict that it draws attention to. Followingly, I draw together a set of interrelated concepts, including power-​ geometries, conviviality, and affective atmospheres, to highlight how geographically uneven relations of power mean that superdiverse urban spaces are differentially experienced, yet mediated and shared by wider structural forces and discourses. This geographical approach can be useful for the study of superdiversity because it spotlights important analytical tools that can be used “to explore the fragile, changing and diverse local configurations of diversity” (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014, 353) and the sociospatial peculiarities of living with difference. The chapter ultimately argues that understanding superdiversity as a spatial concept that is a response to a relational global condition can help us to better discern the

Mapping Superdiversity   29 increasingly complex condition of our cities; and using it in tandem with other key geographical concepts can facilitate a nuanced understanding of the social and cultural complexities and inequalities of living together.

Scales of Superdiversity: Global, City, Neighborhood? Richard Sennett (1990, 123) famously suggested that urban dwellers are people always “in the presence of others.” Cities have long drawn attention for being sites of diverse experiences and stories. Indeed, superdiversity has largely been instantiated as an urban condition (Wessendorf 2014; Hall 2015; Pemberton and Phillimore 2018). In a report for the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), Rachel Humphris (2015, 1) noted a propensity to utilize superdiversity “in urban contexts, and in particular, in global metropolises.” The report records a roundtable discussion between scholars on the difference between superdiversity and intersectionality. Despite the urban focus, the scholars discuss a desire with both concepts “to link the everyday with macro global processes” considering the need to develop “a more complex understanding of social inequalities to wider transformations in society” (3). Doreen Massey effectively uses a spatial approach to draw attention to the ways (urban) places are connected and relationally produced within a wider global system. Her argument is that “in a relational understanding of neoliberal globalization ‘places’ are criss-crossings in the wider powergeometries that constitute both themselves and ‘the global’ ” (2005, 101). Sheller (2018, 1–​2) develops this spatial approach by noting that “scale is a social construction . . . and movement is precisely that which makes and remakes space-​time and entangles different scales.” This multi-scalar and relational approach widens the focus beyond cities and responds to heightened complexity, and mobility (Berg, this volume; Eriksen this volume). Consequently, new analytical tools are needed to interrogate “social dynamics and configurations at neighbourhood, city, national and global levels” (Vertovec 2017, 11). This gives rise to the question of what exactly superdiversity refers to. Nando Sigona asks, “What or who is superdiverse? Is it a neighbourhood, a city, a region, a state, an individual, a community, or society?” (quoted in Humphris 2015, 5). I draw on Massey’s (2005) three key propositions of space as relational, multiple, and provisional to explore superdiversity at the global, urban, and neighborhood scales. I address the ways in which these different scales are connected and relational by engaging with debates in human geography on mobilities, transnational urbanism (Smith 2001), “glocalization,” translocality (Brickell and Datta 2011; Oakes and Schein 2006; McFarlane 2009), connectivity (Thrift 2004), and relationality (Amin 2007). Although superdiversity has empirical relevance as an urban concept, I argue that understanding space as relational implicates all these different spatial scales in a wider global condition. To better answer Sigona’s question, I explore how the neighborhood as a site of ordinary complex spatiality brings these scales together through a topological understanding of space (Amin 2007), and thus studies of superdiversity can be enriched with this lens on how multiple spatial scales, from the global to the home, manifest in everyday life.

30   Katherine Stansfeld

Responding to a Global Condition: From Mobility to Multiplicity The concept of superdiversity emerged in response to shifts in migration and settlement patterns in the United Kingdom, but it has since been used to pay attention to the implications and dynamics of new demographics and communities that are moving to and making homes in cities across the globe (Vertovec 2017, 3). Different and variegated forms of movement have created the conditions of superdiversity, which entail “multidimensional . . . categories, shifting configurations and new social structures” (Vertovec 2017, 8). These forms of mobility have been more than corporeal; besides the 700 million bodies arriving in new places each year (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207), “new forms of ‘virtual’ and ‘imaginative’ travel are emerging, and being combined in unexpected ways with physical travel.” Accordingly, it is not just people who are moving; objects, ideas, and communications are also in motion (Urry 2007), shaping our societies and spaces to the extent that “with digitalisation, mobility can be the defining mode even when subjects are stationary” (Varis 2017, 42). These multiple new forms of mobility are important because they are “at the centre of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life” (Cresswell 2011, 551). “Infrastructures of superdiversity” (Varis 2017) are formed “by the coming together of media, migration, mobility and the flow of capital” (Hegde 2005, 61). Yet this coming together unfolds unevenly, creating “new pervasive modes of mobilised social inclusion/​exclusion” (Sheller and Urry 2006, 222). To the extent that Sheller (2018, 1) has identified a “triple crisis” of climate change, urbanization, and migration “that all revolve around questions of mobility and immobility, and together they bring into focus the unjust power relations of uneven mobility.”

Mobilities: The Tourist to Vagabond Spectrum The concept of cosmopolitanism has drawn attention to role of individuals in these new patterns of mobility. Zygmund Bauman (1998) posited two definitive social types of the contemporary age: the “tourist” and the “vagabond.” The tourist—​“the citizen of the world”—​is able to move as she or he pleases across borders for business or travel; whereas the vagabond is forced to move by economic need, to flee danger, or to relocate after having been displaced. Jones and Jackson (2014) note: It is clear that the “citizenship” of these two types of “citizens of the world” is quite different; and where “cosmopolitan” is applied in its everyday sense, it would be to the elite “tourist” (and passport holder) and his privileged consumption of the world, and not to the “vagabond”—​or indeed to the non-​traveller who stays “in place” but

Mapping Superdiversity   31 may nonetheless, in our thinking, be considered cosmopolitan in her connections in and across the world. (1)

Although these types have been used in distinguishing the differential effects of mobility, Jones and Jackson (2014) draw attention to the nuances and complexities of these figures, highlighting the ways both those who move and those who “remain ‘in place’ . . . nevertheless experience the cosmopolitan” (1). Increasingly, these new forms of mobility have complex dialectical implications as constellations of power shift and change individuals’ positions along this tourist–​vagabond spectrum. Superdiversity provides a lens through which to address these complexities and the ways differentially positioned individuals are affected by mobility. Vertovec (2006, 17) intended the concept of superdiversity to go beyond a “simple ethnicity-​focused approach to understanding and engaging minority groups in Britain” to instead pay attention to the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. As Varis (2017, 26) argues, superdiversity highlights “the fact that the default mode of the world is perhaps ‘more diverse’ than expected.” The “dynamic interplay of variables” that Vertovec (2007) speaks of increasingly affects all members of a superdiverse population. Varis suggests that “scholars of superdiversity are trying to describe . . . [the] ambivalent ground, where it seems that common points of reference, connections, mobilities, and ideas of sharedness have become more unpredictable” (27).

Multiplicity and the Danger of A-​spatial Narratives of Superdiversity I argue that a spatial approach to superdiversity facilitates a recognition of these complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that affect both so-​called majority and minority populations. Massey (2005) draws attention to space “as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (9), highlighting space as the dimension of simultaneous difference. Massey draws on the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze to explore the role of time in space, recognizing that, though time is the dimension of succession, space, inversely, is the dimension of “simultaneity,” of different worlds and lives existing concurrently. Varis (2017, 29) picks up on the importance of recognizing the relationality of this simultaneous difference when examining “the superdiverse conjuncture.” She argues that we should not assume that there are “ ‘superdiverse spots’—​nations states; within nation-​ states; in institutions; in cities; in schools etc.—​to be found, which can be clearly cut off from the rest of the (‘non-​superdiverse’) world with a neat distinction between the two” (29). She goes on to discuss how the forces that have created superdiversity do not only shape the lives of migrants, highly mobile “tourists,” and residents of superdiverse neighborhoods, but also those whose lives are marked by the absence of mobility and diversity. The notion of the “multiplicity of space” points to how all these individuals are

32   Katherine Stansfeld simultaneously implicated as they experience (albeit in different ways) the same contemporary global condition created by mobilities and time-​space compression. Massey argues that space is always and already multiple and complex, yet this is contrary to many of the understandings and representations of it. It may seem useful to explain some spaces and scales as superdiverse and complex, and others as not. This, however, creates a false logic of space. Massey (2005) uses the notion of multiplicity to question dominant narratives of space, focusing on the relevance of multiplicity on a global scale. She critiques the Western discourse that posits “globalisation as a historical queue” (11), where different countries around the world are “assumed to be following the same (‘our’) path of development” (82), yet some are behind or have not yet caught up. Massey suggests that such narratives are “a-​spatial” and present a single story of development and of globalization. They are problematic as “the trajectories of others can be immobilised while we proceed with our own; the real challenge of the contemporaneity of others can be deflected by their relegation to a past” (8). One trajectory is prioritized while others are ignored. Although Massey mainly directs this critique to the Western approach to globalization, it can also be applied on a smaller scale. Instead of seeing some places, cities, or neighborhoods as superdiverse and others as yet to be diversified, it may be more productive to focus on a wider relational condition that has given rise to superdiversity and the differential power relations and forces it highlights. As Massey notes, an a-​spatial approach “occludes present-​day relations and practices and their relentless production, within current rounds of capitalist globalisation, of increasing inequality” (82). In the next section I critically explore notions of “scales and taxonomies” of superdiversity by focusing on the relationality of space.

Superdiverse Urban Relational Space Massey’s approach to space enables a reconfiguration of the idea of separate and distinct spatial scales. As Henri Lefebvre (1991) has noted: The places of social space are very different from those of natural space in that they are not simply juxtaposed: they may be intercalated, combined, superimposed—​ they may even sometimes collide. Consequently, the local . . . does not disappear, for it is never absorbed by the regional, national or even worldwide level . . . The hypercomplexity of social space should now be apparent, embracing as it does individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements, and flows and waves—​some interpenetrating, others in conflict, and so on. (88)

This “hypercomplexity” of spaces can be understood today, in part, by the notion of “glocalization,” which refuses to cast global and local as binary oppositional scales but views them instead as mutually constitutive concepts presenting in each other. Roudometof (2015, 777) notes that “glocalization offers the means to bridge the divide between the

Mapping Superdiversity   33 space of flows and the space of places.” This approach has been developed by theorists such as Nigel Thrift (2004), who argues that we need to go beyond conceptualizing space as “a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’,” he argues instead we should focus on connectivity (59). Ash Amin’s work helps by addressing how these “new spatialities have become decisive for the constitution of place” (2007, 103). He seeks to reimagine the “urban social” “so that trans-​local influences and non-​human associations can be counted” within it (100). Consequently, we can appreciate that the result is no simple displacement of the local by the global, of place by space, of history by simultaneity and flow, of small by big scale, or of the proximate by the remote. Instead, it is a subtle folding together of the distant and the proximate, the virtual and the material, presence and absence, flow and stasis, into a single ontological plane upon which location—​a place on the map—​has come to be relationally and topologically defined. (103)

Here, then, a relational urban ontology reconfigures ideas of nested scales into a topological imagination of enfoldings. Distinctions between local and global may be deployed in this “folded space,” but they are hard to sustain. The ordinary and superdiverse spaces of the city bring together the global and the local and are thus relationally constituted, whether in a local sense of the neighborhood in relation to the city center (Pemberton 2020) or, as Suzanne Hall (2010) has demonstrated, in a global sense of the street to the multitude of localities around the world. Pemberton (2020) in his exploration of this relational constitution argues that “the emergence of superdiverse places . . . highlights how migratory practices are embodied territorially as well as being shaped relationally” (2). This relational approach facilitates, as Meissner (2016) suggests, “engaging with migration as decentralised rather than as exceptional” and that “by investigating how a multiplicity of differences are distributed in networks—​we can identify patterns that help us discuss varying and multidimensional saliences of diversity configurations” (16).

The Neighborhood Scale and Folded Space In recent years, there has been an attunement to and renewed empirical interest in the urban neighborhood. Scholars such as Suzanne Hall have begun to explore superdiversity using urban ethnography to move their anal­ysis between different spatial scales. This approach recognizes the challenge of multiple overlapping geographies for urban living. As Hall notes, “The capacity to engage in difference and change requires an ability to live with more than one spatial and temporal sense of a local place—​a ‘here’ as well as a ‘there’ ” (2012, 6). An investigation of the local as a scale of everyday practice can illuminate the implications of the process of living

34   Katherine Stansfeld with superdiversity across multiple spatial scales, as encapsulated in Massey’s (1994) work on Kilburn as a neighborhood of London with a “global sense of place.” Hall’s use of “trans-​ethnography” probes “across the compendium of micro, meso and macro urban spaces, without reifying one above the other” (2015, 22). She notes that these spaces, or scales, are “distinct and connected overlays of the city” (34). Through this, she instantiates this notion of “folded” superdiverse neighborhoods through empirical scholarship grounded in the everyday. She contends, in a paper coauthored with Datta (Hall and Datta 2010, 70), that “situatedness in migrants’ lives continues to be of crucial significance despite increased global mobility . . . [We require] a rethinking of local places as dynamic sites where transnational, translocal, and diasporic identities are expressed and explored.” This approach can avoid the “trap of methodological neighbourhoodism,” as Galipo argues: Migrant transnationalism informs modes of living together in localised urban spaces. The underlying premise is that a transnational perspective that looks at the mobility of people and their complex transnational networks will help us go beyond a lurking “methodological neighbourhoodism” (Berg et al. 2019) of the convivial turn. (Galipo 2019, 160)

Hall’s studies resonate with a wider body of scholarship on transnational and translocal urbanism from which the concept of superdiversity emerged. Smith (2001), writing from the perspective of work on transnationality and transnational communities (Vertovec 1999), explains that the concept of “transnational urbanism” captures, on the one hand, the transnational reach and connections of many urban sites and, on the other hand, the interactions many have with urban life even when their material practices occur in rural areas or small towns (5). Central to Smith’s account is the way transnational communities demonstrate agency through forming social, economic, and migratory circuits that span national borders, and that in part center on certain urban sites. The concept highlights the “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-​states” (Vertovec 1999, 447). Although the concept is useful for considering the constitution of urban neighborhoods, various feminists have critiqued transnationalism’s masculinist focus on “hypermobility.” Pratt and Yeoh (2003, 160) argue that it is important to “pay much closer attention to the particular and the concrete specificity of daily experience,” and Mahler (1999, 713) argues that there is a need to “push the transnational gaze deeper into the ‘stuff ’ of everyday life.” The concept of “translocality” draws “attention to multiplying forms of mobility . . . without losing sight of the importance of localities in peoples’ lives” (Oakes and Schein 2006, 1). It recognizes the interconnectedness of locales and sees place as open, enduring, and networked (Willis 2015; Varnelis and Friedburg 2008; Freudendal-​Pedersen and Kesselring 2018). The theory enables this interrogation of the city at different scales and considers how place and identity may be formed through and within social, cultural, political, and economic interrelations. Brickell and Datta (2011)

Mapping Superdiversity   35 elucidate “translocality as ‘groundedness’ during movement, including those everyday movements that are not necessarily transnational,” and are thus able to examine migration not only across other spaces and scales such as rural-​urban, inter-​urban and inter-​regional but also bringing into view the movements of those supposedly “immobile” groups who do not fall under the rubric of a transnational migrant but who negotiate different kinds of local-​local journeys (both real and imagined). (4)

Taking a relational or translocal lens can help us to appreciate the ways in which superdiversity results from movements of not only people but also places, which are connected and co-​constructed. This movement and enfolding of spatial scales is part of how superdiversity works in the urban realm, through the overlapping and multiple lives, trajectories, forms, and processes that are constitutive of urban space.

Power-​Geometries of Superdiversity: Social Differentiation beyond Intersectionality? This broader conceptual framing is particularly useful for considering how urban residents are subject to the power-​geometries (Massey 1993) of superdiversity and the social differentiation of time-​space compression, whether they have migrated or not. For Massey (1994), this power-​geometry indicates the way different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-​end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it. (149)

Superdiversity as a spatial concept concerned with mobility and the intersection of variables can provide a lens through which to attune to these power-​geometries. It can draw attention to how migration, settlement, and integration unfold differently along intersecting lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, socioeconomic status and class, religion, and legal status. It has the potential to emphasize the multidimensionality of integration as a process (Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018) to show that rather than a one-​way effort solely for immigrants to undertake, integration is a dynamic process for all members of communities, neighborhoods, and societies to engage in (Phillimore 2012; Klarenbeek 2019). It may also move us away from a focus on integration toward critical reflection on “convivial disintegration” as “a platform from which to acknowledge and critique power asymmetries in contexts of superdiversity” (Meissner and Heil 2020, 3).

36   Katherine Stansfeld Drawing on its background in mobilities and transnationalism, superdiversity can indicate how a Syrian asylum seeker stuck in temporary accommodations; a White, working-​class, British pensioner living in a bedsit; and an international student from Mexico struggling to survive on a zero-​hours contract all share the same urban space and are part of a wider condition of globalization and time-​space compression. The concept of power-​geometries paired with superdiversity can foster analysis of the differential experiences of these individuals and how they all relate to a wider system of global neoliberal capitalism. The concept of superdiversity has the potential to move beyond debates on multiculturalism and interculturalism (Mansouri and Modood 2020) by shifting the lens, from a narrow focus on ethnicity to one that can integrate analyses of labor-market relations; citizenship and legal rights; access to housing; gender; age dynamics; socioeconomic status and class; race and racism; and ethnoreligious difference into debates about diversity and pluralism (Vertovec 2007). An intersectional approach to social differentiation shifts the focus of the debates away from majority-​minority relations to more nuanced analysis of the “geographically uneven relations of power that give institutions, communities, and individuals different kinds and degrees of human agency—​even within the same place” (Castree, Kitchin, and Rogers 2013). Yet superdiversity research and discourse have not been known for a focus on power relations. As Vertovec (2017) recognizes, in the past decade superdiversity has taken on a lot conceptual baggage from being evoked in some highly misleading ways. There has been a tendency to use the term to describe a state of existence in cities without investigating the implications of intersectional difference and the socio-political process the concept is tied up in. Critics have argued the superdiversity concept does not do enough to engage with the issues of how these power relations intersect and have meaning, and that acknowledgment alone is not sufficient to account for the complex experience of this inclusion or exclusion. Despite parallels, superdiversity is different from intersectionality, which provides “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (Crenshaw 2017, n.p.). As the scholars at IRiS roundtable noted: Intersectionality seems more theoretically geared up to provide the tools to look through multiple lenses at the same time. Intersections of categories are not considered as collisions that happen in a moment, but as a process. (Humphris 2015, 3)

However, as Vertovec (2017, 10) has noted, the concepts of intersectionality and superdiversity “share a call for recognizing the composite effects of social categories.” Indeed, during the IRiS roundtable discussion, Dr. Caroline Oliver noted the “ ‘disruptive power’ of superdiversity due to its focus on change, transformation and flux” and argued that it was “inherently political due to the implied questioning of categories” (Humphris 2015, 3). Vertovec (2017) has argued that superdiversity goes beyond the “race-​gender-​class complex” (10) of intersectionality to attune to migration-​related categories. I argue that a spatial approach focused on relationality, multiplicity, mobility,

Mapping Superdiversity   37 and power-​geometries can distinguish superdiversity from intersectionality. This spatial approach directs attention to the nuances of exclusion and inclusion for the different residents living in superdiverse neighborhoods who are affected by mobility and time-​space compression. In the next section, I discuss how the power-​geometries of superdiversity are lived and can circulate through atmospheres and discourses. Reflecting on my own empirical research, I suggest that addressing the complexity that superdiversity highlights may involve attuning to multidimensionality beyond human relations.

Living Superdiversity through Affective Atmospheres Although it is important to explore the intersection of demographic backgrounds and identities in studies of superdiversity, the sociospatial peculiarities of multiplicity in cities cannot necessarily be explained without a phenomenological focus on how it is performed and lived. Considering superdiversity together with conviviality can allow a analytical focus on how social complexity is lived in spatial settings and mediated by wider social forces. This builds on Nowicka and Vertovec’s (2014) work on conviviality to understand the politics of togetherness and the genuine and ordinary ways we live together with difference, particularly considering the need to challenge the “neo-​imperial hierarchies of belonging that corrode the quality of our social interactions and the possibility of humanity” (Back et al. 2012, 151). However, there is a risk that research focused on conviviality might use the concept of superdiversity primarily as “the backdrop to a study” (Vertovec 2017, 4) without engaging with the multidimensionality it implies. I argue that though there is relevance in considering the broader conditions of superdiversity, empirical studies can do more to explore the ways superdiversity manifests and is felt in local settings. Research in human geography has problematized “the social” through exploring the complexity and interconnectivity of life through the “more-​than-​human” (Panelli 2010), the nonhuman (Amin 2008), and the posthuman (Rose 2017). These often more-​ than-​representational (Lorimer 2005) approaches have potential to demonstrate how the experience of superdiversity goes beyond identity categories and bodily markers of difference. In empirical research in a neighborhood in northeast London, I explored superdiverse relations in urban street and public spaces and micropublics (Stansfeld 2019). I argue that mundane interactions and encounters between bodies, materials, and technologies in these spaces can create a form of “convivial affect” (Stansfeld 2021). The research explores how this “convivial affect” is a kind of intensity of togetherness or coexistence. I argue that this contributes to wider atmospheres of superdiversity made up of the more-​than-​human features that can be sensed and felt. Artist Sophie Barr (2017) draws attention to what she calls “global vernacular aesthetics” that manifest through informal economies and practices in superdiverse neighborhoods. They are visible through the “ad-​hocness” of the street (Hunt 2015): such as cultural goods, foods, and clothes spilling out from shops, and translocal signs and posters in windows.

38   Katherine Stansfeld This materiality and the sensorality of the street can create, “superdiverse atmospheres” (Stansfeld 2019) which are mediated by technologies—​mobile phones, wires, and fiber optic cables, the invisible infrastructures of the street (Rose 2017) that allow translocal social connections and dynamics to unfold. I argue that these everyday human and nonhuman encounters are part of a situated politics of difference that is important in understanding the conditions of superdiversity. Becoming attuned to the human, material, and technological elements of superdiverse life can uncover wider power-​geometries, discourses, and circulatory regimes in these urban atmospheres (see also Simone, this volume). Exploration of these everyday environments can tell us more about the experiences of social differentiation and the ways superdiverse relations are mediated by relations to broader flows of capital, forms of postcolonial culture, translocality, and media representations (Stansfeld 2019).

Conclusion Superdiversity is a concept that responds to the complexity of contemporary cities in ways other concepts have failed to do. Perhaps the term has been coined because a paradigmatic shift continues to be necessary—​one that “questions the foundations of our knowledge and assumptions about societies, how they operate and function at all levels, from the lowest level of human face-​to-​face communication all the way up to the highest levels of structure in the world system” (Blommaert 2013, 6). I have argued that by situating superdiversity within a framework of space as relational, multiple, and provisional (Massey 2005), we can become better attuned to the condition of multiplicity in the city. Understanding superdiversity as an inherently relational condition affecting both global metropoles and small localities and the highly mobile and the immobile can put debates that we have previously considered in isolation into conversation. Addressing the “problems of the politics of uneven (im)mobilities through a common prism [can show] how they not only intersect but refract and intensify each other in multiple directions at once” (Sheller 2018, 3). To respond to critics and develop a more nuanced approach to the geography of superdiversity, I argue that we should integrate analyses of translocality, power-​ geometry, and conviviality into debates. I contend that this provides a way to investigate the process and politics of living among a multitude of others in urban environments, reflecting on the ways that superdiversity is lived and performed and manifests through affective atmospheres. Paying attention to the neighborhood scale can facilitate attention to the multiscalar ways this is experienced and connects to other spaces across the globe. The chapter has attempted to reinvigorate superdiversity in a sociospatial light to appreciate the intersectionality of difference and power-​geometries surrounding inclusion to allow for a nuanced and political approach to urban complexity. If this is possible, then the concept has enormous potential, not only for formulating and adapting policies in places where superdiverse relations manifest, but also for the way we conceptualize our ever-​changing, increasingly interconnected world.

Mapping Superdiversity   39

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Mapping Superdiversity   41 Pratt, Geraldine, and Brenda Yeoh. 2003. “Transnational (Counter) Topographies.” Gender, Place and Culture 10 (2): 159–​166. Rose, Gillian. 2017. “Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (4): 779–​793. Roudometof, Victor. 2015. “The Glocal and Global Studies.” Globalizations 12 (5): 774–​787. Sennett, Richard. 1990. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: W. W. Norton. Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. London: Verso. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–​226. Smith, Michael Peter. 2001. Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stansfeld, Katherine. 2019. “Mapping Multiplicity: Place, Difference and Conviviality in Finsbury Park, London.” PhD thesis. University of London. Stansfeld, Katherine. 2021. “Slow Motion Streets: Exploring Everyday Super-​Diversity in a London Neighbourhood through Video Rhythmanalysis.” In Rhythmanalysis, edited by Dawn Lyon and Ray Hutchinson, 63–​86. Research in Urban Sociology 17. Bingley, UK: Emerald Books. Thrift, Nigel. 2004, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B 86: 57–​78. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Varis, Piia. 2017. “Superdiverse Times and Places: Media, Mobility, Conjunctures and Structures of Feeling.” In Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices, edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti, and Jan Blommaert, 25–​46. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Varnelis, Kazys, and Anne Friedberg. 2008. “Place: The Networking of Public Space.” In Networked Publics, edited by Kazys Varnelis, 15–​42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vertovec, Steven. 1999. “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 447–​462. Vertovec, Steven. 2006. “The Emergence of Super-​Diversity in Britain.” Working Paper No. 25. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. University of Oxford. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–​1054. Vertovec, Steven. 2017. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014. Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Super-​Diverse Context. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Willis, Katharine S. 2015. Netspaces: Space and Place in a Networked World. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Chapter 3

Superdiversi t y a nd Urban Pl a nni ng Simon Pemberton

Introduction This chapter focuses on the challenges of superdiversity for urban planning. In contrast to the considerable volume of work that has been produced on urban planning and the multicultural city (Fincher et al. 2014; Burayidi 2003; Sandercock and Lyssiotis 2003, 1998; Qadeer 1997) and on planning and diversity in the city (Fincher and Iveson 2008; Uyesugi and Shipley 2005; Baumann 1996), little attention to date has focused on the challenges of superdiversity for urban planning. Yet the “diversification of diversity” (Hollinger 2006) associated with globalized mobility has meant that new patterns of migration are increasingly fragmented. This has led to a move away from traditional thinking that international migration to urban areas may lead to the concentration of just one or two large-​scale ethnic or national groups in the city. Rather, individuals with varying characteristics—​for example, legal status, age, self-​defined ethnicity, faith, class, age, employment status and educational qualifications—​can be spread across the city as a consequence of a variety of unpredictable migration flows that are now taking place (Vertovec 2019). Furthermore, beyond issues of fragmentation and the spread and scale of superdiversity, the speed of demographic change in many cities is now much faster than it had been previously, although this may vary by locality. This is also true of patterns of supermobility: We can witness different patterns of migration and mobility into, within and out of cities (Pemberton 2020). Superdiversity therefore describes the sociocultural and demographic complexity driven by international migration and internal differentiation within societies and is associated with intra-​and extra group heterogeneity (Goodson and Grzymala-​Kazlowska 2017). Such complexity presents increasing challenges for urban planners. Urban planning can be defined as an action-​oriented interventionist approach that is fundamentally concerned with the process of development and the management of land use and

44   Simon Pemberton environmental change (Adams 2001). However, traditional conceptions of the “rational planner” engaged in technical regulation to solve urban problems and working on the assumption of “sameness” and stability as the “norm” are increasingly redundant with the superdiversification of populations (Burayidi 2003). Rather, given the increasing superdiversity now being seen in many cities, urban planners need to rethink their approach to consider how to balance competing interests, how to recognize and address specific needs that may change over time, and how to respond to people in increasingly diversifying settings (Fincher and Iveson 2008). Much of the work that has been done on urban planning and the multicultural city has reflected post–​World War II labor or “elite” migration, which was conceived as relatively orderly and transparent given that immigration originated from a limited number of countries (Fincher and Iveson 2008, 3–​4). Hall (2000, 29) has identified how in many areas, including parts of Western Europe, population diversity that followed post-​war migration was “governed and managed as a multiculturalist constellation of regimented ethno-​cultural segments.” However, the decline of multiculturalism as a public policy and political discourse in many parts of the world and the growth in new migration that has transformed the profile of populations in urban areas has given way to a “broader expression and recognition of different kinds of differences . . . and resulting largely from new migration that has transformed the demographic profile of urban areas” (Berg and Sigona 2013, 348). In turn, this has led to new pro-​and antidiversity “isms” being offered, including an emphasis on intercultural and intersectional approaches (Anthias 2013). Nevertheless, interculturality does not necessarily focus on how cultural interchange can be motivated; nor does it focus on the multilayered characteristics of individuals that may impinge on their identities (Tasan-​Kok et al. 2014, 15–​16). As a result, others have adopted an “intersectional” approach to capturing differences in populations that explores how multiple social identities, relationships, and issues such as gender and class mutually influence each other and may contribute to systematic social inequalities of particular individuals and groups (Anthias 2013). Thus the term intersectionality is useful to understand the complexity of intertwined identities and can complement a superdiverse approach that considers the spatial implications of the intertwining of variables of difference on the distribution, experiences, and contact of diverse groups within urban areas. The chapter therefore examines the implications of superdiversity for urban planning and the need for new approaches that recognize the limitations of previous interventionist activities based on addressing the needs of a dominant ethnic or national identity cohering within particular neighborhoods in the city (Boschman and van Ham 2013). The next section “Current Debates on Urban Planning and Superdiversity,” evaluates the key areas in current research on the relationship between urban planning and issues of superdiversity, after which the third section, “Key Research Themes for Development,” identifies a number of themes that warrant attention with respect to urban planning responses to increasing superdiversity moving forward. The chapter concludes by setting out further questions that need addressing in relation to the implications of superdiversity for urban planning.

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    45

Current Debates on Urban Planning and Superdiversity Research that has scrutinized the relationship between urban planning and issues of superdiversity can be categorized under four different headings. First, this work has highlighted that the role of planners has shifted from that of technical expert to manager of social difference who needs to understand and work with divergent ideas of what constitutes common culture (Rishbeth et al. 2018) and to “think about . . . judgments between different claims (on the use of public or private property and space), as well as facilitating them” (Fincher and Iveson 2008, 2). This is not a straightforward task. For example, in her work in Sweden, Mack (2019, 90) notes that planners have new responsibilities to integrate immigrants and are now expected to be “horizontal political actors who manage both architectural projects and the Muslim and Christian minority groups with whom they work.” The superdiversification of populations in many cities has meant that urban planners have faced increasing difficulties in identifying and responding to the needs of different residents as well as in assessing the value of claims on public and private space made by different groups and individuals (Tasan-​Kok et al. 2014). The supermobility associated with superdiversity—​as well as issues of population churn—​can compound these challenges, along with increasing population diversity being reflected vertically within property as well as across the city (Blommaert 2014). Access to services and facilities is also heavily influenced by legal and immigration status (Phillimore 2013), but this may often be unclear to urban planners with respect to individual rights entitlements, which can impact on efforts to secure equality of access and the provision of local services (Pemberton and Phillimore 2018). Furthermore, in cities where superdiversity is a more recent phenomenon, urban planners have tended to focus on the importance of class-​based differences in terms of social and economic inequality rather than on ethnic, cultural, or other forms of difference (Pemberton 2017). This may be problematic in its own right because it equivalizes differences between residents and conceals structural forms of inequality, racism, and discrimination. Consequently, there is a need for urban planners to redistribute resources based on a recognition of the differences and the interconnections between various aspects of superdiversity on which inequalities are based (for example, ethnicity, culture, nationality, and gender; again, see Pemberton 2017), and which will vary according to the local context and the extent to which migration-​driven population diversity is evident. Second, research has examined how urban planners have sought to harness and commodify diversity as part of a wider urban cosmopolitanism in order to deliver economic development priorities (Florida 2004; Raco 2018). There are numerous examples where the increasing superdiversity of populations—​and associated infrastructure—​has been utilized to deliver economic development objectives (the “diversity dividend”; see Raco

46   Simon Pemberton 2018, 17). In some urban areas, planning quarters have emerged to facilitate the development of shops and other facilities based around a distinct ethnicity—​for example, the “Chinatowns” and “Little Indias” of cities. These are clear indications of ethnic culture and economic development activities that have been branded and marketed to support regeneration (Friedmann 2010). However, in a number of instances, such commodification has been criticized as superficial and for not necessarily addressing the structural inequalities faced by certain groups (Perrons and Skyers 2003). For example, Fincher et al. (2014) have identified that in a number of UK cities, urban planners have attempted to celebrate increasing diversity, but in so doing have often reinforced difference “by controlling forms of diversity that have been regarded as unruly in heavy-​handed ways” (cited in Tasan-​Kok et al. 2014, 32). Linked to the such arguments are issues related to the planning for spaces of cross-​ cultural encounter. This includes Sandercock and Lyssiotis’s (2003) research, which highlights that under multiculturalism, urban planners emphasized ethnic, religious, and cultural differences and associated “rights to difference” and “rights to the city,” including the generation of cross-​cultural encounters in public space and the involvement and engagement of a wide range of individuals in community facilities, public affairs, and privately owned “public” spaces, such as cafes and shopping centers (Colomb and Raco 2018). Such encounters can support interactions between individuals and bring different identities together (Amin and Thrift 2002). This may also involve the generation of more “convivial encounters” (Neal et al. 2013) in “micropublic” sites such as workplaces, schools, youth clubs, and the gym (Amin 2002). Urban planners have often neglected these sites, but they are where “shared activities and interests which might transcend fixed identities such as gender, race, and class” emerge (Iveson and Fincher 2011, 413). Nevertheless, urban planners now need to respond to individuals in increasingly diversified settings in order for individuals to experiment with their identities and to undertake meaningful encounters with others. For example, the importance of micropublic sites such as the local supermarket to facilitate meaningful encounters that, importantly, are not necessarily associated with a particular national or ethnic migrant group and reflect the everyday lives of individuals living in superdiverse areas also need to be considered. However, this may be challenging due to different aspects of superdiversity such as ethnicity, culture, language, legal status, and nationality differentially shaping the ability of individuals to engage with and participate in such spaces (Pemberton 2017). Hence not all micropublic spaces will lead to encounters that result in the same shared positive experiences and outcomes. A third area of research has focused on the planning of arrival structures for the emplacement of migrants within the diverse city (Meeus et al. 2020). New social complexities made evident through a superdiversity lens have been captured in recent work on “arrival infrastructures” and Saunders (2011) in his book Arrival Cities explores how “arrival neighbourhoods” can serve to facilitate positive exchanges between newly arriving migrants and others. But this work adopts a territorial approach to arrival and largely assumes that all new migrants will initially be concentrated in arrival neighborhoods

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    47 before either transitioning and settling in the wider metropolitan area or remaining in the local neighborhood (Massey and Denton 1993). It also assumes that settlement decisions are bounded and shaped solely by the infrastructures associated with arrival neighborhoods. Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut (2019) have challenged this perspective, arguing that migrant arrival and emplacement in cities of increasing diversity is shaped by a politics of directionality, a politics of temporality, and a politics of subjectivity. In the context of superdiverse neighborhoods, directionality is important because it refers to the ways in which migrants (and nonmigrants) are linked to a range of places through their networks, statuses, and attachments (Pemberton 2020; Meeus et al. 2020; Hall 2015). Urban planning thus needs to move beyond normative assumptions associated with traditional patterns of spatial assimilation and migrants’ remaining in their zone of arrival. There is a need to develop a more nuanced perspective and new approaches to plan for migrants’ differential arrival situations, which may be more spatially differentiated and relationally constituted in an era of superdiversity (Meeus et al. 2020). Urban planners also need to reflect on the ways in which migrants may engage with different infrastructures in the city to “earn a living” in new or unusual ways, and which may contrast with normative assumptions on the use of such infrastructure but which nevertheless contribute to “everyday migrant urbanisms” (Hall 2015). Temporality is also a crucial aspect to consider because it highlights the “messy” everyday realities of individuals living in urban areas, which cannot simply be reduced to citizenship providing permanence and stability (Meeus, van Heur, and Arnaut 2019). It implies recognizing that people move out of and into contexts of diversity (Vertovec 2019). These movements can be shaped by a number of factors, including migrant agency and individual dispositions and resources, as well as broader processes of neighborhood change over time, including the gentrification associated with the commodification of diversity (Raco 2018). This, according to Meeus et al. (2020, 11), requires urban planners to trace, grasp, and acknowledge the diverse geographies and sociomaterial infrastructures that shape arrival. In turn, Vosko et al. (2014) identify how this will “leave space to ‘liberate temporariness’. (. It also means that urban planners can plan for durable solutions for temporary presences that move beyond the use of the improvised shipping container (Meeus et al. 2020, 16). Reference to planners’ harnessing the diversity dividend ties into a politics of subjectivity. The evolving contextual aspects of the places in which individuals live, the changing actions of others, and the sheer diversity of individuals living in cities or neighborhoods experiencing increasing demographic complexity means that planners must move beyond a narrow focus on ethnic entrepreneurship that “prioritises the place-​making practices of entrepreneurs” (Meeus et al. 2020, 16). Instead, urban planning needs to adopt a broader perspective that accommodates the needs of a wider range of individuals—​ economically, culturally, socially—​ and shaped by different markers of difference. A fourth area of research activity has investigated the challenges faced by urban planners seeking collaboration as a way to respond to increasing population diversity. Rishbeth et al. (2018) note that a lack of adequate resourcing for consultation means

48   Simon Pemberton that the engagement of urban planners is often superficial and rushed. The problem is compounded when increasing superdiversification leads to consultation and engagement that focuses on (pre)dominant ethnic or national groups and fails to recognize within-​ group and between-​group differences or that individuals may belong to more than one group (Calhoun 1994). In turn, this undermines the legitimacy of consultation processes. Through improving engagement processes, urban planners may recognize that identities can be forged through difference, are relational and open to change and transformation, and may extend beyond a singular concern with ethnic identity (Pemberton 2017). The challenges of consultation and engagement also relate to the fact that many superdiverse areas are fast changing (Robinson et al. 2007) and characterized by “newness” whereby population churn means that a proportion of residents are perpetually new (Phillimore, 2015). This means that newly arrived populations using different city or neighborhood infrastructures (such as housing or local services) may not necessarily have been subject to processes of consultation or engaged in urban planning processes. Consultation and engagement may additionally serve to marginalize those who are less spatially concentrated or who may be “pioneer” migrants, who cannot draw on or “dock on” existing migrant communities (Wessendorf 2018). Some who are less visibly different from the majority population may be marginalized given their perceived “invisibility” but potentially could be tracked through a focus on “linguistic landscapes” (Blommaert 2014). However, both Sandercock and Lyssiotis (2003) and Chriost and Thomas (2008) point to the lack of reference in urban planning to the significance of language, which has “seriously limited analysis, diagnosis, and prescription in urban planning and urban policy” (Chriost and Thomas 2008, 1). Neither has there been much focus on the importance of “infrastructure markers” (such as shops, signage, or cultural facilities) that reflect migrants’ identity in the city (see Boccagni, this volume, on home(making) by migrants in public space). In addition, the discussion of arrival infrastructures has emphasized the importance of adopting a wide-​ranging multiscalar perspective to address the needs of the city’s newly arriving migrants and of viewing urban planning as an integral element of broader urban governance and management processes (Fincher et al. 2014, 3). There is also a need for urban planners to work with diverse actors—​from the national to the local levels and across different sectors—​to respond to the needs of superdiverse populations (Meeus et al. 2020, 14–​15).

Key Research Themes for Development This section describes three key areas that warrant further attention with respect to the urban planning response to increasing superdiversity. First, as we have already established, there is a considerable literature on population churn in cities, in the context of superdiverse areas specifically (see Bailey and Livingston 2007; Robinson et al. 2007; Phillimore 2015). Yet there has been little attention to date on the immobility and staying

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    49 practices of others living in such areas and the implications for urban planning. This is important, because staying can be an active, agent-​center choice, subject to continual renegotiation, yet it is frequently devalued as connoting statis, decline, and disadvantage (Coulter, van Ham, and Findlay 2016). Research conducted by Pemberton (2020) in Birmingham, United Kingdom, has focused on the territorial and relational aspects of staying in superdiverse neighborhoods with contrasting deprivation levels and histories of immigration. Such neighborhoods are characterized by the increasing migration-​driven superdiversification of their populations; they accommodate migrants and longer-​established minority groups, and no one ethnic group predominates—​diversity itself is the predominant neighborhood identity (Pemberton and Phillimore 2018). In these neighborhood contexts, superdiversity has a quantitative dimension in terms of the increase in arrival of migrants from a wide range of ethnicities and countries of origin, and a qualitative dimension encapsulating intra-​and intergroup diversity. The latter is more important in delineating these neighborhoods as distinct from other types of neighborhoods, as well as the implications for urban planning. Indeed, the qualitative approach emphasizes how the intersection of differences that are evident in individuals may produce new stratifications—​that is, new experiences of space and “contact,” new forms of cosmopolitanism and multiculture, and new patterns of mobility or staying in different contexts of deprivation or, indeed, gentrification (Vertovec 2019). All of these issues are therefore integral to the concerns of urban planners about how to shape the use of public property or private property (or both) by local residents, and how to manage conflict over how public goods are shared or how land is used (Pestieau and Wallace 2003, 255). Thus Pemberton (2020) highlighted how decisions to stay in both deprived and recently gentrifying superdiverse neighborhoods were often intentional, shaped not only by economic capital (housing affordability) and civic capital (permanence and stability) but also by current and previous experiences of population diversity or discrimination, or both; the acceptance of visible difference in the local area; pragmatic attachment to shops and specialist services and inter-​and intramigrant relations. More consideration of how urban planning should respond to the needs of “stayers,” as well as those moving in and out, in different (superdiverse) contexts of deprivation and gentrification, is therefore needed. In relational terms, the proximity of individuals to other areas of the city—​and especially city-​center spaces—​was also identified by Pemberton (2020) as conducive to staying, especially for some individuals who form less of a critical mass/​spatial concentration. Thus while studies have recognized that some city-​center spaces can be exclusionary to migrant communities (for example, see Butcher 2010), Pemberton’s (2020) work notes how migrants less spatially concentrated may develop a sense of ease and belonging in the city center because of its immigration-​related superdiversity (Pemberton 2020). Consequently, urban planners need to put more emphasis on the role of city-​center spaces, as well as polycentric urban spaces, in facilitating or undermining migrant arrival and settlement in areas subject to the superdiversification of their populations.

50   Simon Pemberton From a temporal perspective, urban planners need to acknowledge the importance of time in migration processes (Sheller 2019) and the changing biographies of migrants and the places in which they live, to understand that staying is often an incremental rather than a deliberate “once and for all” decision—​facilitated (and sometimes undermined) as a result of a culmination of individuals’ changing needs, values, actions, and experiences (and ways of knowing the city or neighborhood), as well as their assets (Pemberton, 2020). Thus urban planning under superdiversity is about understanding the complexities of change and the ways in which such needs, actions, assets, and experiences are differentially shaped according to different diversity markers. A second area requiring more research relates to the interlinkages between urban space and integration and how superdiversity is leading to differential urban planning responses for migrant integration. In Denmark, Grünenberg and van Friesleben (2016) have identified a number of integration challenges associated with the spatial concentration of migrants in the city (housing issues, access to services, etc.). They have highlighted some of the key responses of urban planners in cities where superdiversity is increasing, namely (1) the spatial dispersal or redistribution of migrants across the city (or beyond) and (2) strategies of social mixing to secure integration based on the “neighborhood effects” thesis (the neighborhood features that shape social mixing; see van Ham et al. 2012, 1–​22) or the “social capital” thesis which holds that social mixing emerges from interaction with others (see Putnam 1993). Numerous studies have explored the benefits and challenges of the social-​mixing approach in a range of different contexts, and which have differentially highlighted the importance of access to employment; adequate, diverse, stable, and secure accommodation (including mixed-​income developments); of overcoming language barriers; and of reinventing public spaces as spaces for intercultural dialogue and exchange (Behrens and Kuhl 2011; Lees 2008). But with the advent of superdiversity, many cities now must also consider the need to accommodate those at different stages of the life cycle and to create superdiverse infrastructural spaces (Katz et al. 2016). Maintaining flexibility in existing planning processes and remaining open to developing new approaches are also required given that migration-​driven superdiversity is associated with increasingly complex and unpredictable migration flows, as well as urban planning making the best use of land available in the city. Linked to strategies of social mixing are attempts by planners to spatially redistribute migrant populations across urban spaces where increasing diversification as a result of new migrant flows is adding to the challenges of integration and “convivial disintegration” (Meissner and Heil 2021; Raco 2018). In Europe, the urgent redistribution of Syrian refugees has been dependent on the rapidity of the inflows, the density of the existing population, and the current trends in urbanization (see Bither and Ziebarth 2016). However, the increasing superdiversity of populations also means that more consideration of the nature and effectiveness of redistribution strategies by the planners is needed (Fincher et al. 2014). This includes focusing on the positive and negative implications of redistributing (1) to remote rural areas (where individuals may have few connections and little experience with living in such a context); (2) to the peripheral areas of cities

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    51 (where economic opportunities may be lacking, which could contribute to economic and social segregation); (3) to affluent areas or more challenging areas of the city, where on the one hand there may be resistance by wealthy residents because of the perceived impact on property prices, or on the other a lack of bridging capital (networks for “getting ahead” and to access resources; Putnam 1993) for individuals in more deprived areas; and (4) to every area of the city. A third area requiring more research relates to the co-​creation of new urban planning strategies with the local residents, including cultural appropriations in the pre-​ and postdesign phase based on local resident engagement and input. Co-​creation in this sense relates to work “that facilitates and supports deliberate, collaborative planning processes, through which solutions co-​evolve” (Rooij and Frank 2016, 475). Hence a key question is the extent to which co-​creation may be different in superdiverse settings. In this respect, migration channel and legal status are crucial in shaping and informing a superdiversity politics (Pemberton 2017); they underpin the extent to which planners can both identify and work with those whom they are able to legally incorporate into the design and delivery stages of urban planning strategies. Indeed, for migrants who are undocumented, co-​creation may be challenging. Yet the potential for co-​creation cannot be dismissed outright by urban planners; as such further investigation is required of the regulatory powers urban planners need to involve migrants with differing migration channel/​legal status in planning processes. The ability of urban planners to work with those who are legal residents on wider strategies of neighborhood management and on the delivery of intercultural services from local neighborhood centers to support engagement and consultation also requires much more investigation (Bither and Ziebarth 2016). Multiple “public interests” need to be addressed through “parity of participation” in the design phase to ensure that projects can help to meet the needs of a wider range of beneficiaries, and beyond acting for the “public good” of a single dominant ethnic group in the city (Raco, Colomb and Kesten 2014). In turn, the participation of a wider group of individuals in the construction (postdesign) phase has the potential to widen the remit of cultural appropriations by urban planners who are considering migration-​driven superdiversity (Vervloesem et al. 2016). On a practical level, Box 1 below sets out an initial set of principles for the co-​creation of urban planning responses in the superdiversity context around which more research can be conducted. It highlights the importance of individuals’ “diverse ways of living” and their consumption practices and how these may be shaped by a range of (intersecting) diversity-​related criteria, including legal status, human capital, identity, and individual dispositions (see Simone, this volume, and reference to the “urban popular economy”). The approach acknowledges the diffusion of superdiversity rather than concentration of groups in particular areas of the city and the design/​planning and delivery of services according to individuals’ rights of access and entitlement—​and associated patterns of mobility and differentiated access to “micropublic” spaces. It also identifies the importance of ensuring that rights and entitlements are met through informed judgments over different claims.

52   Simon Pemberton

Box 1: Urban planning principles and issues of co-​creation under superdiversity1 1. Delineate superdiverse communities by focusing on “diverse ways of living” and consumption practices. These will be informed by the interplay of -​legal status; -​human capital, including language competency, income, and access to employment; -​identity and dispositions; -​perceptions and experiences; and -​degree of mobility/​transience or fixity/​permanence. 2. Recognize the importance of interconnections and complex interplays between key influences on ways of living. For example, legal status, economic status, housing status (including demand for housing) and the spatial distribution of superdiverse communities. 3. Recognize importance of different “activity spaces” and “beyond local” (transnational) relations in shaping distinct identities and attachment to place. 4. Acknowledge diffusion of superdiversity over and above the concentration of ethnic groups in particular areas of the city, as well as both the horizontal and vertical differentiation of populations (e.g., those living in Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in the private rented sector). 5. Map catchment areas and delivery of services for individuals according to rights of access and entitlement, as well as according to economic and social mobility. 6. Analyze housing conditions by (migrant) status, (migrant) capital, and (migrant) identity. 7. Focus on choice/​flexibility/​quality of housing for those wishing to stay, as well as those more transient, and the associated need for flexibility in change of use to residential and retail infrastructure. 8. Accommodate and respond to increasing migration-​driven superdiversity in existing “micropublic” spaces in the city beyond cultural centers/​places of worship—​for example, workplace, schools, colleges, youth centers, sports clubs, transport infrastructure, health facilities, etc. 9. Use the planning system to ensure rights and entitlements are met through informed judgments over different claims—​this includes recognition of the different needs of those who might be relatively invisible.

Conclusion The extent to which urban planners can intervene and respond to the increasing superdiversity of populations in many urban areas is context specific and dependent—​ at least in part—​on the actions of others and on wider processes of urban governance

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    53 and management (Fincher et al. 2014, 3). However, the role of urban planners, the private sector, voluntary sector organizations, and local communities varies considerably depending on the institutional, political, and regulatory context. Indeed, though in some countries, planning has followed the national lead on multicultural policies and provided services along ethnospecific lines, this—​in some instances—​changed with the rise of “punitive migration regimes” in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. This national policy vacuum makes it more difficult for urban planners to take superdiversity into account (Hall 2017). This will inevitably have an impact on the nature and effectiveness of planning strategies in different parts of the world and for different types of urban space and migration. For example, in the social work context, Williams and Mikola (2018) highlight the continuing importance of “ethnic tracks” in many Australian cities for the delivery of social services. Hence, a critical issue when using a superdiversity lens to achieve more nuanced urban planning is to draw out the intersectionality of diversities. This includes recognizing the difference or differences that affect people’s experiences of, or vulnerability to, inequality and exclusion (Humphris 2015) and how urban planning should respond. Further acknowledgment will also be needed of temporal change and the relationality of the everyday practices that shape people’s experiences in order to move beyond a sole focus on place-​based approaches. In addition, a “politics of superdiversity” demands recognizing that those with a more “privileged” socio-​legal status may have greater opportunities to secure benefits through the planning system than others (Tasan-​Kok et al. 2014). Finally, much of the discussion in this chapter has been on cities in the Global North. Yet superdiversity is also relevant to cities, and urban planning responses, in the Global South (see Parnell and Oldfield 2014). Watson (2009) has also noted the large-​scale rural–​urban migration trends in many parts of Africa that are increasing the demographic complexity of urban populations, and Black et al. (2011) have explored the role of migration and mobility as an adaptation or coping process in relation to climate change in the Global South, and how these new migrant inflows and outflows are reshaping urban and rural areas alike. Further consideration is therefore required of urban planning responses in these contexts. Watson (2009) has additionally highlighted some of the governance challenges of managing superdiversity and the implications for creating sustainable urban communities and environments. But questions remain about whether the challenges of mobility and of staying are similar or different, the extent to which urban space can be used differently in terms of settlement and integration, and the challenges of co-​creating urban planning responses given the paucity of resources available to municipal administrations.

Note 1. Based on Qadeer’s (1997) ladder of planning principles supporting multiculturalism.

54   Simon Pemberton

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Superdiversity and Urban Planning    55 Florida, Richard. 2004. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Friedmann, John. 2010. “Place and Place-​Making in Cities: A Global Perspective.” Planning Theory & Practice 11 (2): 149–​165. Goodson, Lisa, and Aleksandra Grzymala-​Kazlowska. 2017. “Researching Migration in a Superdiverse Society: Challenges, Methods, Concerns and Promises.” Sociological Research Online 22 (1): 15–​27. Grünenberg, Kristina, and Anna Mikaela V. Freiesleben. 2016. “Right Kinds of Mixing? Promoting Cohesion in a Copenhagen Neighbourhood.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 6 (1): 49–​57. Hall, Stuart. 2000. “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question.” In Multiculturalisms: Diaspora, Entanglements, Disruptions, edited by Barnor Hesse, 209–​241. London: Zed Books. Hall, Suzanne M. 2015. “Super-​ Diverse Street: A ‘Trans-​ ethnography’ across Migrant Localities.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (1): 22–​37. Hall, Suzanne M. 2017. “Mooring ‘Super-​Diversity’ to a Brutal Migration Milieu.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (9): 1562–​1573. Hollinger, David A. 2006. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Humphris, Rachel. 2015. Intersectionality and Superdiversity: What’s the Difference. Report. IRiS Key Concepts Roundtable Series. Institute for Research into Superdiversity, University of Birmingham. Iveson, Kurt, and Ruth Fincher. 2011. “ ‘Just Diversity’ in the City of Difference.” In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 407–​418. Oxford: Blackwell. Katz, Bruce, Luise Noring, and Nantke Garrelts. 2016. Cities and Refugees: The German Experience. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Lees, Loretta. 2008. “Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?” Urban Studies 45 (12): 2449–​2470. Mack, Jennifer. 2019. “An Awkward Technocracy: Mosques, Churches, and Urban Planners in Neoliberal Sweden.” American Ethnologist 46 (1): 89–​104. Massey, Douglas, and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meeus, Bruno, Luce Beeckmans, Bas van Heur, and Karel Arnaut. 2020. “Broadening the Urban Planning Repertoire with an ‘Arrival Infrastructures’ Perspective.” Urban Planning 5 (3): 11–​22. Meeus, Bruno, Bas van Heur, and Karel Arnaut. 2019. “Migration and the Infrastructural Politics of Urban Arrival.” In Arrival Infrastructures, edited by Bruno Meeus, Bas van Heur and Karel Arnaut, 1–​32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meissner, Fran, and Tilmann Heil. 2021. “Deromanticising Integration: On the Importance of Convivial Disintegration.” Migration Studies 9(3): 741–​758 doi.org/​10.1093/​migration/​ mnz056. Neal, Sarah, Katy Bennett, Allan Cochrane, and Giles Mohan. 2013. “Living Multiculture: Understanding the New Spatial and Social Relations of Ethnicity and Multiculture in England.” Environment and planning C: Government and Policy 31 (2): 308–​323. Parnell, Susan, and Sophie Oldfield. 2014. The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London: Routledge.

56   Simon Pemberton Pemberton, Simon. 2017. “Urban Planning and the Challenge of Super-​Diversity.” Policy & Politics 45 (4): 623–​641. Pemberton, Simon. 2020. “(Re-​)Negotiating the Process of Staying in Superdiverse Places.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13691​83X.2020.1822​157. Pemberton, Simon, and Jenny Phillimore. 2018. “Migrant Place-​Making in Super-​Diverse Neighborhoods: Moving beyond Ethno-​ national Approaches.” Urban Studies 55 (4): 733–​750. Perrons, Diane, and Sophia Skyers. 2003. “Empowerment through Participation? Conceptual Explorations and a Case Study.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (2): 265–​285. Pestieau, Katherine, and Marcia Wallace. 2003. “Challenges and Opportunities for Planning in the Ethno-​culturally Diverse City: A Collection of Papers—​Introduction.” Planning Theory & Practice 4 (3): 253–​258. Phillimore, Jenny. 2013. “Housing, Home and Neighborhood Renewal in the Era of Superdiversity: Some Lessons from the West Midlands.” Housing Studies 28 (5): 682–​700. Phillimore, Jenny. 2015. “Delivering Maternity Services in an Era of Superdiversity: The Challenges of Novelty and Newness.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 568–​582. Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,. Qadeer, Mohammad A. 1997. “Pluralistic Planning for Multicultural Cities: The Canadian Practice.” Journal of the American Planning Association 63 (4): 481–​494. Raco, Mike, Claire Colomb, and Jamie Kesten. 2014. “Policy Brief 2: Governing Diversity”. European Policy Brief. Online: https://​doi.org/​10.5281/​zen​odo.437​925 Raco, Mike. 2018. “Critical Urban Cosmopolitanism and the Governance of Urban Diversity in European Cities.” European Urban and Regional Studies 25 (1): 8–​23. Rishbeth, Clare, Farnaz Ganji, and Goran Vodicka. 2018. “Ethnographic Understandings of Ethnically Diverse Neighborhoods to Inform Urban Design Practice.” Local Environment 23 (1): 36–​53. Robinson, David, Kesia Reeve, and Rionach Casey. 2007. The Housing Pathways of New Immigrants. York, UK: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Rooij, Remon, and Andrea I. Frank. 2016. “Educating Spatial Planners for the Age of Co-​ creation: The Need to Risk Community, Science and Practice Involvement in Planning Programmes and Curricula.” Planning Practice and Research 31 (5): 473–​485. Sheller, Mimi. 2019. “Afterword: Time Is of the Essence.” Current Sociology 67 (2): 334–​344. Sandercock, Leonie, and Peter Lyssiotis. 2003. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century. London: Continuum. Saunders, Doug. 2011. Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. London: Windmill Books. Tasan-​Kok, Tuna, Ronald Van Kempen, Raco Mike, and Gideon Bolt. 2014. Towards Hyper-​ Diversified European Cities: A Critical Literature Review. Utrecht, the Netherlands: Utrecht University, Faculty of Geosciences. Uyesugi, Joyce Lee, and Robert Shipley. 2005. “Visioning Diversity: Planning Vancouver’s Multicultural Communities.” International Planning Studies 10 (3–​4): 305–​322. Van Ham, Maarten, David Manley, Nick Bailey, Ludi Simpson, and Duncan Maclennan. 2012. Neighborhood Effects Research: New Perspectives. Berlin: Springer. Vertovec, Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139.

Superdiversity and Urban Planning    57 Vervloesem, Els, Michiel Dehaene, Marleen Goethals, and Hüsnü Yegenoglu. 2016. “Social Poetics: The Architecture of Use and Appropriation.” OASE 96: 11–​18. Vosko, Leah F., Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham. 2014. “Liberating Temporariness.” In Migration, Work and Citizenship in an Era of Insecurity, edited by Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham, 3–​34. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press. Williams, Charlotte Francesca, and Maša Mikola. 2018. “From Multiculturalism to Superdiversity? Narratives of Health and Wellbeing in an Urban Neighborhood.” Social Work & Policy Studies: Social Justice, Practice and Theory 1 (001): 1–​24. Watson, Vanessa. 2009. “Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe’s Central Urban Issues.” Urban Studies 46 (11): 2259–​2275. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2018.“Pathways of Settlement among Pioneer Migrants in Super-​Diverse London.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (2): 270–​286.

Chapter 4

T he Urban Ec onomi c s of Su perdive rsi t y Max Nathan

Introduction Steven Vertovec (2007) originally defined superdiversity as a new set of social features arising from 1990s migration patterns, which themselves reflected economic and other globalizations and post–​Cold War political change.1 A rise in the number of “sending countries,” and shifts in the kinds of migrants and movement flows, has diversified “receiving country” nationalities, ethnicities, languages, and religions. As Meissner and Vertovec (2015) point out, within and across each of these identity groups we also see a greater variety of migrant legal statuses and socioeconomic characteristics (such as gender, age, income, and education). Further, the supporting infrastructures of low-​cost airline flights and communications technology have helped sustain higher mobility and transnational diasporas (Blommaert 2013). These new social complexities are now present across many countries (Vertovec 2019). Superdiversity has a notably urban footprint—​reflecting both the historic appeal of ports and economic centers to migrants, and the economic revival of many cities. But beyond this, we can also trace superdiversity back into the deeper, often hidden, history of the “multicultural city” (for example, Schrover; Sante 1998; Sandu 2004; Sassen 2004; Keith 2005; Olusoga 2016). Superdiversity is associated with global cities like London, which is now a “majority minority” city (GOV.UK 2020); importantly, it can also be observed within smaller “second tier” cities like Leicester (Hall 2011), as this chapter shows. Engaging with geographies of superdiversity is unavoidable for researchers and policymakers, given its implications for urban lived experience (Stansfeld, this volume) and for planning and economic development (Pemberton, this volume). Growing diversity has been welcomed as culturally enriching and economically beneficial by many urban local governments (including in London; see Greater London Authority 2006), but it, arguably,

60   Max Nathan also produces new challenges in understanding difference and managing everyday coexistence (Kahn-​Harris 2019). Understanding the economic impacts and implications of superdiversity represents an important part of this academic and policy engagement. This chapter looks at the urban economic impacts of superdiversity in theory and in practice, using the experience of the United Kingdom in the early 2000s as a case study.

A Framework for the Economic Analysis of Superdiversity How might demographic change or shape (urban) economic outcomes? Imagine a simple framework of a dynamic economy with a range of locations, including cities. In this setting, human capital and ideas help drive long-​term economic growth—​by raising innovation and productivity and through knowledge spillovers that allow these ideas to spread throughout society. Entrepreneurial individuals may bring these new ideas into new firms, which enter markets and compete with incumbents. Firms can gain market share via expansion into new markets, including via trade. According to notions of superdiversity, migrants and minority group members in this setting will hold a range of human, financial, and social capitals. Crucially, both diversity (by country of birth, ethnicity, religion, and so on) and “sameness” (co-​ethnic groups, diasporic communities) can have a number of economic impacts, especially via high human-​capital groups and individuals (Nathan 2014): These high-​level effects will be further complicated by differences in age and gender, as well as arrival channel and legal status (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Meissner 2018), points I will return to in more detail. In theory, diversity and sameness offer a number of advantages on the production side of this simple economy. First, many high-​ability individuals select into migration, or they are selected by policy regimes (Hunt 2011). Relatedly, through choice or necessity, migrants and minority ethnic group members may be more entrepreneurially oriented and more open to “disrupting” existing industries (Hunt 2011; Duleep, Jaeger, and Regets 2012). Second, at group level—​for example, in a firm—​diverse teams may offer a broader pool of ideas, experiences and scrutiny (Page 2007). We might expect these effects to be larger for more complex tasks and workflows, and for higher-​skilled activities. Access to a broader pool of “talent” also helps firms to improve their matching of workers to tasks, raising productivity (Peri 2012). Third, through high-​trust connections, diasporic networks may help knowledge diffusion, cross-​boundary coordination, and market access (Kerr 2008; Docquier and Rapoport 2012; Choudhury and Kim 2019). In principle, these advantages are balanced by challenges. Communication barriers and low trust can hold back these processes, at least in the short term; market economies involve winners and losers; migrants and minority groups can experience structural

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity    61 discrimination and hostile policy regimes (Hall, King, and Finlay 2017), including restricting the set of formal economic opportunities individuals might otherwise access. Shifts toward superdiversity can thus, in theory, result in positive or negative outcomes for areas and protagonists. In this setting, cities—​especially big cities—​are also key sites of action. In part, this is because urban areas are, put crudely, “where the (super)diversity is.” It is also because urban agglomeration economies—​such as shared infrastructure and knowledge spillovers—​already help firms and workers become more productive, and this may amplify diversity-​growth channels (Kerr et al. 2017). Cities also offer consumption-​ side advantages to workers and households: urban scale supports a rich variety of amenities and experiences. So in this setting, growing diversity may increase the range of (say) retail and leisure available to residents (Mazzolari and Neumark 2012); an urban “creative class” may also value diversity per se (Florida 2002). Conversely, to the extent that hostile or prejudiced residents dislike diversity, demographic change may lead to majority population outflows or greater segregation within a city (Saiz and Wachter 2011). Although these channels may lead to either higher or lower house prices and rents, more broadly, production-​side gains from urban diversity might also push up housing through crowding, as more productive cities attract further residents. In principle, then, we can imagine that the economic impacts of superdiversity may be ambiguous in sign, and it is not clear how big effect sizes will be. Frustratingly, very little empirical work in economics and economic geography and the associated quantitative disciplines directly engages with superdiversity in full. Rather, studies typically look at linkages from the much simpler measures of migrant population shares and migrant diversity to economic outcomes; in some cases, macro-​ethnic or even racial groups are used instead; in some cases, studies are able to break down results by human capital groups, or first-​or second-​generation status. Page (2007); Docquier and Rapoport (2012); Ottaviano and Peri (2013); Nathan (2014, 2015); Nijkamp, Poot, and Bakens (2015); Cooke and Kemeny (2017), and Kerr et al. (2017) provide reviews of this literature. Studies indicates positive economic impacts from these diversity measures on entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity. Overall effect sizes are not always large and vary both across industry settings and by group (with high human-​capital migrants and diasporas linked to larger gains, as well as diasporas that are geographically closer or historically linked, for example, through past colonial occupation). These aggregate results may also hide gains and losses for specific groups. The bulk of this evidence comes from the United States, and studies from other countries generate still positive but more mixed results, reflecting cross-​country differences in migration histories, social structures, policy regimes, and institutions (Nathan 2014). Evidence on consumption channels is sparser and less conclusive. Some studies (e.g., Ottaviano and Peri [2006] for the United States and Bakens and De Graaff [2020] for the Netherlands) find positive links from diversity to urban wages and house prices, consistent with the above-​mentioned productivity/​crowding channel.

62   Max Nathan

Metrics How can we quantitatively test the ideas in the framework outlined above? Any quantitative work on superdiversity requires quantification. Meissner (2015) splits superdiversity into the core concept of a “broad-​based diversity” of individual attributes versus the variables available to capture this and versus specific local processes and contexts. As this typology implies, capturing such complexity is not straightforward—​even if we restrict ourselves to the individual attributes that might result from different flows, processes, and contexts (Aspinall, this volume; Lessard-Phillips and Fajth, this volume). First, national governments and statistical agencies apply different approaches to track migrant status, ethnicity, religion, and so on (including not collecting data). This cross-​country variation is not random, and it reflects both national histories and contemporary political dynamics. Second, there are more fundamental barriers. Operationalizing individual multidimensionality in a quantitative setting is hard (Lessard-​Phillips and Fajth, this volume). Subjective senses of self differ, and are entangled in broader social relations (Bulmer 1996); one’s sense of self also evolves over time (Ahlerup and Olsson 2012). Manning and Roy (2010), for example, find that UK immigrants almost never see themselves as British on arrival, but are more likely to do so the longer they stay and that this adjustment process varies by sending country. Together, these issues render the practice of classification contested (Modood 2005). The more complex shifts embodied in superdiversity make classification yet harder (Blommaert 2013). For quantitative approaches, one promising way to start is to identify least-​worst proxies of Meissner’s “broad-​based diversity” of individual attributes, and then explore how these might vary across individual and group socioeconomic characteristics, legal status, and local contexts. Specifically, we need metrics that give a feasible combination of granularity (e.g., multiple dimensions) and validity (e.g., reflecting context; Aspinall 2009). This entails working through a larger trade-​off between reducing the complexity of lived experience and being able to represent it in metrics (Lessard-​Phillips and Fajth, this volume). While a superdiversity lens explicitly demands moving beyond a focus on ethnic group and proxy variables for ethnicity, recognizing the importance of variable granularity for the analysis of urban diversity and its implications can, at this point, best be illustrated with this baseline aspect of superdiversity. Conventional measures of country of birth, nationality and macro-​ethnic classifications (such as the UK Office for National Statistics ethnic groups) are unlikely to be sufficient for granular analysis. Although birth country is often easily observable, alongside arrival year and (in some cases) age, gender, and legal status, it can only capture some of the shifts implied in superdiversity (Meissner 2015). More than 40% of the non-​White British population, for example, was born in the United Kingdom.2 Macro-​ethnic classifications such as “White,” “Asian/​ Asian British,” and “Black African/​Caribbean/​British” have been criticized for hiding important variations, having a limited relation to real-​world contexts, and focusing on

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity    63 visible appearance. Notably, in the 2011 Census the second-​largest minority group was the uninformatively named “White Other.”3 Name-​origin analysis has been proposed as an alternative that provides rich information across multiple identity bases, where groups have a common geographical, linguistic, or ethnic origin (Mateos 2007). The intuition is that naming practices reflect long-​standing norms and “ethno-​cultural customs” that map to both specific ethnic and cultural groups—​for better or worse, see Benjamin (2020)—​and specific geographies (Mateos, Longley, and O’Sullivan 2011). Specifically, to the extent that naming practices are distinctive among different groups, a network of forenames and surnames will show clusters of forename-​surname combinations, or “communities” in the language of social network analysis. Researchers working in this field typically combine large name databases (from electoral rolls or phone directories) with probabilistic methods, which are then validated against reference databases of names whose provenance is known. Name-​origin approaches, by proxying culture, ethnicity, religion, and language separately, potentially offer some of the granularity and flexibility required to get at the realities of superdiversity. Nevertheless, name scoring alone is also an incomplete proxy for superdiversity. It is unable to distinguish country of birth, arrival pathways, or legal status (and so cannot directly distinguish recent migrants or those not yet on electoral registers). It can also suffer from measurement error related to international languages—​such as Spanish and English—​where naming practices may span many countries. In the rest of this chapter, I will use name-​based analysis of distinct cultural-​ethnic-​ linguistic (CEL) groups to highlight the importance of granularity in thinking about and analyzing superdiversity—​here understood as a diversity of individual demographic attributes. The analysis will test how CEL links to economic outcomes across different local contexts, controlling for other area socioeconomic characteristics. I will compare these results to those based on cruder, more conventional “diversity” measures, specifically, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) ethnic groupings. In the conclusion, I discuss how bringing in further aspects of superdiversity—​variation in attributes, processes and contexts—​could productively complicate the picture. My CEL groups are derived from UK electoral roll data processed via the OnoMap classification system. OnoMap uses forename-​ surname combinations to assign individuals probabilistically into CEL groups (see Table 4.1 for examples). Groups are derived from classifying forename-​surname combinations in electoral registers or phone directories of 26 countries, covering around 300,000 people, then validated against cross-​country reference lists of surnames derived from academic literature or official statistics (Lakha, Gorman, and Mateos 2011; Mateos, Longley, and O’Sullivan 2011). Using OnoMap goes some way toward addressing the measurement concerns outlined here. Lakha, Gorman, and Mateos (2011) test birth registration, pupil census, and health data for over 260,000 individuals in the United Kingdom; OnoMap matches over 99% of names and gives a measurement error of less than 5%. OnoMap also explicitly models country and region-​level variations of Spanish and English names

64   Max Nathan (for example, including a range of African, Caribbean, and North American English groups). OnoMap also separately scores names on religious tradition, geographic origin, ethnic background, or common linguistic heritage, but I am unable to access these detailed scores for this analysis.

Empirics I explore the conceptual framework (described in the section “A Framework for the Economic Analysis of Superdiversity”) by looking at the UK experience in the early 2000s, the period that immediately followed the emergence of superdiversity as outlined by Vertovec (2007). I first look at demographic diversity across local areas in 2001. Next, I test linkages between area differences in superdiversity in 2001 and local economic outcomes in the five years following. Along the lines described in the section “Metrics,” I proxy superdiversity through OnoMap-​based fractionalization indices (Alesina and Ferrara 2005; Ottaviano and Peri 2005). Specifically, the indices take the number of cultural/​ethnic, linguistic, and geographical-​origin name groups in a location and their relative sizes to give indices ranging from zero (nondiverse) to one (very diverse). As noted earlier, this metric simplifies superdiversity by focusing on the area-​level aggregation of specific individual attributes, across different local contexts (urban, nonurban). In the conclusion I set out some ways for future empirical research to complicate this picture. I build the Index for 65 OnoMap Cultural-​Ethnic-​Linguistic (CEL) groups using 2001 electoral roll data for the adult population of Great Britain.4 As a comparator, I also build a more conventional index for the six main ethnic groups defined by the ONS as of 2001, using 2001 Labour Force Survey data for the working-​age population.5 My final dataset covers the 232 Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) in Great Britain, as defined for 2001. TTWAs are defined as self-​contained commuting zones, and they represent the best available approximations for local economies (Bond and Coombes 2007).6 Within these I identify “primary urban” TTWAs which contain cities of at least 125,000 people (Gibbons, Overman et al. 2011). This allows me to compare outcomes in primary urban versus less urban/​rural areas.

Descriptive Analysis Table 4.1 shows population shares by the 25 largest OnoMap CEL groups in 2001, and for comparison, all six ONS macro-​ethnic groups for the same year. The 25 largest CEL groups cover over 99% of all names. English, Celtic, Scottish, and Welsh name groups make up the vast majority of the 2001 electoral roll, followed by a range of South Asian–​heritage name groups, then a mix of European, East and West African, and East Asian-​heritage groups. This mix reflects both the United Kingdom’s colonial past and its geographic proximity to the rest of Europe. OnoMap also picks

Table 4.1. 2001 Great Britain Population Shares by 25 Biggest OnoMap CEL Name Groups and All ONS Ethnic Groups. CEL subgroup

%

ONS group

%

ENGLISH

68.08

White

97.58

CELTIC

12.22

Asian /​Asian British

1.29

SCOTTISH

5.52

Black /​Black British

0.51

IRISH

3.94

Other

0.27

WELSH

2.63

Mixed

0.19

PAKISTANI

1.16

Chinese

0.16

INDIAN HINDI

0.9

OTHER MUSLIM

0.8

SIKH

0.74

ITALIAN

0.4

BANGLADESHI

0.32

OTHER EUROPEAN

0.3

POLISH

0.24

GREEK

0.24

CHINESE

0.23

NIGERIAN

0.18

GERMAN

0.16

PORTUGUESE

0.16

OTHER SOUTH ASIAN

0.15

FRENCH

0.15

SPANISH

0.15

PAKISTANI KASHMIR

0.14

SRI LANKAN

0.11

JEWISH

0.11

TURKISH

0.1

Note: The OTHER MUSLIM subgroup includes CEL name types “Balkan Muslim,” “Malaysian Muslim,” “Muslim Indian,” “Sudanese,” “West African Muslim,” and “Other Muslim” (smaller Middle Eastern countries, North African countries, Central Asian Reps). OTHER SOUTH ASIAN includes “Asian Caribbean,” “Bengali,” “Bhutanese,” “Guyanese Asian,” “Kenyan Asian,” “Nepalese,” “Parsi,” “Seychellois,” “South Asian,” and “Tamil.” JEWISH includes “Jewish/​Ashkenazi,” and “Sephardic Jewish.” Source: Electoral Register /​OnoMap, Labour Force Survey.

66   Max Nathan out specific ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic groupings not usually visible in official categories, which can be further disaggregated (for example, “Muslim Other” breaks down into Balkan, Malaysian, Indian, Sudanese, West African, and other name groups). Reassuringly, the ONS groups are broadly consistent by size, but offer far less detail by construction. Table 4.2 shows the CEL and ONS indices by area for the 20 most diverse TTWAs in 2001. Here, the differences between the two measures are striking. The ONS Index returns a familiar list of large cities and urban areas that are established “diverse locations” (London, Birmingham, Leicester) and/​or contain large and well-​known minority populations of varying South Asian, African, and Caribbean heritage. By contrast, the CEL Index returns a very different list of locations. Within it we can pick out five overlapping groups. First, Scottish and Welsh cities (Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Dundee, Edinburgh, Swansea Bay, Cardiff). Second, English cities close to

Table 4.2. The 20 Most Diverse Areas by CEL Name Group Index and ONS Ethnic Groups Index TTWA name

CEL Index

TTWA name

ONS Index

Crawley

0.811

London

0.427

Glasgow

0.739

Birmingham

0.367

Lanarkshire

0.725

Wolverhampton

0.337

Dundee

0.697

Bradford

0.317

Edinburgh

0.693

Leicester

0.291

Worcester & Malvern

0.689

Huddersfield

0.268

Aberdeen

0.681

Rochdale & Oldham

0.242

Wycombe & Slough

0.668

Blackburn

0.237

London

0.635

Bolton

0.231

Swansea Bay

0.634

Bedford

0.223

Luton & Watford

0.631

Wycombe & Slough

0.219

Stoke-​on-​Trent

0.629

Burnley, Nelson & Colne

0.186

Wirral & Ellesmere Port

0.623

Luton & Watford

0.185

Ipswich

0.613

Leeds

0.181

Oxford

0.602

Coventry

0.167

Cardiff

0.572

Manchester

0.163

Gloucester

0.571

Dudley & Sandwell

0.152

Portsmouth

0.56

Nottingham

0.138

Leicester

0.555

Milton Keynes & Aylesbury

0.133

Blackburn

0.554

Derby

0.132

Source: Electoral Register /​OnoMap, Labour Force Survey.

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity    67 Scottish/​Welsh borders, such as Gloucester. Third, coastal areas (Wirral, Portsmouth, Swansea Bay, Cardiff, Ipswich). Fourth, London and towns/​cities in the wider London commuting zone (Crawley, Wycombe and Slough, Luton and Watford, Oxford). Fifth, other known “diverse cities” (Leicester, Oxford, Blackburn). These simple exercises highlight the relative affordances of conventional versus frontier metrics. The fine-​grained analysis allowed by the CEL approach shows both the deep-​rooted diversity of many British cities and the influence of geography on more recent changes, and gives some sense of the emerging social, cultural, and religious formations highlighted in the extant superdiversity literature. By contrast, the ONS categories simply reproduce an established picture of “official” diversity without picking up shifts related to emerging superdiversity.

Regression Analysis Next, I look at associations between area superdiversity in 2001, and at changes in wages and house prices in the following five years. To do this, I build a cross-​sectional dataset covering diversity and control variables in 2001, plus the change in wages and house prices from 2001 to 2006. I control for a number of area-​level socioeconomic characteristics, including the share of degree holders, share female population, share population under age 30, share long term unemployed, share employed in manufacturing/​services, and the log of population density.7 Wage data come from the Labour Force Survey, as before. House price data come from the Land Registry Price Paid dataset and are available for England and Wales only. I test for statistically significant linkages from area-​level superdiversity, as proxied by the two Indices, and subsequent changes in wages/​productivity or housing costs. Wage regressions test the production-​side channels set out in the “Metrics” section of the chapter, using the five-​year change in wages as indicative of underlying labor productivity shifts. House price regressions test consumption-​side channels. To test for “amplifying” effects of cities, I also fit an interaction of the superdiversity measure with a dummy variable for urban areas: This helps flag any additional effect of urban superdiversity specifically. Table 4.3 shows results for wages (top) and house prices (bottom). In each case, column 1 fits CEL name-​group diversity against outcomes; column 2 adds controls; column 3 adds the urban area interaction. For comparison, columns 4–​6 repeat using the crude ONS Index. For wages, I find that a 10% rise in the CEL Index is robustly linked to a 1.2% drop in average wages across all TTWAs in the following five years, controlling for area socioeconomic characteristics (column 2). However, for urban areas I find a strong positive link, while for nonurban areas the negative link remains (column 3). In cities, a 10% rise in name-​group diversity—​say, shifting Birmingham’s name-​group diversity to that of London—​is linked to 1.9% higher wages in the following five years. In contrast, the wider effect of urban location on wage growth is close to zero and only marginally significant.

Table 4.3. Links between Diversity (2001) and Wages/​House Prices (2001–​2006) Log wages, 2001–​2006

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

CEL name groups

−0.078*

−0.120**

−0.178***

Index, 2001 ONS ethnic groups

(0.044)

(0.047)

(0.064) 0.062

−​0.051

−​0.269

Index, 2001

(0.085)

(0.095)

(0.373)

Urban TTWA

−0.002

−0.082*

−0.016

−0.024

(0.018)

(0.042)

(0.019)

(0.024)

Urban * CEL Index

0.190** (0.088)

Urban * ONS Index

0.237 (0.368)

Controls

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Observations

211

205

205

232

222

222

F-​statistic

3.137

5.306

4.929

0.527

2.429

2.171

R2

0.016

0.176

0.192

0.001

0.092

0.093

Log house prices, 2001–​2006 (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

CEL name groups

0.128*

0.131**

0.193***

Index, 2001

(0.065)

(0.056)

(0.070)

ONS ethnic groups

−0.227**

0.020

−1.029**

Index, 2001

(0.108)

(0.101)

(0.406)

Urban TTWA

0.039*

0.116**

0.047*

0.008

(0.023)

(0.051)

(0.024)

(0.028)

Urban * CEL Index

−0.189* (0.109)

Urban * ONS Index

1.119*** (0.402)

Controls

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Observations

158

156

156

179

173

173

F-​statistic

3.862

8.925

7.984

4.452

7.593

7.113

R2

0.029

0.373

0.384

0.021

0.282

0.309

Controls and constant not shown. Standard errors in parentheses, clustered on Travel to Work Area. *  =​statistically significant result at 10% level; **  =​significant at 5% level; ***  =​significant at 1%. Source: Electoral Register, Labour Force Survey, 2001 Census, Land Registry.

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity    69 This result is consistent with superdiversity-​productivity channels being stronger in bigger cities through some combination of larger and more diverse populations, amplifying effects of agglomeration economies, or both. In nonurban areas, the negative result is consistent with smaller minority populations, lack of amplifying effects, hostility/​discrimination, or a combination of these. Notably, while the ONS Index gives similar results (columns 5 and 6), coefficients are smaller and less precisely estimated, with larger standard errors. Results are therefore not statistically significant. For house prices, which are estimated only for England and Wales, I find positive associations between higher name-​group diversity in 2001 and house prices five years later: in column 2, a 10% rise in the CEL Index is linked to 1.3% higher house prices. This is driven by nonurban areas, whereas for urban areas the diversity-​prices link is negative but only marginally significant (column 3). However, these results are reversed for the simpler ONS Index, and effect sizes are almost ten times larger: in bigger cities, a 10% rise in diversity is linked to an 11.2% rise in five-​year house prices, while in nonurban areas the same change is linked to a 10.3% fall.

Conclusions Superdiversity, while still a conceptual work in progress (Vertovec 2019), remains a powerful device for understanding urban demographic change. This chapter has discussed the urban economics of superdiversity. It sets out a simple framework in which the emergence of superdiversity—​at individual, group, and area levels—​has a range of economic impacts, both on the production side (entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity, wages, trade) and the consumption side (amenities, cost of living). In theory, impacts can be positive or negative. In practice a large body of cross-​country research identifies positive effects—​albeit from much cruder diversity metrics, typically built from single individual attributes, usually country-​of-​birth data. Quantifying superdiversity more completely is thus a prerequisite for economic analysis, but this is very challenging to do in practice, given the complexity of the phenomenon (see Aspinall, this volume; Lessard-​Phillips and Fajth, this volume). In this chapter I have used simplified name-​ based proxies of superdiversity, focused on modeled individual cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious attributes, to explore the United Kingdom’s experience in the early 2000s, a period of great demographic change. I find some evidence linking name-​based demographic patterns in 2001 to subsequent productivity and wage growth in urban areas during the 2000s; by contrast, CEL house-​price linkages are positive overall but negative for urban areas. On the face of it, these results provide support for the broader notion that superdiversity is an urban economic “asset” and can be deployed in local economic development programs, as many cities have already sought to do (Florida 2002). Nevertheless, the house-​price results suggest a more complex picture in which (super) diversity may be both a productive asset and a consumption disamenity, at least in the

70   Max Nathan eyes of some resident populations. That is, people may value superdiversity at work but not close to home. Further work is needed to understand these linkages (Cooke and Kemeny 2017). Using cruder diversity metrics based on macro-​ethnic groups gives notably different results. This divergence provides further support to the argument of Lessard-​ Phillips and Fajth that how we quantify complex social phenomena may lead to significant differences in our picture of social reality. More broadly, the superdiversity proxy used in this chapter is both experimental and highly simplified, modeling specific salient individual attributes (culture, language, religious heritage) across different area contexts. Although my regression analysis controls for the influence of area context and salient area-​level socioeconomic characteristics (human capital, age and gender distribution, labor market conditions, industry mix), I am unable to directly break down my superdiversity metric along these lines. That is, I cannot directly examine the interplay between these different aspects of superdiversity in practice. As noted in “Metrics” above, to the extent the existing empirical literature grapples with these issues, studies find larger positive impacts from higher-​skilled migrant groups, skilled migrant diversity, and higher human-​capital diasporas (for example, South and East-​Asian heritage groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of whom are skilled tech/​engineering workers or graduates of Bay Area universities or both). How might future conceptual and empirical quantitative work bring this complexity back in? At the conceptual level, economists need to deploy a framework that complements aggregate measures—​such as those used here—​with other metrics that proxy currently missing dimensions. Recent case-​study work by Vertovec et al. (2018) shows one possible route forward, delineating superdiversity in terms of diversity of ethnicity, religion, migrant generation, income, education, legal status and mobility. At the empirical level, having administrative datasets from many countries would—​ in theory—​allow us to combine CEL-​type information with country of birth, year of arrival, age, gender, labor market status (including students) and formal qualifications, straightforwardly at the area level and in theory at the individual level through microdata linkage. This would go some way toward allowing us to observe multiple salient dimensions of superdiversity at a range of scales, and crucially, the intersections of these dimensions. On the other hand, processes and flows—​notably, arrival routes and frequency/​distance of international mobility—​are much harder to capture structurally, at least through conventional datasets. Similarly, future quantitative work on superdiversity needs to seek to understand and represent relationships or linkages between groups. Complexity-​ based approaches could be used to embody—​ for example—​historical connections or hierarchies. This work needs to be informed by qualitative, on-​the-​ground work that seeks to map lived experience (Blommaert 2013; Meissner 2015). It should be noted that my empirics only explore the immediate early 2000s. A longer time horizon would cover continued migration and demographic change, as well as A8 Accession and Brexit. More broadly, it is critical to explore linkages between

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity    71 policy regimes and shocks on people flows and urban population change, both through borders and refugee movements (Hall 2017), but also broader migration policies—​such as points systems and migration caps, as well as emerging post-​Brexit systems in the United Kingdom.

Notes 1. The migration patterns and demography in the United Kingdom shifted further when a number of East European countries, plus Malta and Cyprus, joined the European Union in 2004. The UK was one of the only countries not to impose controls on labor market access to migrants from these countries. 2. Data from the 2011 Census. For Black and minority ethnic groups the figure is higher at 48%. Accessed via Nomis, March 23, 2021, http://​www.nomis​web.co.uk/​cen​sus/​2011/​lc220​5ew. 3. White British, 45,134,686; Asian/​Asian British, 4,213,531; White Other, 2,845,942; Black/​ African/​Caribbean/​Black British, 1,864,890; Other ethnic group, 563,696. Accessed via Nomis, March 23, 2021, http://​www.nomis​web.co.uk/​cen​sus/​2011/​ks20​1ew. 4. Data for Northern Ireland are not available. To the extent electoral roll data underrepresent minority ethnic communities, especially in urban areas, OnoMap-​based estimates will be lower bounds. 5. I drop Northern Ireland to make the data directly comparable with OnoMap estimates. I work with the quarterly microdata, keeping Wace 1 respondents and pooling to produce calendar years. I restrict the analysis to the ONS official working-​age population (16–​64 for men and 16–​59 for women). 6. Specifically, TTWAs are defined as an area where at least 70% of residents work in the area, and vice versa. Labour Force Survey and OnoMap data are only available at the Local Authority District (LAD) level, which do not represent real local economies. As district boundaries are not congruent with TTWA boundaries, I adopt a two-​stage linking procedure. For LFS data, I first aggregate individual data to LAD averages using LFS weights. Next, for all data, using the November 2008 National Postcode Sector Database, I calculate the number of postcodes in each 2001 TTWA and in each of its constituent LADs. I then calculate each LAD’s “postcode share” of the relevant TTWAs’ total postcodes. For each TTWA, shares sum to one. Shares are then used to construct TTWA-​level averages from the relevant LAD-​level averages. 7. Control variables are all built from the Labour Force Survey, apart from population density, which is taken from the 2001 Census.

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Chapter 5

Hum an Ri g h ts , In tersectiona l i t y, a nd Su perdive rsi t y Kristin Henrard

Introduction Providing an overall perspective on law and superdiversity is not feasible within the contours of a short chapter in a handbook. Indeed, in multiple fields of law there are many legal concepts whose interpretation would be influenced if a superdiversity angle were adopted. Specific attention has already been paid, inter alia, to questions of language, law, and superdiversity (five chapters in the 2018 Routledge Handbook on Language and Superdiversity: Creese and Blackledge 2018) and the stratification of legal status (Shachar and Hirschl 2013). Several other questions about the interaction between law and superdiversity merit scrutiny, such as questions concerning custody, effective entitlements to benefits, equal access to education, and the right to a fair trial and procedural justice. This chapter homes in on human rights, particularly, intersectional discrimination. Liberal democracies are committed to respecting fundamental rights in their policies and practices. This is no different now that societies are becoming characterized by, in the words of Vertovec (2007), “superdiversity.” Whereas superdiversity has been given a variety of meanings, it is used here to highlight the variety of subgroups that can be distinguished within ethnic minority groups, in line with the multiple identities humans tend to have. Indeed, superdiversity does not refer merely to the increasing diversification of ethnic groups because of multiple migration patterns; it also refers to the recognition of diversity within these ethnic groups. In theory, it is possible to adopt a variety of “human rights perspectives to superdiversity.” This chapter focuses on “intersectional discrimination” because intersectionality is conceptually aligned with superdiversity, and the prohibition of discrimination plays a central role in legal strategies concerning population

76   Kristin Henrard diversity (Henrard 2019; see also the European Commission’s communication on the EU Antiracism action plan 2020-​2025 COM(2020) 565 final, 1). Intersectional discrimination seems indeed an apt lens through which to “legally” capture and address superdiversity, as both “intersectionality” and “superdiversity” alert us to the lack of homogeneity within ethnic groups, and the multiple axes of differentiation within these groups, with intersectional discrimination highlighting a distinct mode of discrimination on intersecting grounds (Humphris 2015). Furthermore, because the empirical reality of superdiversity is bound to result in increasing intersectional discrimination, it becomes even more essential to properly identify and assess such instances of discrimination. The 2015 Eurobarometer on discrimination in the European Union arguably bears this out when it indicates that around one-​fourth of all discrimination experienced by respondents is of a multiple nature (European Union, 2015, 8). Considering that the law, its reach, and implications are, to an important extent, determined by how courts interpret and apply legal norms, it seems equally important to consider the (quasi) jurisprudence of a range of international (quasi) courts (Venzke 2012). This chapter provides legal perspectives on superdiversity through its focus on intersectional discrimination and proceeds along three broad lines. First, it highlights the importance of having regard for intersectional discrimination and how it enriches nondiscrimination analysis, which is especially relevant in superdiverse societies. Secondly, it explores what a proper (explicit or implicit) identification of intersectional discrimination and a suitable assessment thereof would be, paying special attention to the level of scrutiny adopted by the courts, the interests identified, and the remedies awarded if a violation of the prohibition of discrimination is found. Third, it reveals the hesitation, even reluctance, of a range of international courts and quasi-​courts to actually proceed. The analysis shows obvious differences of degree concerning the extent to which the United Nations treaty bodies, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) are even willing to identify intersectional discrimination, let alone properly evaluate it. To conclude, the chapter identifies an urgent need to develop a comprehensive methodology for assessing instances of intersectional discrimination. The latter methodology is essential to develop non-​discrimination laws and policies that are suitable for superdiverse societies.

What “Intersectional Discrimination” Brings to the Table—​of Special Relevance for Superdiverse Societies The prohibition of discrimination seeks to root out the stereotypes and prejudices that underlie discrimination (Quinn 2016, 67). Allowing actions imbued by these stereotypes and prejudices would jeopardize the basic principles of equal treatment and equal opportunities for all, central tenets of liberal democracies (Becker 1992, 89–​90). Traditionally, the prohibition of discrimination and related non-discrimination policies and legislation have been conceived from the single-​axis angle: prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race, sexual orientation, etc. This single-​axis focus is particularly

Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity    77 visible in the elaboration of conventions that focus on a particular ground of discrimination, such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. It can be argued that having special regard for discrimination on certain so-​called suspect grounds, identifying more specific norms in this regard, and more strictly scrutinizing differentiations on these grounds constitute an important development of non-discrimination law, improving the effective protection against discrimination (O’Connell 2009). Nevertheless, when the attention on suspect grounds is caught in a single-​axis frame, it is reductionist and fails to properly capture (and address) the underlying layers of disadvantage (Quinn 2016, 69–​72). It is important to be fully aware of the fact that we are never identified by one characteristic only. Instead, we combine different identities—​race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The recognition of intersectional discrimination highlights that we also experience specific and complex disadvantage, not because of one identity marker, but because of an intersection of such grounds (Makkonen 2002, 9). Put differently, adopting an intersectional angle does more justice to actual lived, accumulated, and often structural prejudice and related disadvantage minorities face (Crenshaw 1991, 1243). Kimberlé Crenshaw pointed out the particular disadvantages of Black women, in the sense that the combination of being a woman and being Black leads to distinct forms of unjustifiable disadvantage (Crenshaw 1991, 1247–​1250). The disadvantages suffered by Black women cannot be captured by looking only at race or only at the gender dimension: There is a particular disadvantage that results from being Black and a woman (Crenshaw 1989). Adopting an intersectional angle on discrimination also requires adapted assessment methods and the need for appropriate remedies (Truscan and Bourge-​Martignoni 2016, 105). The disadvantage suffered due to discrimination on intersecting grounds is very specific. This, in turn, triggers reflections on questions of proof and of effective remedies. Recognizing intersectional discrimination would remedy the problem for victims in the single-​axis approach, namely that victims had to prove distinct instances of discrimination on the respective grounds that are implicated. Intersectional discrimination instead focuses on intersectionality, not on the accumulation of the respective grounds. Relatedly, the intersectional discrimination approach highlights and alerts the courts to structural disadvantages (Smith 2016, 81). Furthermore, properly quantifying disadvantage is particularly important for determining effective remedies for instances of intersectional discrimination (presupposing identification of the intersectionality). The need for an effective remedy can be considered an inherent component of each fundamental right because it is directly related to the effective enjoyment of that right (Iordache and Ionescu 2014, 11-​12). However, human rights conventions also enshrine a distinct right to an effective remedy (Harris, O’Boyle, and Warbrick 2018, 744–​745; European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) 1950, art. 13; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 1966, art. 2; American Convention on Human Rights, art. 25).

78   Kristin Henrard Determining what an effective remedy will be depends on all the circumstances of the case. Jurisprudence has clarified that an effective remedy should be able to prevent or discontinue the alleged violation and should provide “adequate redress” for the violations that occurred (Harris, O’Boyle, and Warbrick 2018, 750). Obviously, the determination of what constitutes adequate redress must be informed by a proper understanding of the disadvantage suffered. Because the intersectional approach enables the proper quantification of the disadvantage suffered, it also helps to expose the root causes of structural disadvantage and points to the suitable remedies (Quinn 2016, 69–​70). But exactly because of the structural disadvantages at play, monetary compensation may not be sufficient, and concrete (structural) measures may be required. The line of thinking on the added value of the intersectional discrimination lens is valid for all kinds of intersection of grounds, and thus for disadvantages encountered by, for example, homosexual Muslims, Jewish disabled men, Lesbian African women, and so on. Nor does intersectionality stop at the intersection of two grounds; it can also concern more grounds. This is typically the case for several instances of Islamophobia, where not only grounds of religion and ethnicity/​race are intersecting but also gender (Trispiotis 2019, 14). Well-​known examples include measures targeting headscarves and burkas, since they discriminate against Muslim women as both an ethnic and a religious group. As the preceding examples of intersectionality reveal, recognizing intersectional discrimination is of special relevance to capture the particular disadvantage and marginalization of minorities within minorities (Malloy 2010, 260–​261). Identifying and providing redress for intersectional discrimination goes beyond mere formal equality, and contributes to substantive or real equality (Smith 2016, 81). At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the assessment of intersectional discrimination has its challenges. As a nondiscrimination analysis is an inherently comparative exercise, it requires the identification of a comparator that does not possess the specific characteristic on which the discrimination is alleged to be grounded (Fredman 2010, chap. 1). Identifying the appropriate comparator for intersectional discrimination cases is challenging and complicates the establishment of intersectional discrimination. Considering the conceptual alignment of intersectionality on the one hand and superdiversity on the other, developing a better understanding of intersectional discrimination and how it matters in the fight against discrimination is thus highly relevant for superdiverse societies and their government. The following section will further elaborate the proper identification and assessment of intersectional discrimination at the level of theories and principles of non-discrimination law.

What the Proper Identification and Assessment of Intersectional Discrimination May Imply Properly identifying instances of intersectional discrimination is arguably an important preliminary step: Questions of assessment only arise when an instance of intersectional discrimination is actually identified. The identification of intersectional discrimination

Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity    79 presupposes that a differentiation (or lack thereof) is not merely investigated in relation to one ground of distinction but in relation to multiple grounds of distinction that are intersecting. It is not necessary to use the term intersectional discrimination, as long as it is recognized that a particular disadvantage is meted out to—​or disproportionately affects—​a distinct subgroup within a minority, implying the intersection of multiple grounds. For example, measures that disproportionately affect Muslim women’s manifestation of their religion, may amount to indirect discrimination on the intersecting grounds of religion, gender, and race/​ethnicity. Admittedly, political scientists are divided on the need to mention the issue of intersectionality in legal texts (Lombardo and Rolandsen 2012, 492–​493). Some studies have shown that the institutionalization of intersectionality is neither necessary nor sufficient to optimize its implementation (Verloo et al. 2012, 530–​532). But other—​also legal—​scholars have argued that a specific mention of intersectionality would facilitate its application (Moon 2011, 170–​171). In this respect, it is a welcome development that some legal texts, such as the UN Migrant Workers’ Convention, mention intersecting inequalities explicitly. Still, and more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, it is commonly accepted that the current paradigm of non-discrimination law already fully allows law practitioners and judges to adopt an intersectional approach, including when the term is not explicitly enshrined (Satterthwaite 2004, 169–​170). It therefore can be opined that it may not be necessary to include the notion of intersectional discrimination in legal documents, but that doing so nonetheless may increase awareness of and alertness to the issue by (international) courts, public officials, and professionals and, in turn, to the enhanced recognition and identification of instances of intersectional discrimination. The subsequent assessment and evaluation of the possible instances of intersectional discrimination invites reflection on at least two factors: the determination of the proper level of scrutiny, and the remedies provided. The crucial factor in determining the level of scrutiny is the ground of differentiation. Some grounds of differentiation have been identified as “suspect”; these tend to be either immutable (e.g., race) or closely bound up with personal identity (e.g., religion), and they go hand in hand with histories of deep-​rooted discrimination, related expressions of prejudice and stigmatization (Ely 1980, 150–​154), and the increased vulnerability of the affected group (Peroni and Timmer 2013, 1074–​1075). Differentiations on such suspect grounds tend to trigger heightened scrutiny. It has been noted that other factors may add nuance to this level of scrutiny, such as the absence of consensus on a particular type of measure and related contextual matters (Gerstmann and Shortell 2010, 52). When there is an intersection of more than one ground, this actually leads to intricate questions about the appropriate level of review, especially when suspect grounds play a role but the alleged perpetrator also has legitimate reasons for certain decisions or actions, or when more than one suspect ground is at play. It can be argued that the intersection of a suspect and a non-​suspect ground still triggers heightened scrutiny

80   Kristin Henrard because the suspect ground has a bearing on the decision taken, which is per se suspect. This is borne out by US legislation and case law regarding so-​called mixed motives (Civil Rights Act 1964, Title VII, pertaining to employment discrimination). Relatedly, when two or more suspect grounds intersect, it invites an even higher level of scrutiny or, in the words of US jurisprudence on equal protection, “strict scrutiny plus” because there is a double reason to be suspicious (Carbado and Crenshaw 2019), considering the increased vulnerability of the victims. Similar considerations about vulnerability could steer both the identification of all relevant interests and the relative weight attached to these interests in the proportionality review (Henrard 2019, 152–​153). In human rights law, remedies for human rights violations should be “effective” (ICCPR, art. article 2, 3; ECHR, art. 13; EU Charter Fundamental Rights, art. 47). A common thread in relation to the effectiveness of remedies is that they should be suitably tailored to the damage suffered and thus sufficient and capable of directly remedying the situation (inter alia ECHR, Guide on Article 13, Right to an Effective Remedy, §36). In this respect, reference has been made to the need to take into account the special vulnerability of certain categories of persons (Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 31, § 15), and thus also enhanced vulnerability due to an intersection of grounds. As intersectional discrimination is a severe or aggravating form of discrimination, the ensuing damage is more extensive (Fredman 2016, 52). Dinah Shelton highlights in this respect the heightened harm caused to the victim when discriminatory animus and its underlying prejudice are known to have played a role (Shelton 2015, 267). When multiple prejudices intersect, the resulting harm is similarly more acute. Fredman highlights, in her 2016 Report on Intersectional Discrimination for the European Commission, that EU member states’ statutes often provide for enhanced compensation (acknowledging the more severe damage caused), while at times identifying enhanced powers for inspectorates or equality bodies aimed at redressing disadvantages suffered and optimizing full participation in society.

Engagement with Intersectional Discrimination by International Courts: A Question of Degree The analysis that follows considers the extent to which a range of international courts actually engage with intersectional discrimination. This engagement can be discussed at two levels: the first involves the preliminary question of identifying instances of intersectional discrimination; and the second involves the methodology the courts used in assessing such cases. The supervisory bodies discussed here include not only the two key European courts, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, but also the United Nations treaty bodies. For the two European courts, the analysis on intersectional discrimination needs to be understood against the respective overarching development lines of non-discrimination law and jurisprudence. It is well-​known and extensively documented that the ECtHR for a long time had a rather meager non-discrimination jurisprudence, owing to a combination of at

Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity    81 least two trends. On the one hand, when the Court concluded there had been a violation of a substantive right, the nondiscrimination analysis would no longer be necessary. On the other hand, when the Court did engage in a nondiscrimination analysis, it tended to apply such a light level of scrutiny that it hardly ever identified a violation of the prohibition of discrimination (Henrard 2009, 317–​318; O’Connell 2009). In line with the dynamic nature of human rights law, however, the court’s jurisprudence on nondiscrimination did evolve and become stronger (Henrard 2016). In any event, the court has been offering higher levels of protection against discrimination, particularly on suspect grounds (De Schutter 2005; O’Connell 2009). Notwithstanding these promising developments, so far, the ECtHR has not explicitly identified instances of intersectional discrimination in any of its judgments. On occasion, the ECHR has been ready to de facto acknowledge that persons were discriminated against on an intersection of grounds going hand in hand with a particular predicament and heightened vulnerability (Smith 2016; Henrard 2019). An often-​highlighted example of this is the case B.S. v. Spain, where the Court established a prohibited discrimination against a Nigerian woman who worked as a prostitute, following her complaint about racist police violence. Some authors emphasize the linkage between the Court’s argumentation in terms of “particular vulnerability” and the concept of intersectionality (La Barbera and Lopez 2019, 1167). Nevertheless, the Court does not explicitly note the intersection of multiple grounds of differentiation (ethnicity, gender, and a particularly “vulnerable” profession). Its evaluation of the complaint merely emphasizes that the applicant is particularly vulnerable because she is “an African women working as a prostitute” (ECtHR, B.S. v. Spain, 24 July 2012, par. 62). In other words, the acknowledgment of intersectionality is, at most, implicit. Moreover, in several other cases concerning intersectional discrimination, the Court has not shown a sensitivity to several grounds being at play at the same time, seemingly missing the intersectionality in these cases. This has been particularly visible in several cases concerning the sterilization of Roma women, where gender and ethnicity crucially intersect (ECtHR, V.C. v. Slovakia, 8 November 2011; ECtHR, N.B. v. Slovakia, 12 June 2012). Ignoring this intersection, amounts to obfuscating that the systemic gender violence against Roma women is different from gender violence against other women, and different from violence against men. The ECtHR’s hesitation, even reluctance, to identify and fully engage with intersectionality in its non-discrimination analysis has indeed been glaring in several cases. A particularly relevant case in terms of superdiversity is the (in)famous S.A.S. v. France (1 July 2014), in which the Court was faced for the first time with a national measure that de facto amounted to (and was dubbed) a burqa ban. The French legislature had passed a measure that criminalized the wearing of clothing that concealed the face in public. Several NGOs argued, as intervening third parties, that this measure concerned intersectional discrimination against Muslim women (S.A.S. v. France, par. 90, 93, and 97), pointing to the intersection of religion and gender. In its ruling, the ECtHR explicitly takes note of the claim of these intervening parties about Islamophobic remarks made during the legislative process and notes the risk the country thus runs

82   Kristin Henrard of consolidating harmful stereotypes of particular groups (par. 149). The Court does refer several times to the particular disadvantage suffered by Muslim women, and thus implicitly considers the intersection of religion and gender. However, the ECHR chooses not to engage with the notion of intersectional discrimination, does not identify it as such, and does not engage with its translation in the nondiscrimination analysis. Furthermore, the Court does not consider the broader literature that qualifies Islamophobia as a type of racism (Trispiotis 2019, 9) and thus constituting intersectional discrimination on grounds of religion, race, and gender (HRC, Sonia Yaker v. France, 17 July 2018, par. 8.17). Overall, there have indeed been several instances where the ECtHR has shown itself to be aware of the complexity of the social construction of identities, and of the related relative vulnerability. Nevertheless, it remains striking that the Court fails to explicitly recognize intersectional discrimination, and therefore does not develop a comprehensive methodology for identifying and assessing it. When considering the extent to which intersectional discrimination is recognized and suitably translated in the European Union’s non-discrimination analysis, there is a striking divergence between what is visible in legislative instruments and related negotiations, on the one hand, and in the case law of the CJEU, on the other. It is important to recall that the EU did not initially have a strong focus on the prohibition of discrimination as a fundamental right, and the founding treaty did not include a general prohibition of discrimination. Instead, the prohibitions of discrimination enshrined in the founding treaty were confined to the grounds of nationality and gender (Treaty establishing the European Community [EC Treaty] 2002, art. 12, 119; Bell 2002, 32–​50). Both these prohibitions of discrimination were primarily concerned with guaranteeing the internal market: securing free movement rights and preventing competitive disruptions due to differential (employment related) rights for women (Bell 2002). When the Treaty of Amsterdam introduced article 13 into the EC treaty, it added five grounds of discrimination to the existing EU non-discrimination template—​namely, race, religion, sexual orientation, age, and handicap. This seemed to signal a move away from the free-​market rationale and toward what is called a social-​citizenship model (Bell 2002, 121). Interestingly, the development of directives on this legislative basis has gone hand in hand with increased attention to multiple-​ground discrimination. In 2000, recitals (14) and (3) of the Race Equality Directive (2000/​43) and the Framework Equality Directive (2000/​78) respectively recognized for the first time the problem of multiple-​ground discrimination stating “especially . . . women are often the victims of multiple discrimination.” Although this statement is focused on the intersection of gender and other grounds of discrimination and thus has a feminist perspective, a broader intersectional perspective has been proposed in relation to the new non-discrimination directive (beyond the labor market) on grounds of religion, sexual orientation, age, and handicap. However, one of the reasons that this directive has not yet been adopted since its proposal by the Commission in 2008 is the concern of some member states about the practicability of including references to intersecting grounds

Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity    83 of discrimination. The current commission president Ursula von der Leyen has put the further development of non-discrimination legislation high on her agenda (Political Guidelines for the next European Commission 2019–​2024: https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​info/​ sites/​info/​files/​politi​cal-​gui​deli​nes-​next-​comm​issi​on_​e​n_​0.pdf). The extent to which discrimination on intersecting grounds will be explicitly included and regulated remains to be seen. Turning to the case law of the CJEU, it is important to keep in mind that prior to 2000, even when cases involved the intersection of grounds, the CJEU would not have been able to identify discrimination on intersecting grounds of gender and race or religion and ethnicity, etc. (Nielsen 2008, 42). However, post 2000 the CJEU has also failed to recognize instances where grounds of discrimination clearly intersect, let alone developed a comprehensive methodology to assess instances of intersectional discrimination. Nevertheless, in some of the CJEU judgments promising lines of reasoning can be detected that, over time, could assist the Court in developing a framework of analysis tailored to intersectional discrimination. This latter will, in turn, contribute to the development of non-discrimination laws and policies that are suitable for superdiverse societies. The existing lacuna in the CJEU jurisprudence is particularly noteworthy in cases where claimants have explicitly formulated their claims in terms of intersectional discrimination, such as in the Z. case (CJEU, Z. v. A Government department and the Board of management of a community school, C-​363/​12, 18 March 2014: intersection of gender and disability) and in Parris (CJEU, David L. Parris v. Trinity College Dublin and Others, C-​443/​15, 24 November 2016: intersection of age and sexual orientation). In both cases, the litigators emphasized the disadvantage stemming from the intersection of the two grounds concerned (Xenidis 2018, 69), but the CJEU refused to consider the intersectional effect (Moschel 2017, 1848, see, esp. Parris v. Trinity College Dublin and Others, par. 80). And in several other cases, the Court has noticeably failed to recognize instances of clearly intersecting grounds of discrimination. Striking examples concern the CJEU’s two first headscarf cases, in which the CJEU, like the ECtHR, glossed over the Islamophobic context in which seemingly neutral measures amounted to de facto headscarf bans. It has, indeed, been noted elsewhere that the CJEU in Achbita and Bougnaoui, its two first decisions involving dismissals of Muslim female employees for wearing the headscarf at work (Donegan 2020, 151, 160–​161), missed the intersectional disadvantage when restrictions are imposed on the wearing of the headscarf. Such measures necessarily impact women, insofar as they are part of a particular religious community and, in Europe, often also belong to ethnic minorities, thus exposing an intersection of at least two, possibly three, grounds. Fortunately, in a few cases, the CJEU has developed promising reasoning in which it acknowledges intersectionality and shows its understanding of the complexities involved when multiple grounds of differentiation intersect, while also identifying potentially suitable strategies to tackle these complexities. In the Meister case (CJEU, Galina Meister v. Speech Design Carrier Systems GmbH, C-​415/​10, 19 April 2012) concerning a discrimination complaint based on intersecting grounds of sex, age, and ethnic origin, the CJEU acknowledged the difficulty of finding a suitable comparator, and suggested

84   Kristin Henrard taking into account the wider factual context (secs. 37, 38), albeit without clarifying what this contextual assessment would require. The Odar case (CJEU, Johann Odar v. Baxter Deutschland GmbH, C-​152/​11, 6. December 2012), may not seem relevant in a handbook on superdiversity because it concerned the intersecting grounds of age and disability, but the CJEU’s approach to intersectionality in this case nevertheless deserves attention. Although the Court pursued a single-​axis analysis focused on disability, it did account for the particular disadvantage resulting from the intersection of disability and age where it highlighted that severely disabled people’s greater difficulties in finding new employment become further enhanced when they approach retirement age (Odar v. Baxter Deutschland GmbH, par. 69). Put differently, in this case, the CJEU at least implicitly acknowledges intersecting grounds of discrimination, and proceeds with a modulating approach to capture the resulting disadvantage. Overall, the CJEU is only beginning to engage with intersectional discrimination, its explicit identification, and the development of a comprehensive methodology to assess such cases. Finally, the UN treaty bodies were actually the first international human rights bodies to identify and recognize intersectionality and intersectional discrimination (Chow 2016, 463–​464). The United Nations’ attention to intersectionality, and the related complex experiences of disadvantage and oppression, emerged at the turn of the twenty-​first century. The intersectional approach was considered apt to capture the human rights challenges of women and to realize gender mainstreaming (Chow 2016, 464; Campbell 2016, 5–​6). Because the intersectional movement started in relation to the experiences of particular groups of women, this is also the strand that is most developed in the supervisory practice of the treaty bodies. The Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW/​C) even considers duties to legally recognize intersectional discrimination as core obligations (General Recommendation no 28) and identifies state obligations to address intersectional discrimination through policies and programs (see also CERD/​C General Comment no 25; CCPR General Comment no 28, CESCR/​C General Comment no 20, CRPD/​C Comment no 5; Chow 2016, 446). Several UN treaty bodies have developed entire General Comments devoted to particular subgroups, highlighting and addressing their specific intersectional concerns and needs, including indigenous children (CRC/​C General Comment no 11), children with disabilities (CRC/​C General Comment no 9), and women with disabilities (CRPD/​C General Comment no 5). The general recognition of the relative ease with which UN treaty bodies have adopted the term intersectional discrimination and the growing awareness of intersectionality go hand in hand with criticism about the lack of a proper methodology for establishing the full extent of the harm and proper remedies (Zalnieriute and Weiss 2020, 17–​18; Truscan and Bourke-​Martignoni 2016, 122–​123, 130). Admittedly, several General Comments do signal awareness of the need to take into account the specific nature of the synergistic disadvantage produced by intersectional discrimination when devising remedies (e.g., CEDAW/​C, General Recommendation no 28) and the need for states to adopt specific

Human Rights, Intersectionality, and Superdiversity    85 policies and programs (Truscan and Bourke-​Martignoni 2016, 124–​126). Nevertheless, these general comments do not provide much guidance about the parameters to keep in mind when constructing suitable remedies and state policies and programs. The scope of this chapter does not allow for an in-​depth analysis of the quasi-​ jurisprudence of the UN treaty bodies in response to individual complaints. It is striking, though, that the ICCPR’s Human Rights Committee, contrary to the ECtHR and CJEU, has identified intersectional discrimination on gender and religion grounds in cases involving burqa and headscarf bans (Yaker v. France, 17 July 2018; FA v. France, 16 July 2018). Furthermore, states are put on notice that they need to identify strategies to counter instances of intersectional discrimination, including the training of judiciary and legal professionals (CEDAW/​C, R.P.B. v the Philippines, 21 February 2014, 8.9).

Toward Non-discrimination Laws and Policies Suitable for Superdiverse Societies: A Call for a Comprehensive Methodology to Assess Intersectional Discrimination Considering the conceptual alignment of intersectionality and superdiversity, intersectional discrimination seems a promising lens to legally address superdiversity, and particularly, discrimination in superdiverse societies. However, the hesitation and even reluctance of international supervisory bodies to fully engage with intersectional discrimination has blocked the realization of this promise. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and various UN treaty bodies reveals great disparities in terms of the explicit recognition of intersectionality. The European courts recognize intersectionality, at most, implicitly, whereas the UN treaty bodies have been more forthcoming. Further, and relatedly, no suitably adapted methodology for assessing instances of intersectional discrimination has yet been developed. Several “first germs” of such methodology can be identified, though. To some extent, interesting suggestions can be found in the jurisprudence of the CJEU concerning the suitable comparator and the establishment of the disadvantage. To some extent, the supervisory practice of several UN treaty bodies highlights the importance of tailoring remedies to the specific nature of the synergistic disadvantage produced by intersectional discrimination and the need for states to adopt specific training policies and programs. Judicial dialogue among international supervisory bodies is anticipated to further steer this development toward a suitably adapted methodology for instances of intersectional discrimination. This will be essential for developing non-discrimination laws and policies that are suitable for superdiverse societies.

86   Kristin Henrard

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Chapter 6

Superdiversi t y from a Historical Pe rspe c t i v e Marlou Schrover

Introduction When, in 2007, Steven Vertovec introduced the term superdiversity, historians were fast to point out that the word was new, but the phenomenon was not (for an overview, see Foner 2017). This response was not unexpected: As a rule, sociologists emphasize newness, and historians seek to explain continuity and discontinuity. In general, historians are always skeptical when new terms are introduced, asking whether the term or what it describes is really new. For instance, in 1920, 40 percent of the population of New York City was foreign born, as it is now. Currently, 40 percent of the people in London are foreign-born, which is considerably more than the 3.3 percent who were foreign-born in 1920 (Martin 1955). London now looks more like New York. That is interesting, but the question is whether it merits the coinage of a new concept. Do historians need the term superdiversity to be aware of reconfigurations? Does a new concept help historians to ask different questions? How does superdiversity relate to older concepts seeking to explain diversity? This chapter attempts to answer these questions.

Superdiversity Vertovec (2007) defined superdiversity as the “diversification of diversity.” He used it to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the United Kingdom had experienced before (Vertovec 2019). The concept was meant to highlight three aspects (Meissner and Vertovec 2015): (1) changing configurations of people, whereby new immigrants from a broad range of national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds arrived in societies with diverse older populations; (2) diversification of

90   Marlou Schrover migration channels; and (3) diversification of legal statuses, gender and age composition, and human capital. In particular, the “regulatory complexity” (Hall 2017) and the increasing “social complexities related to migration” (Vertovec 2007) were seen as new. Superdiversity could be used (1) descriptively, to describe the three points mentioned above); (2) methodologically, to address complex social formations); and (3) practically, to enable policymakers to deal with complex realities. This last point implied that superdiversity could lead policymakers and implementers to move away from “ethno-​ focal” (or “community”-​based) policies and services. Policies and practices that had worked in the past were no longer seen as useful or relevant in the new superdiverse setting (Berg and Sigona 2013). “Superdiversity . . . emerged at a juncture where old concepts such as integration or assimilation as quasi-​linear processes of migrant incorporation had lost their explanatory power” (Meissner 2015). For Kirwan (2021), superdiversity is a theory that “offers researchers a research lens . . . which overrides simplistic explanatory models that assume a one-​size-​fits-​all approach . . . . The breakthrough which superdiversity theory offered . . . was its capacity to excavate the multi-​ factorial nature of societal change flowing from migration phenomena” (p.2). The observations regarding the linear and simplistic process are a bit surprising. In 1945, there were still some authors who adhered to the straight-​line theory, but in the 1990s, that theory was abandoned based on critiques from, among others, Gans (1992), Rumbaut (1997), and Waldinger and Perlmann (1997). In response, Portes and Zhou (1993) coined the concept segmented assimilation, the idea that the offspring of some immigrants showed not upward mobility but downward mobility. They had assimilated into the lower class and were not—​across generations—​able to move out of it. For some migrants, integration eventually meant upward mobility, but for many others, it was a bumpy ride (Gans 1992) or a downward slide (Alba and Nee 2003). The bumpy ride and segmented assimilation theories replaced the idea of straight-​line assimilation.

Older Concepts Over time, researchers began introducing new terms to describe the new diversities and complexities they observed and to explain how they were created, perpetuated, responded to, and experienced. In 1924, the term cultural pluralism was introduced to describe how groups in (US) society maintained cultural identities. The number of publications on this issue peaked in the 1920s, after a period of increased migration to the United States between 1880 and 1910 and various attempts to justify immigration restrictions. Kellor (1920) wrote a thick book about the persistence of ethnicity and the enormous diversity within US society. People in the 1920s were, according to Kellor, surprised by diversity. They saw a world in which the great-​grandchildren of immigrants still did not speak English; the descendants of immigrants held on to “old world customs and manners of living”; immigrants formed isolated communities, which sat as islands in the cities; and descendants of immigrants often favored the land of their forefathers

Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective    91 over America. Countries in Europe, according to Kellor, in contrast to the United States, all had dominant nationalities, but also strong minorities who were “averse to being assimilated.” Kellor regarded cultural pluralism as a complex subject to which authorities were responding by encouraging (in the European case) or restricting (in the US case) migration, opening and closing migration channels while trying to do so. Many authors were writing about the same issues. Kansas (1928), for instance, published a book on the subject, as did Davie (1936), who wrote: “All important immigrant-​receiving countries have already been profoundly affected by immigration” (p. vii). Davie made a prediction about future migrations. Like most predictions about migration and its consequences, his was wrong. “So far as the Western world is concerned, mass migration is now probably a thing of the past,” (p. vii) he wrote. He did acknowledge the dramatic worldwide changes taking place in the past decades, noting, “Immigration is not only the life history of the countries of the New World, it is a world-​ wide problem, with practically every nation involved. To such an extent has the world become unified that human migration today sets up reactions of international scope” (p. 1). The transport revolution, with its fast trains and steamships (which had reduced the length of a transatlantic crossing from twenty-​one to five days) and the revolution in communication (cheap newspapers and the telegraph, telephone, and radio) had made it easier than ever before to travel and stay in touch, thus profoundly changing how people experienced migrations. Davie labeled the changes in scale and scope as unprecedented, as did many authors before and after him. Most authors acknowledged the “plurality” of this period and its consequences. In the nineteenth century, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world, increasing from 299,000 people in 1870 to nearly 1.7 million thirty years later. In this setting, almost everybody was a migrant. Large numbers of migrants came from Germany, China, France, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Turkey. In addition, there were migrants from numerous other countries. These groups showed so much internal diversity (of language, religion, nationality, legal status, and class) that they should not be considered (and were not considered or considered themselves) as one group. Even within groups that shared the same religion, there was diversity in orthodoxy: there were, for instance, large differences between secular and orthodox Jews. Park and Burgess (1924) were an exception to the awareness shown by others: because they did not understand most of the immigrants’ languages, they homogenized groups, seeking to simplify reality. After World War II, the unemployment of the 1930s, which had led to severe restrictions on immigration and left refugees with almost no possibility of escape, was seen a scenario that should be avoided in the future at all costs. Fears that the scenario might be repeated, in combination with the severe housing shortages, made many European countries introduce unprecedented schemes of assisted emigration. These schemes differentiated migrants according to gender, class, religion, ethnicity, skills, and education. Australia, for instance, had a White policy that barred the migration of people of color, severely restricted the immigration of Jews, preferred Catholics over Protestants, families over singles, and skilled workers over unskilled workers (Schrover

92   Marlou Schrover and Van Faassen 2010). The people who wanted to leave had political motives (they had been Nazi collaborators, or feared a third world war), economic motives (to escape the destruction and poverty in Europe), family reasons (starting a family was difficult because of the housing shortage) or they were refugees (who fled during or after the war). All migrations were mixed. In order to regulate these migrations, Australia entered into migration agreements with Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Spain, West Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States, and also brought people to Australia from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia (Mence, Gangell, and Tebb 2015). The agreements concluded between the countries of origin and of destination were meant to deal with the complex structures that stood at the beginning and the end of the migratory trajectories. They became the blueprint for the regulation of the guest-​worker migration, which started soon afterward. Between 1958 and 1972, about eight million work permits were issued to guest workers from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Morocco to work in Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. Many more arrived without permits. East Germany had a similar labor migration regime and recruited workers from Vietnam, Poland, Hungary, Cuba, Mozambique, Algeria, Angola, China, and North Korea (Ireland 1997; Rabenschlag 2014). The Bracero Program brought four to five million workers into the United States from 1942 to 1960s, mainly from Mexico, but also from the British West Indies, and Jamaica. Canada also recruited workers from the same regions (Massey and Pren 2012; Plascencia 2016). Non-​ Western countries also recruited workers during this period of economic growth. In the 1960s, Mauritania, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire, for instance, attracted workers from Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Gambia. Workers from Mali, Niger, and Chad also migrated to construction sites and oil fields in Algeria and Libya (Bakewell and De Haas 2007). Migrations from Chad, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, countries with the world’s largest internal language diversity, resulted in migrations that were diverse in many respects (Pavlenko 2019). All these guest-​worker migration programs were highly regulated and could only function because of a highly complex interplay between state authorities, employers, and NGOs. Among the guest workers who came to countries in northwest Europe were those who had not only had economic but also political reasons for leaving: Some of the Portuguese migrants were fleeing the repressive Salazar regime and the draft for wars in Mozambique and Angola. Spanish guest workers who opposed the Franco regime left for political reasons as much as economic ones. Guest workers from Morocco left during the so-​called Years of Lead, the repressive regime of King Hassan II, escaping both poverty and repression. Turkish guest workers sought to escape the political coups of the 1970s and ethnic and religious tensions in Eastern Turkey, and Greek guest workers fled the Greek Colonels’ regime. The guest-​worker migrations were categorized as labor migrations but the movement is best described as mixed. At the time of this guest-​worker migration, many authors thought that what was happening was new, complex, and unprecedented. Rist (1978), for instance, wrote:

Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective    93 It is apparent to even the most casual of observers. Whether one meets the Algerian waiter in Paris, the Italian streetcar conductor in Zurich, the Turkish bellhop in Berlin, or the Yugoslav laborer in Stockholm, they are but individual confirmations of the fact that Western Europe has become a vast area of immigration. These new immigrants have come by the millions. . . . The most immediate consequence of this immense infusion of people from so many varying ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds into the Northern countries is that these countries have now become mosaics. Where they were once relatively homogeneous and their citizens easily identifiable, they have now become heterogeneous and pluralistic. It is but one example of the magnitude of this transformation, both in absolute numerical terms as well as in its cultural manifestations” (p. 81).

In the 1960s, several countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada, introduced (partly in response to guest-​worker migration) multiculturalism as an ideology and a policy for managing the complex cultural diversity that resulted from migration (Runblom 1994; Jopke 2007). Their multiculturalist policies “allowed” immigrants to be different from the rest of the population, and encouraged them to hold on to their languages and cultures (McGoldrick 2005; McKerl 2007; Schrover 2010). Initially, the idea of multiculturalism was appealing because acknowledging the rights of groups was seen as a way to reduce social conflict (Schrover 2010, 2013b). Multiculturalism as a policy led to formalized relationships between and within groups based on a conception of them as internally homogenous and having unique inherent characteristics (Uitermark, Rossi, and Van Houtum 2005; Salaff and Chan 2007; Verkuyten and Brug 2004). Multiculturalism pressed people to organize into groups based on perceived cultural similarity (Kurien 2004). Differences between groups were overemphasized, and diversity within groups was denied. Multiculturalism was a policy, not a reality. Over time, however, it came to be seen as a reality. In the 1990s, it was declared that multicultural policies had failed, though this assessment sprang from a redefinition of the goals of multiculturalism, from “living apart together” to “integration.” The so-​called failure of the multicultural model left a void, especially for policymakers and practitioners. It led to the introduction of new terms. In the 1990s, authors showed they were sensitive to the consequences of increased diversity and social (in)equality, using concepts such as social carrying capacity (Light, Bhachu, and Karageorgis [1993] 2017), cultural complexity (Eriksen 2007) or heterogeneity, which would lead to a disintegration of communities (Lea and Young 1981). In response, there were attempts to move away from an ethnic lens to policies that would enforce social cohesion (Schrover 2010). The concept of “mainstreaming” was introduced to make immigrant and minority integration interventions part of policies targeting “disadvantaged” groups in general. Mainstreaming shifted policies from specific to generic (Scholten, Collett, and Petrovic 2017). Policy mainstreaming led practitioners, who work with diverse populations, to understand that the previous approaches focused on ethnicity and migrant identity were insufficient, but they were unsure of how to proceed independently of such approaches (Poppelaars and Scholten 2008; Vacchelli and Mesarič 2020; Schiller 2015).

94   Marlou Schrover In the meantime, the concept of intersectionality became increasingly popular. Feminist scholars had introduced this concept in the 1980s to draw attention to the intersection between categories of identity and power. Changes in power, equality/​inequality, and identity can only be explained when all the categories of exclusion and inclusion are studied simultaneously, authors emphasized (Frager 1999; Crenshaw 1989; McCall 2005; Boris 2005; Davis 2008). The early literature focused on gender, class, race/​ ethnicity, and religion as categories for the analysis of power and equality/​inequality and defining elements of identity (personal, social, legal), social location, opportunity, and experience. Later literature also included age, (dis)ability, sexuality, education/​skill/​occupation, skin color, life cycle, legal status and residence rights, and nationality/​citizenship (Schrover and Moloney 2013; Schrover 2014). The concept intersectionality has been used in hundreds of thousands of publications, paying testimony to its usefulness in explaining the complexities of diversities. According to some authors, intersectionality is more suitable for studying diversity within diversity than superdiversity is, because intersectionality pays attention to more categories of identity and power, and more systematically analyzes the ways they intersect (Anthias 2013; Khazaei 2018). According to Berg and Sigona (2013, 348) “diversity” can do for migration studies, what intersectionality has done for feminist studies, marking a change from a focus on entities to a focus on relations, and enabling “scholars to be alert to the spatial dimensions of the politics of difference” (p.348). However, this overlooks the broad use of intersectionality in migration research (Bastia 2014). According to Aptekar (2019), some authors writing about superdiversity unjustly dismissed intersectionality as an outdated concept because they believed it was too focused on race, class and gender. Meissner and Vertovec (2015) write: Some feminist scholars have been critical of the super-​diversity concept because they feel it overlooks earlier theoretical notions of intersectionality. Intersectionality indeed emphasizes multi-​variable effects, but by far most of the intersectionality literature focuses exclusively on the combined workings of race, gender and class. The concept of super-​diversity does not challenge anything about theories of intersectionality in this sense; rather, the former is concerned with different categories altogether, most importantly nationality/​country of origin/​ethnicity, migration channel/​legal status and age as well as gender.” (p. 545)

This observation overlooks that the literature on intersectionality has moved well beyond looking at gender, class and ethnicity only.

More and Different? Meissner and Vertovec (2015) point out that since 1970 the number of countries experiencing migration has increased. This observation needs to be critically examined. In the first place, the number of countries in the world is not the same. After 1989,

Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective    95 Czechoslovakia fell apart into two successor states; the former Yugoslavia was divided into seven states; and the Soviet Union was broken up into fifteen successor states. Where before 1989, there were three recognized countries, there are now twenty-​ four. There are 195 countries in the world today, compared to 143 in 1969. The absolute number of people living outside their country of birth increased from 93 million in 1960 to 244 million in 2016. This increase is in line with the growth of the global population, from 3.0 billion in 1960 to 7.5 billion in 2016. The global share of people living outside their country of birth is now 3 percent, as it has been for the last six decades. More important than changes in the number of countries or percentages, is the problem that the further away from the Western world, and the further back in time, the more difficult it becomes to estimate the number of people who migrated, or to know how this affected diversities and complexities (Schrover 2013a). Migrations from, to, or within the Western world have been described more often and in greater detail than other migrations (McKeown 2010; Bade et al. 2011; Ness et al. 2013). Underregistration also had to do with the definitions of who is a migrant, and which borders are relevant (Urry 2004; Cresswell 2010; De Bruijn 2014). It has to do with authorities caring less about certain categories of migrants. In the period from 1946 to 1970, for instance, 617,000 White people migrated to South Africa. They were carefully registered. The Black workers who came between 1913 and 1986 from Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, however, were not registered in a similar manner, or were not registered at all. In addition, migrant women worldwide were as a rule registered less often than men (Schrover 2013a). There had been large-​scale migrations in the past, and there were diverse societies. In 1498, for instance, Vasco da Gama described the highly diverse societies in Mozambique, Mombasa, and Malindi (Dussubieux and Robertshaw 2012; Oonk 2013). Over time, we see continuous change in the demographics of the migrants, their routes, and the responses. Between 1547 and 1860, 11 to 14 million enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic (Lofkrantz and Ojo 2012; Matlou 2013), 12 million enslaved people were transported across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean between 600 and 1900, and 7.4 million enslaved people moved north across the Sahara between 800 and 1900 (Austen 1992). There were large differences within the enslaved populations. For instance, 5 million enslaved people were brought to the Caribbean who came from what is now Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-​Bissau, Mali, Angola, Congo, and Gabon. Upon arrival, groups were purposely split up and mixed so that—​without a common language and any other ties—​the risk of revolt was reduced. References to “slaves” or “enslaved people” homogenize groups and deny the differences. The Caribbean islands changed hands frequently: islands were alternately ruled by the Dutch, the French, the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and, to a lesser extent, the Danes and the Swedes. Travel between the Caribbean islands was frequent, cheap, and easy, and for many travelers, state barriers and state control had little relevance (Van Rossem and Van der Voort 1996). This resulted in mixed societies in which a great variety of languages was spoken, and in which people lived with blurred ties and identities. Authorities in the seventeenth century did seek to differentiate between, for instance,

96   Marlou Schrover Iberian Whites and Northwestern European Whites (Beriss 1991), and according to class, whereby White paupers (petits blancs) were seen as problematic and likely to get involved in a racially mixed relationship. The wish to categorize and control far surpassed their ability to do so. In all colonial settings, (legal) differences were established for the colonized and the colonizers. Colonizers moved people within their empires, and as colonial subjects, they were not registered as foreigners, even if they had crossed half the globe to get to there. Neither the colonizers nor the colonized ever came from only one country. People in the Malay Strait settlements, which later became the independent countries of Singapore and Malaysia, for instance, have origins in almost all European countries, including Russia, as well as in British India, Burma, Japan, China, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. The people in the colony perceived the population as superdiverse and saw the Malay Strait settlements as a “plural society” with a “widely diverse population” that was “multiethnic” (Hirschman 1986; Braga-​Blake and Ebert-​Oehlers 1992). There were, for instance, differences between colonizers and colonized and within groups among the Eurasian group in Hong Kong. Eurasians were people with European (fore)fathers and so-​called native mothers; “native” was a legal category in the colonial setting, along with “European” and “foreign Oriental.” Within the Eurasian group in Hong Kong, there were tensions between the Portuguese group, which had Catholic ties and Portuguese names; the Chinese Eurasians, who had Chinese names, dressed Chinese and observed Chinese customs; and the British Eurasians, who were Protestant and had a British lifestyle. Over the years, the boundaries between these groups became so blurred that the authorities were unable to categorize them, although they kept trying. In the Dutch East Indies these attempts led to very broad estimates of the numbers: The number of Eurasians was assumed to be between 220,000 and 9 million (Rosen Jacobson 2018). The blurring of boundaries also occurred in other colonial settings. On Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) there were, from 1815 onward, descendants of Dutch settlers, who formed a rather diverse community with the descendants of the Portuguese and the British on the island. The Portuguese had come before the Dutch, and the British arrived after the Dutch rulers had left. Those with Portuguese ancestry were generally of the lower-​class and darker skinned than those with Dutch and British forefathers. The latter group confirmed this hierarchy by jealously guarding racial boundaries and distinguishing themselves from the Portuguese Catholics (Rosen Jacobson 2018). Historians studying colonialism have paid ample attention to how class, gender, and ethnicity intersected in the colonial setting; how these complexities bolstered or undermined colonial authority; and how mechanisms of passing and masquerading influence how lines were drawn and blurred over time (Bhabha 1984; Stoler 1989, 2010; Clancy-​Smith and Gouda 1998; Pattynama 2000). In the 1950s, and after the Dutch East Indies had become the independent Republic of the United States of Indonesia, 400,000 people migrated to the Netherlands. They do not show up in as foreigners in any records or statistics because they had Dutch citizenship. That does not mean that they were not perceived or self-​identified as different.

Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective    97 There were also large within-​group differences depending on skin color, education, age, and family composition. The Dutch authorities responded to these differences and treated those believed to be oriented toward the East (by which they meant low-​skilled and dark-​skinned) very differently from those believed to oriented to the West (Rosen Jacobson 2018). The same applies to, for instance, the 400,000 migrants who came in the 1970s from the former Dutch colony Surinam; the 800,000 Pieds Noirs, who migrated to France when Algeria became independent in 1962; the Anglo Indians who went to Britain after India became independent; and retornados who came to Portugal. The end of colonialism led to endless debates and multiple changes in the laws barring former subjects from citizenship or taking away their citizenship (Sutherland 2005; Small and Solomos 2006; Pawley 2008). Ideas about the right to return (and the laws and regulations that sprang from debates) built on ideas grounding the 1923 Population Exchange between Turkey and Greece, whereby more than two million people were “returned” to either Greece or Turkey (Ross 2015). More than a century earlier, the Back to Africa movement had encouraged the “return” of enslaved people from the Americas to Africa, although “returnees” did not go to the countries their ancestors came from. Attempts to organize these returns continued well into the twentieth century (Lombardo 2002). “Returnees” had in common that most had never been to the “mother country.” This also applies to the 4.5 million so-​called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, who came from the Soviet Union/​Russia to (West) Germany: they initially received citizenship upon arrival and do not show up in the statistics as foreigners, although they perceived themselves, and were perceived by others as different. This is not to say that none of these groups of “returnees” were counted (they were, of course; Dietz 2006). The point is that the “returnees” were less visible in certain categorizations, and this reduced the idea of past diversities. It created a false idea about the increase of diversity in later periods. After 2007, the new countries of the European Union increasingly started to make use of these laws of return, building on this very long history of thinking about belonging (DeTinguy 2003). In recent decades the laws of return enabled large numbers of co-​ethnic “returnees” to enter the European Union. Poland accepted co-​ethnic returnees from Kazakhstan. Greece resettled 155,000 co-​ethnic returnees from the (former) Soviet Union between 1977 and 2002 (Voutira 2004). The Czech Republic currently gives rights to Czechs who decades ago were deported to the Ukraine. Spain and Portugal give preferential rights to people whose ancestors migrated from Spain, including people who were driven out by the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. The right has been used by migrants from Central and South American countries and Turkey. Finland encouraged the return of Ingrian Ethnic Finns (Lutheran labor migrants who had moved to the Russian province Ingria in the seventeenth century and who were reallocated to other parts of the Soviet Union during World War II). There are many other countries that follow this principle: The Republic of Armenia, and the Republic of Belarus, for instance, give preferential rights, as does China to ethnic or overseas Chinese, and Japan to Japanese from, for instance, Brazil. Whether “returnees” got citizenship upon arrival differed by country and time period. Overall, the returns are not new; they constitute a very large

98   Marlou Schrover degree of complexity because of the constantly changing rules and continuous debates, based on a long tradition of thinking about difference and belonging. More or less the same complexity, continuity, and continuous change is found in debates on statelessness. Statelessness, over time, has led to extensive debate and interference from states, intergovernmental bodies such as the League of Nations, and numerous NGOs (Schrover, Vosters, and Glynn 2019). Debates about statelessness peaked after a Soviet decree in 1921 deprived one to two million people of their Russian nationality (Cabanes 2014). Debates flared up when 32,000 to 35,000 men from a large number of countries were deprived of their citizenship after fighting against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. In the same period, Nazi Germany deprived German Jews of their citizenship. Those who survived the Holocaust later fought against renationalizations, and for the right to remain stateless (Fraser and Caestecker 2013). Decolonization created new groups of stateless people. In 1962, for instance, Algerians in France could become French citizens if they made a “declaration of acceptance” of the French Republic. Many declined and became stateless. When Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, Yugoslav citizenship disappeared. In Slovenia, this led to the creation of a group of some 18,000 people who were called the “Erased.” They were considered to be nationals of another Yugoslav successor state, who lived in Slovenia. They were asked to register as “foreigners” and when they refused or failed to do so, they were removed from the registry of Permanent Residence, losing social, civil, and political rights. The end of the Soviet Union also created new groups of stateless people. Estonia and Latvia had been part of the Soviet Union since 1940. When their independence was restored in 1991, people who had been Latvian or Estonian citizens prior to June 1940 and their descendants were automatically granted citizenship. However, people who arrived after 1940 did not automatically receive citizenship. They had to apply for naturalization as immigrants, a process that included a knowledge test and a language test in Estonian or Latvian. These criteria discriminated against ethnic Russians. Some decided not to apply for Estonian or Latvian citizenship and became stateless. In other Soviet Union successor states (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kirgizia) similar processes occurred. Overall, many more examples could be given of changes in numbers and in the diversification of migration channels and legal statuses in the past. There is continuity in these changes.

Where Are the Historians? Vertovec (2019) analyzed how the word superdiversity was used in 325 publications across multiple disciplines. In historical research, it was seldom used: 4 times out of 325. When historians do use the concept, they deny newness, and point to, for instance, the highly diverse population of ancient Rome. De Bock (2015) writes: “Due to its claim of contemporary exceptionalism, the notion of superdiversity raises suspicion among

Superdiversity from a Historical Perspective    99 historians.” She adds: “However, historians would do well to not dismiss the entire superdiversity debate as more hype that does not concern them. . . . We might not agree with the idea that the diversity caused by the ‘new migrations’ . . . is all that exceptional, but we could recognize the possibilities that the concept of superdiversity has to offer.” De Bock concludes we could “explore diversity within past . . . populations. Looking at superdiversity through a historical lens then can help assess its claim of contemporary exceptionalism, as historical examples will provide a better insight into what it is—​if anything—​about the current configurations of diversity . . . that is different from those in the past” (De Bock 2015) (p. 593). De Bock called on historians to see what they could learn from using the concept of superdiversity, and on nonhistorians working with the superdiversity concept to see what they could learn from history. Historians could “debunk some of the homogenizing categories that tend to characterize the representation of past immigrant populations” (De Bock 2015, p. 583). Using a superdiversity perspective might show that the homogenizing label “guest worker” does not adequately describe this migrant cohort (Meissner & Vertovec 2015). This observation is surprising. That the label “guest worker” does not describe these migrants is true, but a multitude of older studies observed this well before the superdiversity concept was introduced (Martin & Miller 1980; Jones 1990; Kudat and Sabuncuoglu 1980, to name only a few). Nonhistorians using the concept superdiversity very seldom refer to historical studies even when they on rare occasions do provide historical information (Fomina 2010). They do not do so even though there an enormous number of historical studies are available. According to Meissner and Vertovec (2015): “Much of the history of migration studies has been comprised of research focused on particular ethnic or national groups, their migration processes, community formation, trajectory of assimilation (in the American sense), and latterly their patterns of transnationalism. Super-​diversity underlines the necessity to re-​tool our theories and methods, not least in order to move beyond what some call the ‘ethno-​focal lens’ ” (p. 542). There are historical studies that use an ethno-​focal lens, but there are also large numbers of historical studies that do not (Kowalski, Matera, and Sokolowicz 2020; Wasem 2020; Althammer 2020; Schepers 2020; Reimann 2020; Bright 2018; Lorke 2018; De Hart 2017; Puschmann et al. 2016, to name just some recent studies; see also Hoerder 2002; Bade et al. 2011; Ness et al. 2013).

Conclusion Historians have paid attention to how diversity was created, perpetuated, responded to, and experienced. They have described how the configurations and demographics of immigrant populations and of the societies from which they came, passed through, or settled in changed over time. They have studied how migration channels closed and opened; how debates and laws about legal status and immigrant rights were influenced by state authorities, NGOs, intergovernmental bodies, and migrants themselves, and how all responded to or stimulated change. They have described how contemporaries

100   Marlou Schrover differentiated groups, how differences were made between and within groups, how migrants were categorized (or self-​ categorized), and how they were othered or homogenized into groups. This chapter only scratched the surface of this extensive body of literature. At many points in time, people observed that what they experienced was new and unprecedented: speed, scale, and scope were seen as ever increasing. Of course, that observation is in some measure true, but that does not mean there are no similarities in how migrants relate to their migrations, how societies (countries of origin, transit, and destination) respond to their departure and arrival, and how change was shaped or influenced an experience. There is a merit in pointing out newness. There is, however, also a merit in pointing out and explaining continuities. As this chapter has shown there is continuity in the introduction of new terms. Authors have introduced a multitude of terms and the differences between them are not as large as those who coin the terms suggest they are. Looking back over time, differences and changes are easily smoothed over. Problematizing the migration of today works via deproblematizing that of the past, homogenizing groups, mostly in retrospect, and denying the complexities of the past. The contribution of historians to the debate about superdiversity is to counter collective amnesia and show how we can and do build on earlier debates, policies, and experiences.

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Chapter 7

So ciolinguist i c s a nd Su perdive rsi t y Innovations and Challenges at the Online-Offline Nexus Massimiliano Spotti AND JAN BLOMMAERT

Introduction Superdiversity, first coined by Vertovec (2007) to highlight the unpredictability of and within the category “migrant” due to complex patterns of transnational mobility emerging from 1990s onward, invites us to depart from passport-​based narratives of language, nationality, legal status, and identity. Superdiversity, and by now superdiversities (Meissner and Vertovec 2016), is a term that has since its coinage been picked up in several disciplines for different purposes. Further, it is a term that has helped humanities and the social sciences to engage policymakers in re-​evaluating their understandings of diversity and to push the public discourse beyond the mainstream conceptualization of diversity in societies where it is a compound of countable cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and legal groupings. Across the language disciplines, from sociolinguistics to linguistic ethnography, scholars across Europe (cf. Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton and Spotti 2016; Kroon and Swanenberg 2018) have used the term superdiversity to foreground the suitability of long-​standing research traditions in language studies while engaging in a dialogue with the concept. In this chapter, we first take stock of the prolific relationship superdiversity has had with sociolinguistics (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Creese and Blackledge 2018) and the advancements it has helped the field make in reshaping its conceptual wealth and methodological armor. From there, we begin an open reflection on the notion of “combinatorial spaces” (Arnaut, Karrebaek, and Spotti 2017), using it as a lens that—​once appraised from an ethnographic interpretive perspective—​can help us avoid the analysis of (im)mobility and complexity fall into easy

108    Massimiliano Spotti AND JAN BLOMMAERT celebrations of individuality versus “break and bake” hybridity. Last, we gain insight into its more recent application within the online-​offline nexus, putting it in relation to the recent re-​appreciation of the notion of Durkheim’s sociation and the “social fact” ([1895] 2010). Ultimately, while trying to compound early prolific encounters of language and superdiversity with the online-​offline nexus work in progress, we try to open up our analysis to new forms of imaginable vocabulary that may come to help the sociolinguistic ethnographic analyst who wishes to dissect human beings’ creativity as it occurs in their daily communicative exchanges and sociosemiotic identity performances while tying it down to the importance of aprés Durkheim’s work in furthering the understanding of the superdiverse “human in the digital.”

What Is So Super, if Anything, about Language and Superdiversity? Starting with a seminal paper by Blommaert and Rampton (2011), sociolinguistics began turning to superdiversity to reassess its conceptual and methodological armor in the light of the increasing complexity, fluidity, and mobility of multilingual individuals. This was done when dealing with both urban agglomerates (Spotti 2011; Maly 2014) and places at the sociogeographical margins that were erroneously considered to be barely touched by globalization (see Coupland and Garrett 2010; Spotti 2018). The awakened interest of sociolinguistics in the relationship of language and superdiversity led to the emergence of an array of terms for how language and people work together in the socio-​ cultural spaces they inhabit, what we commonly call “society.” In there, we find—​as termed by Parkin and Arnaut (2014)—​the “nano-​ethnographic” sociolinguistic analysis employed to drill down to the grain of superdiversity in order to grasp “contemporary urban vernaculars.” Thanks to that, attention has been paid to how linguistic signs interact with social knowledge in the everyday discursive production human beings engage with, leading sociolinguistics to re-​evaluate its understanding of language through the lens of the Silverstenian “total linguistic fact”—​that is, [t]‌he total linguistic fact, the datum for a science of language irreducibly dialectic in nature. It is an unstable mutual interaction of meaningful sign forms, contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology. (Silverstein 1985, 220)

We can extrapolate from this that, instead of regarding language as a finite form of expression, the analysis of language in society should focus on linguistic forms that, in themselves, have a societal discursive function situated within the ideological frames present in the sociocultural space(s) in which they are uttered. By so doing, sociolinguistics manages to move away from analysis focused solely on linguistic form and

Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity    109 ideology (variationist sociolinguistics) or on linguistic form used in interaction while neglecting the ideological component of what is being said (conversation analysis). In short, we see how the stylistic performance of language users becomes an interesting way into larger ideological discourses of belonging that are, in turn, socially indexicalized possibilities of local language use. Once triggered, the notion of the “total linguistic fact” gave way to an array of terms that propose a grounded revision of such powerful yet static sociolinguistic notions as code-​mixing and code-​switching. Thus, we have Canagarajah’s (2011) notion of “codemeshing”; Creese et al.’s (2011) notion of “flexible bilingualism”; Makoni and Pennycook’s (2007) disinvention of languages and Pennycook and Otsuji’s (2015) notion of “metrolingualism”; García and Wei’s (2014) notion of “translanguaging”; Jørgensen et al.’s (2011) notion of “polylingual languaging”; Blommaert and Backus’s (2013) reappreciation of “sociolinguistic repertoires”; and, though left vastly underdeveloped, Blommaert’s (2012) notion of “supervernaculars.” The above-​mentioned conceptual engagements were broadly welcomed, but the linking of superdiversity with complexity to further the understanding of language and society has also met with strong critiques. It has, for example, been pointed out key limitations that are, as yet, only variably acknowledged in the language and superdiversity literature. Drawing on Stuart May’s (2016) exposé of these limitations, I highlight but a few. First, as May points out, is the inherent (though largely unintentional) ethnocentrism of sociolinguistics’s recent “(re)discovery” and rehabilitation of multilingualism as the norm. Second is the privileging of individual linguistic repertoires and language use that overemphasizes the potential for individual linguistic agency and, relatedly, delimits wider analyses of the effects of ongoing linguistic hierarchies and related inequalities (Busch 2012). Third, we find the claim of a renewed focus on parole at the expense of langue, foregrounding individual multilingual oral language use and simultaneously underplaying or simply ignoring the significance of access to and use of standardized, literary, or prestige language varieties. The latter—​with particular reference to educational arenas (see May 2016)—​remains an underdeveloped key factor in wider, long-​term mobility for multilingual speakers in contemporary global societies. Fourth and last, although the dialogue between language and superdiversity in the field of sociolinguistics was not meant to give way to armor of believers or, even worse, disciples, there is also the fierce academic condemnation of language and superdiversity as having turned the dialogue into a form of “academic branding” (Pavlenko 2018), achieving only the reiteration of a simplistic celebration of hybridity (Kubota 2016). However, the use of superdiversity in sociolinguistics, rather than (just) a branding move, should be understood as a response, one that, in the first instance, is aimed at grasping the novel and more varied flows of populations and languages in societies where heightened forms of social diversity and complexity are at play. More importantly, though, it is a response aimed at gaining a better grasp of the intricacies of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, shedding light on how, in movement-​driven interactional intermingling, identities are constructed and communicative elements come

110    Massimiliano Spotti AND JAN BLOMMAERT to cohere or differ in negotiation while language users are engaged in acts of identity and sociation (see also Spotti and Blommaert 2017; also Tyler and Dovchin 2019). The sociolinguistics scholars who have viewed superdiversity as a lens rather than a paradigm shift have done so to move away from the mere description of processes of social structuration, and to situate the communicative practices occurring in daily interactions as the entry point of analysis, avoiding a sociolinguistic imagination that presupposes links between the actors involved in those practices and a predefined set of places, territories, communities, and language-​culture blocks. Proponents of using alternative perspectives to describe multilingual and multimodal meaning-​making practices in sociolinguistics, such as translanguaging (Li et al. 2013), also question whether contact and osmosis rather than migration may be the most important factors in the relationship between superdiversity and language.

Polycentric Heteronormative Spaces: A Viable Lens for Understanding Language and Superdiversity Notwithstanding the aforementioned, often sterile, diatribe about language and superdiversity as academic branding, scholars interested in language, social interaction, and superdiversity have come to realize what superdiversity does for language. That is to stress that understanding it as “more of something,”—​that is, “more ethnicities,” “more groups,” “more languages”—​with “more” being synonymous with “in addition to” some preexisting group-​based societal order—​shows a limited understanding of superdiversity’s conceptual wealth (see Spotti, Swanenberg, and Blommaert 2021). Rather, the trick superdiversity plays here is to understand language as means of accounting for interactions in terms of multiple groups, categories, and characteristics, digging into how language encounters are maintained and identities negotiated. Instead, the most sensitive indexical of societal transformation is found in the changing configurations of sociation, addressed across the superdiversity and sociolinguistics literature as “conjunctions,” “coagulations,” and “interactions of variables,” where the common denominator is that wherever social transformations take place they go hand in hand with sociolinguistic transformations (Blommaert 2013). It follows that, from an ethnographic interpretive perspective, which many scholars have been operating from with respect to superdiversity, the notion of space and of the online-​offline nexus that characterizes contemporary global networked societies, must be taken into account. The notion of space, sociation and enregisterment is the focus of the remainder of this section (Arnaut et al. 2017; Agha 2007). Moving away from a Cartesian understanding of space and its ideological ends, Lefebvre (1991) rethinks space and views it as a social product that masks the

Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity    111 contradictions of its own production and deconstructs the illusion of transparency. To link human agentivity and spatial domination, Bourdieu (1977) focuses on the spatialization of everyday behavior and how the sociospatial order of things is translated into the bodily experience and human practices. He proposes—​and social scientists will build heavily on his idea (see also Scollon and Scollon 2003; Blommaert and Huang 2010)—​the concept of habitus, a generative and structuring principle of collective strategies and social practices that both is the product of history and produces new history. Further, while still dealing with space, Michel Foucault, in his seminal work on the prison (1977) and in a series of interviews and lectures on space (1984), examines the relationship between power and space by positing architecture and the use of space as a technology of the government, which tries to regulate the body. The aim of such a state-​owned technology is to create “a docile body” (Foucault 1977, 136) through the enclosure and the organization of individuals in space. In contrast, Certeau (1984) set out to show that people’s way of doing things makes up for the means by which users re-​appropriate the space organized by the techniques of sociocultural production. These practices are articulated in the fine-​grained details of everyday life and used by groups or individuals who are already caught in the nets of discipline, though in Certeau’s work, spatial practices elude the (implicit) planning of government control. To build again on Certeau (1984): Power in space is embedded through territory delimitation and boundaries in which the weapons of “the strong” are classification, delineation, and division—​the “strategies” of spatial domination; whereas “the weak” use furtive tactics to contest, negotiate, or even subvert spatial domination, and all that goes with the normativity of doing things as prescribed by the one in power. Despite the tendency to want to portray societies as homogeneous, no space is characterized by a uniform grouping of people characterized by a one-​way stream of doing things, saying things, and acting out toward one another. Rather, societal spaces are made of multiple centers and peripheries that either require or allow users to deploy the sociolinguistic and sociosemiotic repertoires that best fit the environment, and that impose different discursive, ideological, and sociolinguistic orders on their users and their identities (cf. Blommaert et al. 2005; Singh and Spotti 2021). People inhabiting such spaces, therefore, need to orient themselves to different sets of norms and expectations, often simultaneously, in a time and space compression. Polycentricity thus stands for the fact that in every environment where there is sociation, multiple sets of norms will be simultaneously present. Although these norms might not be of the same order—​ they are scaled, stratified, and, in that sense, never ideologically neutral even if they are represented as such (Carr and Lempert 2016, 3). Polycentricity defines the intrinsic indeterminacy of social actions and processes, and their nonunified character: Social change involves some parts of society developing faster than others, creating anachronistic gaps. What space, polycentricity, sociolinguistics, and superdiversity contribute to, then, is a set of empirical arguments that make the need for new theoretical propositions compelling and inevitable, inviting us to be daring and prospective rather than retrospective, reflecting on what is already there.

112    Massimiliano Spotti AND JAN BLOMMAERT

Envisaging Convergencies across Disciplines: Combinatorial Spaces Taking space as our point of departure and situated language interactions as our unit of analysis, a newer set of concepts could then help sociolinguistics overcome the dryness of such terms as “entanglement” and the “amassing of resources” during sociation processes. While Latour’s (2005) “compositionism” seems to have remained out of the conceptual Umwelt that has developed around language and superdiversity, Arnaut et al. (2017, 8) point out that other metaphors of convergence in space have entered deeply into this field—​namely, conviviality (Gilroy 2006; Heil 2012), intersectionality (Berg and Sigona 2013), and, to some extent, “corner-​shop cosmopolitanism” (Wessendorf 2010, 17). Although we should be careful with all these terms in that none of them wishes to signify the absence of discursive and ideological tensions or even conflict, in their own idiosyncratic ways, they all facilitate moving beyond divisive categories like “ethnicity” to showing that what divides people in their daily urban and rural dwellings are different preferences when it comes to taste, lifestyle, rituality, leisure activity, and morality emerging within the socio-​cultural spaces they inhabit. Further, while these insights have been applied to the activities taking place in public urban and rural spaces, they are also important for understanding the heterogeneity present in commonality when dealing with sociolinguistic portrayals of youngsters’ web-​based doings. As Leppänen et al. (2009) point out: It shows how young people’s increasingly savvy and linguistically and textually sophisticated new media users are both geared by and express translocal affective, social and cultural alignments and affinities, such as shared activities, interests, lifestyles, and values. (1081)

Arguably, the ethnographic wealth that the relationship between language and superdiversity gives way to while the two are engaged with each other is, so far, mainly meant to grasp the creativity and consequent richness of the semiotic processes that are at hand when people interact at the online-​offline nexus. The interest of sociolinguistics in superdiversity “at the nexus” stresses once more that meaning is multimodal, passed on to hearers who are also viewers with much more than “just” language alone. People apprehend and make meaning through gestures, postures, faces, bodies, and movements of the self and of the selfies they produce (Li, Spotti, and Kroon 2017). In different combinations, this help constitutes emergent shaping contexts for both of the ways in which meanings within utterances are produced, understood, and taken up (Bezemer and Jewitt 2009; Adami 2017). It follows that as people increasingly communicate in more oral, written and pictorial combinations and through carefully designed performances of the self (Goffman 1963), there is a felt need for methodological adjustments where both multimodal analysis and a sociolinguistic ethnographic

Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity    113 one help us identify complex and unexpected indexicalities (see Goebel 2015; Staehr and Madsen 2017; and Vigouroux 2019), alignments, and positionalities, as well as the linguistic ecologies and economies at work in socio-​technological platforms online. To sum up this tentative argument so far: The online-​offline nexus has become for language and superdiversity common turfs, here envisaging processes of emergent normativities and sedimentations, on the one hand, and the creative and material production processes unsettling these, on the other. The latter is also crucial for Rampton (2014), who in his work suggests looking beyond present vocabularies of cultural and sociolinguistic analysis, calling for attention to Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling,” zones in which cultural, sociolinguistic, ethnic, and religious coherence and patterns of regularity—​at the macro level—​are continually unsettled by the often unspoken desires of glocalized individuals.

Superdiversity, the Internet, and the Online-​Offline Nexus At present, therefore, the insights gained by combining indexicality, multimodality, and fine-​grained ethnographic analysis have shown how traditional concepts and ingredients used in language studies, in general, and in sociolinguistic analysis, in particular, stress that rather than start from an assumption of common ground for understanding, one should start from a point of nonshared knowledge and grow the latter in multimodal communicative processes taking place at the offline-​online nexus of people’s lives. Building on the notion of the online-​offline nexus (Blommaert 2018, 486) and its implications for individuals, groups, and activities, we ought to tackle one last point here. Just as the development of a dialogue between sociolinguistics and superdiversity has resulted in the abandonment of the “traditional” idea of “a language,” sociolinguistics has also witnessed the progressive abandonment of semi-​technical notions such as “speech community” (see Blommaert and Rampton 2011, 4). A speech community was once considered to be an (almost) objective entity that could be empirically identified as a body of people who interacted on a regular basis, held attitudes and commonly shared rules of language usage, and was the largest social unit that the study of a given variety of “a language” in society could seek to generalize. This understanding of speech community has been superseded, first, by the more empirically based notion of “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991), and later, by the notion of knots and networks, where the representation of a group was often associated with multiple and flexible sites resting on the axiomatic understanding of groups, individuals, and languages. Rather, because many of our communicative interactions do happen online, we ought to start with some caveats here. First, patterns of communication necessarily involve meaningful social relationships as prerequisites, conduits, and outcomes; second, such relationships

114    Massimiliano Spotti AND JAN BLOMMAERT will, similarly, always involve identities and categorizations, interactionally established; third, when we observe patterns of communication, we are observing the very essence of sociation and “groupness”—​regardless of what we call a “group” (see Tovares 2019). All these considerations lead us to dare to advance a final point—​that is, that specific patterns of interaction shape specific forms of “groups.” In concreto, instead of lingering on whether a definition is better than the other, we can ponder whether the initial understanding of action to which sociolinguistics has subscribed for decades is still tenable. In response to this, Blommaert (2018) denounces the Internet, understood here as an infrastructure of globalization, with its traffic density of information and knowledge mirrors, astonishingly resembles global information networks established in the late nineteenth century. Persistent global inequalities are, in that sense, extended and expanded by the Internet itself. Such processes of persistent global inequality, mobility offline and immobility online, and vice-​versa, shape as well as occur in a new communication and information environment, the details of which we are only beginning to understand (cf. Seargeant and Tagg 2014). To this, we should add the following reflection on groups at the online-​offline nexus. Groups, then, are not solely collections of human beings that interact with one another. Rather, they are patterned sets of communicative behaviours and the relationships with which they are dialectically related. Whenever we see such ordered forms of communicative behaviour, there is an assumption of active and evolving groupness—​sociation—​but the analytical issue is not the nature of the group or, for what it matters, the label we need to choose for it. It is the specific social relationships observable through and in communication that matter and with the latter as a lens, all other aspects of sociation can be related to this. So, if one needs the definition of a group: a group is a communicatively organized and ratified set of social relationships. It follows that in attempting to shed light on human beings as agents of sociation in conditions of superdiversity, as noted by Appadurai (1996:194) in his seminal work Modernity at Large, the self is therefore not the ontological starting point for a theory of social order. Rather, building on Goffman, the self is an end product, whose existence depends upon a presentation order, which is the primary constraint of situations of co-​presence of the self with others. This presentation order is replete with reciprocally exchanged moral expectations—​“involvement obligations”—​ providing a degree of security in social encounters. Goffman’s insistence on the ritual character of interaction (often seen as an insistence on communicative routine) is, in fact, an insistence on the maintenance of moral order in social action. And this is done in view of the interaction order itself (sui generis); it is not directed toward the reproduction of social structure at all. The flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network such that people from different sociocultural offline spaces become part of a singular group of message recipients (McLaughlin and Vitak 2012) thus brings about a context collapse as the effect of technology that “complicates our metaphors of space and place, including the belief that audiences are separate from each other” (Marwick and boyd 2010, 115). We see how, in this definition of the problem, the flawed assumptions mentioned above control the argument. We can only produce clear and transparent meanings from within

Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity    115 clearly defined communities of which we, as well as our audiences, are members—​so it seems. When we more closely examine interactions taking place at the online-​offline nexus, however, we see that people are well capable to make themselves understood even in the presence of unknown or diffuse audiences (Szabla and Blommaert 2020; also Tagg, Seargeant, and Brown 2017). But the idea of the (native) speaker is widespread throughout the language-​ focused disciplines and, certainly in assumed connection with more or less established communities, is perennially problematic, as Ben Rampton (1995) conclusively demonstrated. Someone could alternatively say that the present-​day flaw of sociolinguistics in analyzing the self at the nexus stands right in the middle of the adoption of a highly simplistic linear theory of action in which features from the community are merely either “carried over” or “transmitted” into language by individuals. We see how the particular actions of participants precipitate specific identity positions and patterns of normativity within a given online congregation, regardless of the a priori uncertainty about all of this. If superdiversity and sociolinguistics are to continue the productive dialogue they have had so far, as we sincerely hope, the understanding of diversity needs to include a growing awareness of the impact of the online-​offline infrastructure on tangible sociolinguistic economies as an opportunity to change the general direction of our heuristic strategies, but not a heuristic that takes us from groups (linearly) toward individuals, and back, eventually bypassing language. Rather, it has to be an understanding of language and superdiversity in which we start from actual instances of interaction and move toward individuals and groups. This may enable us to make far more accurate and realistic statements about who is who in the online-​offline nexus of communication. But even more importantly, it equips both sociolinguistics and superdiversity with an exceptionally powerful theory of action and, consequently, with exceptional relevance for more general socio-​theoretical arguments and constructs (see Blommaert 2020 on the notion of scaling and polycentricity).

Acknowledgments This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Jan Blommaert and the massive efforts he made to get sociolinguistics and superdiversity talking to each other. Was it a paradigm shift? Who knows? It surely was a great deal of fun.

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Sociolinguistics and Superdiversity    119 Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–​1054. Vigouroux, Cecile 2019. “Language and (In)hospitality: The Micropolitics of Hosting and Guesting.” Language, Culture and Society 1 (1): 31–​58. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2010. “Commonplace Diversity: Social Interactions in a Super-​diverse Context.” MMG Working Paper 10-​11. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen.

Chapter 8

So cial P ol i c y a nd Su perdive rsi t y An Agenda for Addressing Racisms and Inequalities Jenny Phillimore

Introduction “Social policy” is an academic field that focuses on empirical examination of the social actions taken to support the well-​being of individuals in society (Alcock 2003). Vertovec (2007), in in his seminal paper outlining the social scientific challenges associated with the advent of superdiversity, raised a number of issues that pertinent to social policy. These included the need to explore new patterns of inequality, prejudice, and segregation and the research-​policy nexus. Some have accused superdiversity researchers of overlooking these concerns. At the same time, social policy scholars, who have a remit to attend to such challenges, have neglected race and ethnicity and paid almost no attention to the emergence of superdiversity. Given that the advent of superdiversity is now largely accepted in Europe and the argument that the concept can be used as a way to “interpret the multiple modes and impacts of current forms of societal complexification” (Vertovec 2014, 2), superdiversity has clear relevance to social policy. A number of scholars have called for greater consideration of the relations between superdiversity and policy. Berg and Sigona (2013) see policy as one of three dimensions of superdiversity, but they focus predominantly on policy aimed at managing social integration and governing populations. Faist (2009) notes the shift of policy and organizational practice “beyond the issue of the adaptation of individual migrants (assimilation) to the level of organizations in which life-​chances regarding health, education, and work are distributed and regulated.” (173). Yet while social policy scholarship has largely neglected to examine evolving needs in superdiverse societies, scholars using the concept of superdiversity have been accused of adopting a celebratory orientation and eschewing more critical approaches focused on racism and inequality.

122   Jenny Phillimore I consider how social policy scholars might engage with superdiversity and embark on research that attends to the aforementioned criticisms. Having examined why social policy should be concerned with superdiversity and setting out some of the key criticisms and contributions of the current scholarship I lay out an agenda for future research. In so doing, I argue that both social policy and migration researchers can help to identify the differences that make a difference in individuals’ lives, enabling a new understanding of the role of structure and agency in determining individual and group outcomes.

Social Policy and Superdiversity Social policy is fundamentally concerned with human needs and how those needs are met. It engages with the actions, policies, and practices enacted to meet need including all the legislation, activities, and inactions that affect people’s lives and, ultimately, their welfare and quality of life. As the world becomes more unequal and social cleavages persist, there is an ever greater case for “social policy as academic practice” to address vulnerability and ensure equality (Taylor-​Gooby 2019). Social policy has paid particular attention to social welfare, which includes both social arrangements implemented to meet the needs of individuals and groups and policies and practices aimed at reducing social problems (Manning 2003). Yet social policy scholarship has paid little attention to diversity and superdiversity. Superdiversity has received only a handful of mentions in the leading social policy journals; among these Critical Social Policy and Policy and Politics stand out because they contain just a few contributions, whereas the others make no reference whatsoever to the concept. The vast majority of superdiversity articles that are relevant to social policy are published in migration studies journals, suggesting a need for social policy scholars to engage with the concept and respond to some of Vertovec’s challenges. Blommaert (2013) identifies superdiversity, alongside the emergence of the network society, as one of two fundamental changes that have reshaped social life in postmodernity. He describes the social world as a polycentric environment wherein many people have multiple attachments and identity markers yet are expected to integrate into a society portrayed by politicians and policymakers as monolithic (see also Grzymala-​ Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018). In so doing, individuals are expected to become familiar with both an imagined monolithic culture and with a complex bureaucracy that has failed to adapt to diversity. The inability or unwillingness of institutions to accept and adapt to superdiversification is one of the major social policy challenges for the provision of services in demographically complex societies. Indeed, the majority of the challenges that Vertovec (2007) set out in his article introducing superdiversity are social policy challenges. The issues concerning new patterns of inequality and prejudice, of segregation, new experiences of place and contact, the interconnections between transnationalism and integration and the research-​policy nexus, and the puzzle of how to

Social Policy and Superdiversity    123 engage communities in service delivery and ensure that resources are distributed fairly are all of fundamental concern to social policy analysts. Spoonley (2015) stresses the critical role of policy in addressing some of these challenges, in particular, the implications of rapid diversification for social cohesion and social mobility. He also highlights the need for policy to ensure the potential of superdiversity is realized in terms of social and economic benefits. Spoonley calls for national governments to support intercultural dialogue, actively address barriers to social mobility, and ensure that robust antidiscrimination laws are introduced. Others have pointed to a local turn, noting the importance of local policymakers and practitioners taking action to ensure migrant inclusion and diversity governance (see Caponio 2010; van Breugel 2020). Elsewhere, the importance of multilevel governance has been stressed (i.e., Scholten and Penninx 2016), as has the role of mainstreaming in terms of using a “whole society” approach to mobilize action across policy areas (van Breugel and Scholten 2017). Yet despite these preoccupations with social inclusion, welfare, and social mobility, social policy, until recently, neglected diversity, race, and ethnicity. This was partly because of its somewhat uncritical focus on welfare states, structures conceived and built based on notions of the White male breadwinner model (see Williams 1989, 2021). Critical social policy analysts have attempted to place race and gender at the heart of the social policy agenda, but with some notable exceptions, they continue to be neglected (Vickers et al. 2013; Law 2009). Several scholars, from wide-​ranging disciplines, have examined different aspects of social policy or called for greater attention on policy in the context of superdiversity. Sepulveda et al. (2011) stressed the need to better understand heterogeneity in migrant enterprises in developing policy responses and frameworks, noting that at the time of their research, policy responses were not evidence led, and ethnic minority businesses, where they were even noticed, were treated as homogenous. The authors suggested a shift from “single group” forms of delivery, arguing that, though such a move was likely to be contested because it was seen as a retreat from attempts to address structural inequalities, it was necessary to retain a commitment to equality while simultaneously developing policies that are sensitive to the local context. They argued for policy focused on place rather than the group, an argument made elsewhere in relation to healthcare provision (Pemberton et al. 2019). Phillimore (2011) and colleagues (see Lindenmeyer et al. 2016b, 2016a; Green et al. 2014), focusing on access to national health services, call for a better understanding of the needs of superdiverse populations to develop appropriate policy. As yet most of the social policy attention has focused on residents’ experiences of access to services in superdiverse places, with work published in relation to housing (Walters 2015), social work (Boccagni 2015), education (Vandenbroeck 2018), healthcare (Phillimore et al. 2021), and nursing (Culley 2014). These studies have highlighted that current provision of these services is inadequate because even if it attempts to account for ethnic diversity, by adopting an ethnonationalist or groupist approach, it fails to account for the level of complexity associated with superdiversity. This complexity is frequently discussed in terms of greater numbers of groups, but it also looks at the

124   Jenny Phillimore intersection of characteristics and the role of legal status in shaping access. Attention has also increasingly been paid to the use of language in social policy settings (see Creese and Blackledge 2018). This work highlights the agentic role of migrant subjects as communicators, breaking away from the problematizing of non-​native speakers that tends to portray language as one of the main barriers to accessing welfare services (Samkange-​Zeeb et al. 2020). Although sociolinguists have shed some light on interactions in social policy spaces, they have not yet, for example, examined the implications of the practice of translanguaging for policy and practice. Work that is very pertinent to social policy, though largely published in sociology journals, has drawn on Brubaker and colleagues’ (2006) focus on the sociology of the everyday. Notable here are Mayblin et al.’s (2019) examination of the everyday life of asylum seekers that highlights the role of social policy in enacting slow violence, providing an example of how attending to the everyday can illuminate the relation between policy and the generation of harm. Elsewhere, Berg (2019) but also Pemberton in this volume suggest an attention to micropublics: spaces of interaction between the front-​ line bureaucrats who mediate social policy and the individuals who are the subject of policy, showing how the advent of austerity impacts on lives in superdiverse places. Berg points to problems with the mainstreaming of provision for diverse communities into services, which has led to a reduction in special services at the same time that national policy controls migration flows and legal statuses, both of which affect the social rights of individuals enacted at local level. Her ethnographic study of street-​level bureaucrats who are tasked with delivering services and addressing difference in the context of national policy, highlights how they channel and shape policy, many adopting an ethos of inclusion that counters national policy intent. These studies demonstrate the importance of examining the lived reality of policy by showing how policies can produce inequality. They also illustrate the deficiencies of existing models of service delivery and argue for new ways of thinking about and researching superdiversity and social policy that eschew methodological nationalism, and shifting predominantly to what Berg (2019) describes as “methodological neighborhoodism.” The importance of moving away from the binary language of them–​us, migrant–​non-​migrant that dominates the thinking on national policy is further expounded by Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore (2018) in a call for research that examines how integration and inclusion is enacted in superdiverse societies.

Criticisms and Opportunities Some progress has been made in attending to social policy interests, albeit largely by researchers from outside the field. Yet these approaches do not adequately deal with criticisms that apply equally to the study of social policy and superdiversity: that they fail to attend to racism and inequality and offer an ahistorical, fundamentally colonial account of the position of “diverse” populations (Ndhlovu 2016). Back (2015) directly

Social Policy and Superdiversity    125 accuses Vertovec of insouciance on racism because he mentions the term only once in his seminal paper, and argues that the paper ignores the legacy of urban sociologists and their tradition of doing work on the cultural politics of race. He also notes the lack of attention paid to relations between racism and the legacies of empire and a failure to challenge anti-​immigrant sentiment. Ndhlovu (2016) points to the hegemonic dominance of United States–​European Union perspectives, arguing that the Western academic tradition overemphasizes identitarian epistemologies, ontologies, and discourses. If some see superdiversity as conceptualizing a postmulticultural era (Tremlett 2014), Ndhlovu argues that it merely builds on the failings of multiculturalism by overemphasizing culture and paying insufficient attention to the socioeconomic imperatives of populations. While he acknowledges that superdiversity points to increased complexity, he nonetheless insists that it does not offer “fresh reflections on the invisible imperial global technologies of subjectivation that continue to underpin and enable asymmetrical global power relations” (Dastile and Ndlovu-​Gatsheni 2013, 105). In conclusions that stress the social policy relevance of superdiversity, Ndhlovu describes the concept as a framework that focuses on difference without challenging exclusion and tells a partial history by ignoring the Global South. There is, however, no evidence that Vertovec’s (2007) paper makes global claims about superdiversity or overlooks inequalities and racism. Instead, Vertovec uses the paper to introduce the concept of superdiversity and set an agenda for future work. It is evident that superdiversity and social policy scholars have largely failed to attend to this part of Vertovec’s agenda and have, indeed, focused more on interactions and encounters. Scholars have subsequently called for greater attention to be paid to the differences that make a difference to individuals’ lives and social policy outcomes (i.e., Berg and Sigona 2013; Humphris 2015). And while we have attempted to uncover inequality and the inadequacy of policy in addressing it, we have not gained sufficient ground in explaining it or thinking about how it can be overcome, and without a doubt, we have not paid enough attention to racism. Hall’s (2017) paper in Ethnic and Racial Studies articulates the links between the emergence of superdiversity and European border-​making, highlighting a “politics of contradiction and the fear generated by the migration ‘crisis,’ connected to the discriminatory sorting of migrants sustained by an historic ethos of subordination” (1562), and in so doing makes a coherent and valuable attempt to connect superdiversity, policy, and racism. She illuminates a history of contradiction wherein states use subjects as cheap or free labor while offering them no or unequal rights. She places the emergence of superdiversity directly as the link between an ethos of subordination related to bordering of migrants and the neoliberal demand for cheap labor. She makes direct connection between the emergence of diversity and its generation by a discriminatory migration milieu, and stresses the role of superdiversity in highlighting the role of discriminatory policy: “In my view, the core value offered by super-​diversity is an attention to the ways in which the variegation of people within and across border spaces matters” (1571). Thus, she sees the potential for superdiversity to uncover the role of policy and colonialism in the production of racism and inequality.

126   Jenny Phillimore Tremlett (2014), too, see opportunities in the use of superdiversity, first, in its potential to overcome the problems associated with an overemphasis on ethnicity that prevents a holistic understanding of social processes and the roles of actors and agencies. She applies this thinking to the category of Roma, who despite their considerable heterogeneity are frequently problematized and essentialized by European policymakers and researchers (see also Sardelić, this volume). Tremlett considers superdiversity’s lack of alignment with a specific discipline to offer a space to think about the contexts and constituents of racism, highlighting the importance of its multidisciplinary appeal. Like Mayblin and colleagues (2019), referring to the everyday, Tremlett argues that using superdiversity even offers the possibility of shifting away from binary language: “The linking thread is the recognition of complexity, understanding complexity not as an aberration but as a feature of everyday life” (2014, 23). To normalize complexity, she suggests that superdiversity research also focus on those who are frequently termed “hosts” or “mainstream,” suggesting that asking who has the power to identify what is diverse is at the heart of an anti-​essentialist approach that can further social justice. Berg and Sigona (2013) also see potential of superdiversity opening up a new agenda, “pushing us to go beyond static categorizations, which constrain our understanding of social life and towards a better understanding of the contingency, spatial specificity and complex conjunctures of multiplying axes of difference” (356). Such an approach, they note, must focus on histories and narratives so that we can understand the implications of the past for present-​day inequalities. While Foner (2017) asserts that not everything about superdiversity is new, she does acknowledge an increase in polyethnic neighborhoods, legal statuses, and languages spoken. She warns against the overemphasis on greater ethnic diversity that has dominated superdiversity research to date (Vertovec 2019) and stresses the need to consider “social, political and economic structures and institutions” (55) as explanatory factors in social and economic patterns.

An Agenda for Action So, there is both a need and potential for social policy researchers to address the core criticisms of both superdiversity and social policy that we have neglected to critically engage with racism, injustice, and inequality. Here, I outline a research agenda that attempts to privilege voice and account for power. Following Faist (2009) I contend that (super)diversity makes possible a politics of difference, “a new relationship between the universal and the particular” (187), which takes particular account of the structural and the individual. This means connecting structure and agency, group and entity, and following the power both historically and hierarchically. Following the power hierarchically means shifting our gaze away from the usual subjects of superdiversity research—​ those who reside in superdiverse places—​ and identifying instead the policymakers and practitioners who make the decisions about the policy and practice

Social Policy and Superdiversity    127 that affect those subjects. This would be a long-​term enterprise, moving “up” from micropublics to the elite and examining the assumptions and beliefs that shape their actions. Following the power historically would mean building on the work of Bhambra (2017) and Bhambra and Holmwood (2018) by looking at the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state and at how diversity policy and practice generate racialized inequalities. Given that the conceptual logics of superdiversity originate in the Global North and inevitably reflect “manifestations of the world-​systems power structures in that they strive to approximate a mirror-​image of Euro-​American pretentions about there being somewhat seamless global identities based on notions of globalization and universalism” (Ndhlovu 2016, 36), there is a need to go further. There is much scope for decolonial analyses wherein even the conceptual logics on which superdiversity is based are questioned and the social responses to superdiversification critiqued. We do not need to abandon the notion of superdiversity and the complexity it highlights, but we do need to think about it from multiple perspectives. Ndhlovu points to the potential for Southern theory to identify the mechanisms that generated our current understandings around superdiversity and to offer counternarratives. Engaging scholars of and from the Global South in scholarship around superdiversity is a priority. The agenda for action set out here is a starting point for work connecting superdiversity and social policy as it relates to the social actions that shape the well-​ being of all in a society. The agenda can and should be developed through engagement with other voices, which may include superdiverse “subjects,” policymakers, practitioners, and scholars from other disciplines in the Global South and Global North. The agenda is thus multidisciplinary with interdisciplinary aspirations and attends to the social policy challenges set out by Vertovec in 2007. It proposes placing racism and inequality at the center of investigations and analyses and promotes thinking about how they shape well-​being and might influence the creation of a policy and practice capable of tackling inequalities. 1. Focus on experiences uncovering and describing racism and inequality by paying attention to micropublics and the everyday. Following Tremlett (2014), look at lived experiences to see what everyday practice can tell us about what diversity means and how racism and inequality manifest in the everyday. This may involve a focus on welfare micropublics to, as Berg (2019) suggests, consider diversity together with inequality to “develop more textured and nuanced accounts of superdiverse urban areas including a fuller understanding of the social production of difference and indifference” (184). 2. Attend to multifaceted forms of division and racism. On uncovering racisms and inequalities moving up and back from the everyday, tracing these to their sources in terms of both power and history and responding to Alexander’s (2015) call for racism and racialization to penetrate studies of migration and superdiversity. We need to understand the sources and constructions of racisms and inequalities in order to design policies to tackle them.

128   Jenny Phillimore 3. Look at diversity as social practice and at what are seen as markers of diversity, why, and by whom and exploring who has the power to identify markers and how they use it. Here I build on Berg and Sigona’s (2013) assertion that “a fine-​grained, ethnographic understanding of the diversification of diversity as lived experience helps us understand when, where, how, why and for whom some differences come to make a difference” (356), with the focus on processes—​the how of difference and questioning constructions of difference. 4. Adopt a multilevel analysis that explores the interactions between national and local policies and how these play out to create diversities and generate (in)justice and (in)equality; how they reinforce and contradict each other; and how national hostile policies are contested at other levels. 5. Explore how forms of diversification, discrimination, and racism are produced across borders by examining empirically Hall’s (2017) brutal migration milieu and accounting for the global in our understanding of the everyday. Here, we need to unpick, describe, and account for the discriminatory migration milieu that is at the core of diversity generation, “connecting categories of race, religion and legal status to the restrictions of mobility in a highly unequal world” (1566), and to examine how these shape policy and practice. 6. Examine voice in the face of inequality and racism and how it is enacted; how power is subverted and captured to push back against oppressive structures that have installed and reinforced the status quo; and how to engage voice for progressive policymaking. 7. Engage in comparative study at multiple levels. Compare neighborhoods, cities, countries, policies, and practices to identify commonalities and differences in patterns and approaches with which to grow our understanding of the foundations of racisms and inequalities and the factors that shape them. Much of this agenda will take us out of our scholarly comfort zones, and will involve, as social policy analysis often does, the engagement of multiple scholars from different traditions. It will entail identifying new or different conceptual tools that, for example, enable us to think about both the past and the present and what they mean for the everyday, perhaps engaging with Ndhlovu’s (2016) call for connecting the scholarly traditions of the South and the North. But it also demands different kinds of social policy research. We need to shift our focus away from big data sets that record outcomes or attitudes by ethnonational origin and make sure that when we design surveys, we include a wider range of categories, such as immigration status, and use different sampling strategies, such as maximum diversity sampling or respondent driven sampling (Goodson and Gryzmala-​Kazlowska 2017; Aspinall, this volume), to ensure that superdiversity is recorded. We must use new approaches to analyze datasets, adopting anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical approaches that go beyond the established use of social categories (Phillimore et al. 2019a). Social policy has tended to rely heavily on qualitative accounts of everyday experience that often focus on generating snapshots of vulnerabilities. We need to utilize a

Social Policy and Superdiversity    129 wider range of techniques. It is important to account for the everyday lived reality of social policy structures and to explore the agentic actions of individuals in surviving, finding voice, pushing back, and getting by (or not). This approach involves understanding how experiences unfold over time and relies more on narrative, oral history and the construction of timelines. We also need to attend to the role of elites using interviews, discourse, and media analysis and to connect policies across regimes and borders in mapping exercises that join the dots across place and time. Finally, we need explorations of local policy ecosystems that eschew the single-​policy-​domain focus that is frequently adopted in social policy research, to understand how different policies and practices connect within places to shape lived realities.

The Importance of Real-​World Research It is not enough simply to document and understand the relationship between superdiversity, social policy, and inequalities, but the eventual goal must be to produce research that has a function beyond the academe. The sheer complexity of not only populations but also the factors underpinning inequalities alongside the deeply entrenched sources of discrimination and racism can make communicating findings in an accessible way difficult. The example of the Understanding the practice and developing the concept of welfare bricolage (UPWEB) project shows how difficult it can be to ensure that research findings can speak to policymakers. The UPWEB project led by the author used a wide range of methods, including ethnography, mapping, narrative interviews with timelines, elite interviews, and household surveys to examine the ways in which residents living in superdiverse neighborhoods addressed their health concerns. This interdisciplinary comparative project explored the interactions between structure and agency, revealing the conditions that led to health-​seeking behaviors often viewed as problematic within national healthcare systems, uncovering different forms of discrimination and racism (see Ahlberg et al. 2019; Phillimore et al. 2021), and identifying effective practices. The findings have been extensively published and introduced such concepts as “welfare bricolage” and local healthcare ecosystems which offer the potential to bring understanding to complex behaviors such as the simultaneous combinations of multiple resources across welfare sectors (see c and 2019b). Yet despite our best efforts, the study had almost no traction with policymakers because the findings and solutions pointed to the need for major structural adjustments and cross-​sector cooperation and so were viewed as too radical to be possible. The importance of real-​world research that can speak to a wide audience has been illustrated in the global pandemic by the early identification of mortality rates almost twice that of the general population in so-​called BAME groups. Initial assumptions that

130   Jenny Phillimore high mortality rates were due to genetics or cultural factors, such as religious practice, were overturned by researchers moving beyond ethnicity to explore the intersections between ethnonational origins, gender, age and socioeconomic status and finding that inequality rather than ethnicity underpinned the shocking disparities (Nazroo et al. 2020). Further work also highlighted the importance of place, finding clear links between air pollution and Covid-​19 in England, with superdiverse neighborhoods tending to have higher pollution levels and poorer, more overcrowded housing (see Travaglio et al. 2021; Carrington 2020). Projects looking beyond ethnicity have thus played a major role in highlighting the importance of structural rather than cultural factors in the pandemic. The findings have been acknowledged and accepted by politicians and policymakers, and ethnicity is now viewed as a factor that increases vulnerability to contracting and dying from the virus. The extent to which such evidence will be used produce policy that actually makes a difference in the lives of the minority groups disproportionately affected by the pandemic remains to be seen. Resolution means addressing the structural inequalities that see so many people from diverse backgrounds living in poor conditions and working in risky front-​line jobs.

Conclusions Over a decade after Vertovec’s seminal paper introduced the concept of superdiversity much work remains to be done. Fundamentally a social policy concern, the relationship between superdiversity, inequality, and racism demands the attention of social policy and superdiversity scholars alike, who need to move beyond the established approaches to explore the differences that make a difference to superdiverse populations. The importance of a policy focus has been articulated well by scholars who have engaged with the concept of superdiversity and by many of its critics. Some progress has been made, particularly around highlighting the inequity of access to services and the failure of multicultural approaches to meet the needs in superdiverse areas. Yet there is a need for more proactive linking of social policy and superdiversity, in particular with scholars of social policy utilizing the concept and new methods to identify the relations between inequalities, policies, and practices. There is huge scope for further work that engages with both structure and agency, the everyday and the global, and with history and policy. Such work can uncover the complexity that underpins inequalities by connecting policy and practice operating at different scales, across borders and over time. Future endeavors need to be undertaken across disciplines using mixed methods and comparison to uncover and articulate inequality and racism and to understand how it is generated and perpetuated by policy and practice. The agenda I have set out offers a wide range of challenges to scholars but attending to it goes beyond addressing intellectual puzzles to an urgent engagement in the academic practice of social policy to address vulnerability and meet need.

Social Policy and Superdiversity    131

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Pa rt I I

M E T HOD OL O G IC A L R E F L E C T ION S

Chapter 9

Su perdiver si t y i n C om parative Pe rspe c t i v e Ralph D. Grillo

Comparing Superdiversities Ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, in varying degrees, has characterized many societies in different epochs, so where does superdiversity fit among the varieties of diversity? Following the precedent of David Hollinger’s (1995) reflections on the “diversification of diversities” in the United States, “superdiversity” emerged in Steve Vertovec’s (2007) paper as a term describing sociocultural diversity in a major urban center (London) in a postcolonial society in an era of globalization, migration, and transnationalism. For Vertovec it was a multidimensional phenomenon, involving more than the coexistence within a single formation of a multiplicity of ethnicities but encompassing other ways in which such populations might be differentiated, including the routes through which people arrived in the city, as migrants or refugees, with the consequences for their legal status (see also Vertovec 2019). Other vectors of difference include gender, economic inequality, sexuality, and so forth, as is seen in the intersectionality literature. This is “Superdiversity Heavy,” à la Vertovec. Frequently, however, in the research literature the term is restricted to one dimension only, ethnic plurality (“Count ’em”): “Superdiversity Lite.” Given its historicity, superdiversity is best reserved for Heavy, Vertovec diversity, a special case of diversity, tout court, typical of certain cities in the current ecumene, “global,” if not “imperial,” cities, poles of attraction for migrants and refugees because of the access and opportunities they offer: London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, or Johannesburg (significant in Sub-​Saharan Africa). As such, Heavy diversity perhaps has limited application beyond those contexts. Lite has wider distribution and greater appeal to researchers or policy advocates who are thinking about interculturalism (e.g., Cantle 2012). Heavy, however, deserves its place among socioscientific ideas about complexity, including nineteenth-​century and later attempts to grasp what was happening

138   Ralph D. Grillo in eras of rapid social, economic, technological, and organizational change, principally through industrialization and urbanization: for example, Comte, Maine, Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, and, more recently, Castells and Giddens. That in itself suggests a worthwhile comparative project, as would comparing approaches to superdiversity through the lens of academic disciplines, setting the geographers’ “visualization” approach pioneered by Dan Hiebert and others (see, e.g., https://​super​div .mmg.mpg.de/​) against that of anthropologists prowling the mean streets to understand what actually happens, on the ground. It would also be instructive to compare how, when, and why a particular situation (Lite or Heavy) is “subjectively” (or popularly) perceived as “too much.” David Goodhart’s (2004) “Too Diverse?” explores such a perspective, as does the idea of an “excess of alterity” employed by the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori (2002). Robert Putnam’s contention that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ ” (2007, 149) is another influential example. Indeed, the overriding narrative of much of the contemporary political rhetoric in Europe and North America is that diversity has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished, exemplified by the so-​called backlash against immigration in Europe and North America and the rise of populist anti-​immigration movements. My own interest, while linked to such issues, is less concerned with superdiversity as such but with what drives diversity, or rather diversification, simple, super, or anything in between, and the responses to it (e.g., “too much”) in different contexts. What have been the processes through which a particular state of diversity (mainly but not exclusively ethnic, cultural, and religious, and mainly in an urban context) arises—​that is, the questions of what shapes that diversity and its constituent elements, how are those elements defined and named, and how and why do relations between them shift and change, and with what consequences? This entails studying what has happened in a particular social formation, constructing its diversification over time, and then comparing diversification in different contexts, locating similarities and differences. The following case studies in summary fashion look at three cities where I undertook fieldwork: Kampala, Uganda, in the 1960s; Lyon, France, in the 1970s; and London in the 2000s. Other cities, of which I have more limited knowledge, also come to mind: Mexico City; Belfast, at the onset of the so-​called Troubles; Bologna, studied by Sussex-​ based researchers in the late 1990s (Grillo and Pratt 2002). All were and are ethnically and otherwise highly diverse, if not superdiverse, but what shaped their diversity, that is, their (changing) ethnic, cultural, and religious populations, and its governance?

Colonial City: Kampala 1960–​1970s Diversification in Kampala in the 1960s was the product of the form British colonialism took in that part of the world from the 1920s onward, drawing in labor from across East Africa and beyond, indeed, intercontinentally from South Asia, and Europe, placing

Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective    139 everyone within supposedly universal “racial” and ethnic hierarchies, while underpinning the privileges of a local indigenous elite, the Baganda aristocracy (inter alia, Elkan 1960; Ghai and Ghai 1965; Grillo 1973, 1974; Morris 1968; Parkin 1969, 1975; Richards 1954; Southall and Gutkind 1957). This was similar to colonial cities elsewhere in Sub-​ Saharan Africa, such as the mining towns of the Zambian Copperbelt, which attracted much attention from anthropologists (Epstein 1958; Gluckman 1961; Kapferer 1972; Mitchell 1956). They were migrant cities whose highly variegated polyglot populations included “expatriates” and settlers from Europe, African migrants from rural areas, and, especially in Eastern Africa, from the Indian subcontinent. In the 1960s Uganda also housed refugees from neighboring Burundi, Rwanda, and the Congo. The example of the labor force of the East African Railways and Harbours (EARH), formerly Uganda Railway, revealed how colonialism organized and differentiated the population of such cities within its social, economic, and political order, and also illustrated changes that were taking place. The EARH had long had racially separate pay scales, and though by the 1960s these had been largely abandoned, Europeans, Asians, and Africans continued to be located in higher middle-​and lower-​income occupations, with Europeans and Asians the senior and middle-​ranking managers. This hierarchy was reflected in the allocation of company housing in what was described as “European,” “Asian,” and “African” accommodation. A similar distribution of jobs and housing could be found throughout colonial Africa. While such “racial” categories were fundamental in the description and organization of diversity, they were not the only mode of differentiation. Within the African population the ethnicity of groups and individuals speaking different languages and espousing different cultures, what colonialism called “tribes,” was also highly significant, as, in some cases, was religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, Muslim). In the 1960s, it became commonplace to argue that colonialism itself had created “tribes,” or at least “tribalism.” Indeed, in their passion for classification and order, the authorities did put labels on groupings they believed shared language or culture, but the way in which such identities and commitments emerged was the outcome of a complex, top-​down–​ bottom-​up, ethnic dialectic between colonial officials and missionaries and indigenous peoples and their leaders (Vail 1989). While some people refused such differences or incorporated them in a complex discourse (“I’m a detribalized Tswana princess,” one young woman told me in Kampala), they became increasingly important in the approach to independence (1962) and in its aftermath. Concerning “Asians,” a 1900 report had contended that East Africa could be “the America of the Hindu,” and laborers from British India were recruited in the early twentieth century to work on the construction of the railway. Many died from disease and working conditions or returned home, but some stayed and more were later recruited to serve in clerical posts in the public services, and others opened shops and businesses, some very substantial. Although both Africans and Europeans often treated them as a single category, “Asians” were also divided along ethnoreligious and cultural lines. Indeed, by 1960 they had become increasingly communalized, with differences of caste and sect (and international affiliation, India/​Pakistan) overriding common racial or

140   Ralph D. Grillo cultural identities, though this had little local political significance. Later, in the 1970s, under President Idi Amin, many Asians were expelled and their assets confiscated, leaving for the United Kingdom, where they made a distinctive contribution to Britain’s multicultural society and economy. Indeed, two of the most senior ministers in the 2020 Conservative government were children of Asian immigrants originally from East Africa. Diversification in one place interacted with and influenced what happened in another. Among Europeans, certainly from Britain, it was class, if anything, that differentiated them, and indeed class also became of increasing significance among the African population in the period leading up to independence. By the early 1960s there was in Kampala as elsewhere in colonial Africa an emergent African middle class of skilled and white-​collar workers, as on the housing estate studied by Parkin (1969; also Grillo 1974), who were gradually moving into jobs previously held by Europeans and Asians. In the mid-​1960s, with the ending of direct colonial rule, if not of (neo)colonialism, the process accelerated as “Africanization” displaced some people from jobs and the socioracial hierarchy and benefited others, causing tension between those who gained and those who missed out. “Don’t lord it over me in your suit,” said a popular song. This was one factor in disturbances that erupted in 1966. Although colonialism sought to categorize populations on “racial” and ethnic lines, lumping them together and keeping them apart, it could not prevent flows of people, language, and culture between those blocks. This called into play another set of categories, and in all colonial contexts we find terms to refer to people in between. A young trade unionist, returned from a course in Britain, complained that “over there” he had been called “colored.” “But I’m not Colored,” he said, “I’m African.” Although colonial (“European”) rule formally ended sixty years ago, it still hovers in the background, perhaps in the guise of international aid and its agencies, or in the shape of Asian businesses, which subsequently began to return. Colonialism was never of course the only factor affecting Kampala’s development; after 1980, for example, HIV-​AIDS impacted the city’s population (Wallman and Pons 2001; Wallman 1996b). Nonetheless, colonialism and its aftermath (including the “tribalism” it sustained) structured diversity in Kampala for over a hundred years. This overview contextualizes one form of diversification and its governance. Lyon, the second city of France, tells another story.

Industrial City: Lyon, 1970s–​1980s In the mid-​1970s, Lyon was a major industrial city whose diversification stemmed largely from the flow of migrants and refugees into what were then the flourishing automobile, chemical, and construction industries. They came principally from Southern Europe and the former French North African colonies, among whom there were differences between Arabic and Berber speakers, which were long-​standing and frequently conflictual, as in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. There were also Algerians who had

Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective    141 sided with France in the struggle for independence and were now seeking asylum in the “mother country” (Harkis), and the so-​called Pieds-​Noirs, French colonial citizens of various national origins who had left North Africa upon Algerian independence. The governance of diversity in Lyon has long been “problematic” (Grillo 1985), indeed, from time to time (as in the 1980s and 2000s) there have been serious civil disturbances. In the 1970s official and popular concern focused on immigrants from North Africa, usually described as maghrébins or, more colloquially, arabes. Historically, immigrant labor had meant mostly single men who were leaving families là-​bas, back home, but by the mid-​1970s, those families started to arrive in large numbers, while maintaining important transnational ties with their countries of origin, as was happening elsewhere in Europe (e.g. with migrants of South Asian origin in the UK). European policy (partly in response to the oil crises of the decade) had toughened restrictions on immigration but recognized the demand for family reunification, not least on the part of migrants seeking education and employment opportunities for their children. Their situation and relationship with France and French society was routinely interpreted through a colonial perspective that emphasized their “tribal” background. They were often spoken of as coming from “traditional” societies (straight from the bled) whose beliefs and practices regarding women and children made it difficult, some said impossible, for them to fit into (integrate with) French society. In Lyon in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the effects of this demographic diversification (more women, more children) were immediately felt in the housing sector. Past migrants had generally found accommodation in tenements or shanty towns, but as these were demolished “bachelors” were increasingly concentrated in large, purpose-​built hostels in suburban boroughs (Jones 1991) with families housed in dilapidated apartment buildings, as in the Rue Oliver de Serres in Villeurbanne, or fourteen-​story tower blocks on the infamous Les Minguettes estate, in Vénissieux. A further consequence was the emergence, observable in school registrations, of a rapidly growing “second generation” of young men and women of North African origin, born and brought up in France; the so-​called beurs and beurettes, terms which originated as slang “reversals” of the word arabe. While Islam was by no means absent from Lyon in 1975 and 1976, it was not the salient (or divisive) force that it subsequently became. Although never irrelevant in the lives of migrants and their families, it was not at the forefront of their concerns, which were more to do with housing, jobs, health, and social services and, increasingly, children’s education. Islam had a relatively low public profile, with only one mosque, hidden in a back street and little frequented, the Imam, said to be a Harki “paraded for the July 14 celebrations.” Later, Islam gained heightened salience as a global religious, social, cultural, and political force, especially in its “Islamist” or “fundamentalist” form. Its visibility and significance for Muslims and non-​Muslims in Europe increased dramatically from the 1980s onward when Middle Eastern states (oil-​rich, with Muslim rulers) began, for mixed motives of religion, charity, and politics, to recycle petrodollars into the Muslim infrastructure in Europe, notably through the financing of mosques and other Muslim organizations. By the 2000s, this infrastructure had been widely achieved, and national debates about Islamic dress (headscarf, niqab) illustrated how the public

142   Ralph D. Grillo presence of Islam had become a matter of serious contention, not least in Lyon (Cour des Comptes 2020; Downing 2015b; Galet 2021; Marie 2021; Parvez 2011, 2013, 2017). In the 1970s and 1980s, partly in response to these developments, the right-​wing Front National appeared as a factor in French electoral politics, notably, in the working-​class Lyon suburbs, previously the fiefdom of the Communist Party, which now bore the brunt of the social and economic pressures stemming from diversification, and where it was argued that a “threshold of tolerance” had been passed, an idea which in the mid-​1970s influenced official and unofficial perceptions and policies (Debono 2016). Thus, although Lyon’s diversity did not diminish after the 1970s, its nature and the response to it shifted. In my own work (Grillo 1985) I was principally concerned with the governance of diversity and the continuing colonial—​that is, “racial”—​mentality of those responsible for its administration. One issue concerned the “representation” of immigrant, ethnic, and religious minorities, in two senses. First, how what happens in Muslim families, for example, is perceived and conceptualized by Muslims themselves and by members of the majority society, a particularly important concern when the latter have institutional responsibilities as social workers, teachers, police officers, and so on. Secondly, whose perceptions and conceptualizations become hegemonic and influential in the public arena? Who has the power to define the situation of such families and make that definition stick? How are different voices incorporated (if they are at all), and how is space made available for alternative perspectives (what Baumann [1996] called “demotic” counternarratives) that challenge dominant ones? In 1976 it was striking how public perceptions of minorities and their families, and how those perceptions informed policy, largely entailed indirect modes of representation. One example (in Grillo 2018) involved a report by the Groupe Tiers Monde de Caluire (an activist group based in a Lyon suburb) who organized an exhibition to inform the public about why immigrants came to Lyon and the problems they faced there. The exhibition, held in a hall on Caluire’s main street, consisted of a poster and photographic display illustrating a variety of facts about immigrant life and the problems of housing, school, work, and so on. In preparing their report, the Groupe had undertaken a social survey of their area, walking throughout the borough and observing where most of the immigrants lived, taking photos but not actually talking to any of the inhabitants. They also interviewed people whose work brought them into daily contact with immigrants. Thus, the director of a hostel spoke about his (male) migrant residents and their jobs, while a social assistant spoke about families, mainly mothers and children. These interviewees, all French, supplied the Groupe with the bulk of its data. Somewhere, behind it all, were the immigrants themselves, often invisible or without a voice, whose own views were a matter for speculation. That said, there were some immigrants who became part of, or perhaps inserted themselves into, the “information structuring chain,” for example a prominent café owner who had connections with the Préfecture. Such people were thought especially valuable or influential by teachers, social workers, or hostel directors, who in turn passed on what they had to say, for instance, to the Groupe Tiers Monde de Caluire. The voices of immigrants were thus transmitted largely through intermediaries, and this was typical of the form representation took in Lyon in

Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective    143 1976. Certainly, there were immigrants active in trade unions, which foregrounded the slogan “Français. immigrés, même patron, même combat,” and some French NGOs included (minority) student activists, but this did not significantly alter the picture. Forty years later, while some 14 percent of Lyon residents in the 2014 census had been born outside France, there was now a large “postmigrant” population, as Joseph Downing (2015a) calls it, the children, indeed grandchildren of the immigrants of 1976. Downing’s research reveals both continuity and change. He argues that compared with Marseille, Lyon had, until recently, adhered to the standard French national, “republican,” policy of nonrecognition of ethnic and cultural difference (Downing 2015b; see Silverman 1999). Indeed, Lyon’s participation in the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities program, and its bid to be the 2013 European capital of culture, was criticized for insufficiently involving minorities. This criticism was taken on board in a (revised) Charte de Coopération Culturelle, which linked the twenty-​two largest cultural organizations in the city in a concerted effort to attract minority participation, and there have been a number of initiatives in the cultural field, especially on the part of third-​sector associations. “Cultural” here means the creative arts, especially music, as with the Centre des Musiques Traditionnelles Rhônes-​Alpes (CMTRA 2020), and its “sound atlas,” which “employed anthropological ethnographic methods to document the stories, daily lives, and music of musicians in the area, including meeting them in their houses . . . from Africa, South America, the Arab world and the Caribbean” (Downing 2015a, 1568). Similarly, La Maison des Passages, a multiethnic association, aims to create a postcolonial and intercultural identity for Lyon, documenting “hidden histories” of France’s colonial past and the Algerian war of independence CMTRA seems more closely involved with the communities (specifically the musicians), than Caluire researchers in 1976. Nonetheless, though La Maison organizes cultural events where people of different backgrounds meet and interact, these largely appeal to a middle-​class, educated audience, and, as Downing makes clear, where associations exist to cater for migrants’ immediate needs, they may find themselves co-​opted by other, more dominant and influential bodies. Despite such continuities with the 1970s, in the mid-​late 2000s there is a much greater number and variety of institutions and associations, including some that are faith-​based, that seek to speak both indirectly and directly for immigrant and ethnic minorities (Parvez 2013); this phenomenon is observable elsewhere in Europe (including London), where there has been a marked proliferation of nongovernmental organizations, many involving women of migrant background (notably, but not only, Muslims), born, raised, and educated locally, and now active in public affairs.

Fractal City: London in the 2000s London, now the archetypical superdiverse city, has been the subject of a multitude of historical studies, with outstanding anthropological work in the recent period (e.g.,

144   Ralph D. Grillo Back 1996; Baumann 1996; Gidley et al. 2018; Lymperopoulou 2020; Wallman 1984, 1996a; Wessendorf 2014). It would be interesting to compare its diversification, and reactions to it, in different epochs. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the influx into the East End of Italian immigrants (including my grandfather) and Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, led to a Royal Commission and the Aliens Act of 1905. In 1950s London there were “race” riots, in a period culminating in the politician Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968), amid a growing realization that London now included increasing numbers of Commonwealth immigrants. In the 1960s the Labour government enacted legislation controlling immigration and redefining British nationality, regulated “race relations” through laws to combat discrimination, and moved toward a form of “integration,” which shaped the United Kingdom’s approach to multiculturalism over the next forty years. The 2000s saw a “backlash” against that multiculturalism, the institution of a “hostile environment” for refugees, and Brexit. Throughout there have been major changes in the composition and perception of incomers. In 1960 diversity meant migrants and their descendants from the Caribbean and South Asia, differentiated by culture, language, and popularly, “race,” an idea that discrimination legislation sought to combat. In the 1970s, however, some activists, such as the feminist Southall Black Sisters, recuperated the notion of race, this time using the term “Black” in a political sense to encompass all formerly colonized, racially subordinated subjects. Characterization of the South Asian population later shifted, from “race”/​“color” to culture and language to “faith,” most obviously, but not exclusively, in the case of adherents of Islam (Peach 2005). Subsequently, in the 1990s and 2000s, important for Vertovec’s Heavy superdiversity, migration and settlement no longer involved only people from South Asia and the Caribbean but a huge range of countries and cultures, speaking a multitude of languages, entering via various routes with different legal and other statuses, who often find precarious employment in the so-​called gig economy. These new diversities did not mean that the old diversities simply vanished; different waves of diversity coexisted, often side by side. Although, when writing about London, Vertovec originally rejected the term “hyperdiversity” in favor of “superdiversity,” hyperdiversity does have its uses to refer to situations where the actors (including the powers-​that-​be) think they cannot handle diversity anymore, that things are out of control. There may be tipping points of the kind reached in the 1900s, again in the 1960s, and again in the 2000s, when Vertovec was writing. In the latter period the broad consensus on the principles underlying Britain as a multicultural society were increasingly being challenged, and multiculturalism was criticized on all manner of grounds. In the latter part of the 2000s that criticism reached a crescendo with alarm about “parallel lives,” ghettoization, the radicalization of young people, unfair access to resources, and so on, echoed in the seemingly irresistible rise of right-​wing populist, anti-​immigrant parties. This “backlash” (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010), expressed in the growing antipathy to the Muslim presence, was exacerbated by external events, including 9/​11, and the earlier Salman Rushdie Affair, as well as the influx of migrants from an expanding European Union. Local developments such as disturbances in the northern cities of England in mid-​2001, also had an impact. A

Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective    145 report recorded that “many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives” (Cantle Report 2001, sec. 2.1), a phrase that achieved wide currency. That report’s author, Ted Cantle, advocated a “community cohesion” approach as an alternative to multiculturalism, foreshadowing his later embrace of “interculturalism” as a way a of responding to the “reality of increasingly super-​diverse and globalized communities” (Cantle 2012, 38). Yet the multiculturalism of the critics was often an imagined “strong” (state) multiculturalism, overlooking the multiplicity of practical accommodations and the “demotic” (Baumann 1996) multiculturalism, built on “conviviality” (Gilroy 2004), which remained intact., as numerous studies of superdiverse London (notably, Wessendorf 2014) document at the microlevel. Contemporary London is highly differentiated, and many trajectories are apparent. On the one hand, it is a “fractal city” (Soja 2000), “fragmented and polarized,”; “fragmentation” is a key metaphor, often applied to “postmodern” societies, and perhaps a defining feature of superdiversity. But superdiversity is only part of the story. It used to be said that London consisted of many “villages,” or “manors,” to use a local term, and there is considerable variation in class and ethnic composition within boroughs. Kensington, for example, contains some of the highest value housing in London, as well as the Grenfell Tower and similar blocks. There is also variation between boroughs in terms of what Sandra Wallman (1996a) calls “narratives of difference.” She compared two boroughs and found one to be ethnically and in other ways “relatively open, and . . . heterogeneous” (22), and the other “tightly bounded, relatively closed, consistently homogeneous.” Thus, if superdiverse London is on the whole “open,” and perhaps more so now than at the time Wallman did her fieldwork, there are nonetheless areas or indeed communities where people live “parallel lives” in (relatively) self-​enclosed worlds (Grillo 2015a).

Concluding Observations Elsewhere (Grillo 2015b) I outlined (pretentiously), “rules” for the anthropological study of superdiversity: No macro without micro, no micro without macro; no local without the global, no global without the local; no present without the past (and, in the appropriate historical contexts, the future); no personal without the political, no political without the personal; no “fetish” of fieldwork (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Such “rules” are in the background to the case studies summarized here, which illustrate the varied and changing forms that emerge in specific instances of diversity at particular moments: Kampala in the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule; Lyon on the verge of a demographic shift that later turned into something to do with religion; and London in the shadow of 9/​11, EU expansion, and Brexit. But what emerges from these pen sketches? Superdiversity is not “a thing in itself ” but has many guises and is never static. There is always a lengthy process of diversification, and to understand the forces that shape

146   Ralph D. Grillo it, and responses to it, any instance must be observed through the lens of its historic, social, cultural, economic, political, and religious contexts. That observation cannot be confined within a city’s boundaries but must occur across a multiplicity of sites at micro-​, meso-​, and macrolevels, locally, nationally, and internationally. For example, at the macrolevel, superdiverse London is in large part a product of the current global ecumene, as Hannerz (1992), called it, which is, of course, a neoliberal ecumene. Neoliberal globalization and transnationalism generate not only the conditions for superdiversity but also reactions to it, with discontent about threats to national culture or personal welfare, especially among the so-​called “left behind” who voted for Brexit in the United Kingdom and Trump in the United States. State regimes, sometimes with competing or contradictory ideologies, nationally or locally or both, have a significant role in organizing diversity and difference. Colonial/​ imperial condescension placed diverse populations in racial and ethnic hierarchies; French “republicanism” officially ignored difference and proclaimed universalism while allowing contempt for otherness to flourish; British governments lurched from crisis to crisis in an on/​off relationship with an increasingly multicultural society. Such regimes incorporate a politics of categorization and naming through which governments work, alongside those which academics or civil society activists employ, and those found at street level. The interaction between them constitutes an important site of contestation. “Tribe” in Africa, arabe in France, “Muslim” in Britain provide examples that also raise issues about personal as well as public identification. Diverse cities range across a spectrum of “mixity” (social, cultural, linguistic, economic, sexual). In some, relations are relatively closed (wholly or in part); in others they are relatively open. Under Apartheid (or “Jim Crow”) there were legal restrictions, and transgression was formally or informally punished. In the Ottoman system, as under European colonialism, diversity was tightly structured and compartmentalized, while elsewhere boundaries were/​are (formally or informally) porous, with mixity, if not encouraged, at least tolerated. Colonial Kampala lies toward one end of that spectrum, contemporary superdiverse London, at least in part, toward the other. Diverse cities are multilingual and multivocal, not to say heteroglossic, with a multiplicity of culturally differentiated and often conflicting norms and values. But who speaks for whom, when, and where (government, academics, civil society, the street?), and what can they say, and with what effect? Non-​state actors and civil society institutions play an important role in defining, and giving voice to, different representations of minorities and culturally differentiated conceptions of the good life and how to live it, whether positively or negatively, for and against. This is a central feature of the politics of diverse cities, whose governance creates both winners and losers. There may be moments when diversity and its implications become an obsession, at least in the minds of the authorities or the media, if not the local communities. There are “tipping points,” when changes in the nature and extent of diversity are accompanied by paradigmatic shifts in the mindset through which diversity is observed and interpreted, when sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, actors (including social scientists) believe that something qualitatively different and (negatively or positively)

Superdiversity in Comparative Perspective    147 challenging is occurring. In Kampala, it was independence from colonial rule; in Lyon, it was popular French reactions to the concentration of immigrant families in particular neighborhoods, passing a so-​called “threshold of tolerance”; and later it was Islamic fundamentalism; in London it followed the global and local events of 2001–​2005 that led to misgivings about the long-​standing policy of multiculturalism. Subsequent developments (the Grenfell Tower disaster, Windrush scandal, the Black Lives Matter campaign, the impact of the Covid-​19 pandemic on BAME, i.e., Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic communities) have perhaps begun to foster a climate in which the concerns of a diverse population are once again taken seriously. Each of the cases described were or are under colonialism’s shadow and its aftermath and influenced by attitudes and categories with origins in colonialism, even in a supposedly postcolonial world. Most obviously Kampala, but colonialism was, and remains, a significant factor in Lyon, and has much to tell us about London, past and present. As elsewhere in Europe and North America, relations between the “West” and the “Other” in the shadow of colonialism are at the heart of many instances of diversity. Although Western colonialism does not frame all cases, nor is it the only factor, it remains highly significant. And after that, and because of that, the same applies to “race” and racism, a constant presence. While the shape of diversity may change, as new factors come into play (e.g., the salience of “other” faiths), old processes and habits, configurations and paradigms, endure or reappear, as happened with the colonial mentality that influenced the perception of “Arabs” in Lyon in 1976 and as is happening in different ways forty years later. Finally, historical and comparative studies, while pointing us toward differences and similarities, also challenge us to ask what they contribute to wider theoretical concerns, for example, the nature of power and politics in highly diverse social formations. But that is beyond my remit.

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150   Ralph D. Grillo Wallman, Sandra, and Valdo Pons. 2001. “Where Have All the Young Men Gone? Evidences and Explanations of Changing Age; Sex Ratios in Kampala.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 71 (1): 113–​127. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014. Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Super-​Diverse Context. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 10

Ethno graph i e s of Su perdive rsi t y Susanne Wessendorf

Introduction Processes of globalization and increased human mobility have led to a surge in ethnographic work spanning international borders, examining transnational relations (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-​Szanton 1992), and situating research in more than one place (Marcus 1995). But ethnographers have long been interested in plural societies and linkages beyond the local (Furnivall 1948; Geertz 1985; Hannerz 2003). In light of accelerated processes of human movement and international connections, this concern has almost become mainstream, and “global ethnographies” (Burawoy 2000) that span territorial borders and attempt to capture the impact of globalization on the local level now form a burgeoning body of literature in anthropology, sociology, geography, and the social sciences more generally. Importantly, such studies can build on long-​standing calls that, despite or, rather, because of this global interconnectedness, ethnographic work should continue to attend to the local, as processes of migration are always situated within specific localities and shaped by place-​specific histories (Hall 2015; Smith and Guarnizo 1998). Ethnographies of superdiversity can build on this long-​standing scholarship, which looks at how processes of globalization affect people’s lives in neighborhoods, towns, and villages. They represent the most recent attempts to address the challenges of observing and describing increased societal complexity resulting from national and international mobility, urbanization as well as increased immigration into rural areas. Ethnographies of superdiversity also resulted from political developments regarding ongoing immigration and perceived tensions between majority and minority populations in immigrant-​receiving societies across Europe. The notion of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) was coined in the aftermath of the “multiculturalism backlash” (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010), which took place across Europe and claimed

152   Susanne Wessendorf that multiculturalism policy and practice contributed to ethnic minorities leading “parallel lives” and a lack of interaction between different “groups” defined along ethnic and religious lines (Cantle 2001). This change in policy toward ethnic minorities and migrants, exacerbated by events such as the 2005 terrorist attacks in London, led to a renewed focus on “social cohesion” and a discourse that emphasized the need to facilitate more interaction between different ethnic and religious minority and majority groups, and create a shared sense of belonging and civic pride (Grillo 2010). In response to these political developments, and despite wide criticism of the social cohesion agenda’s culturalist stance (while ignoring socioeconomic divisions and racism) (Amin 2002; Bloch, Neal, and Solomos 2013; Hickman, Mai, and Crowley 2012), an increasing number of social scientific studies shifted their focus on studying specific ethnic minority groups to a focus on localized forms of diversity and interrelationships between groups and individuals of different backgrounds (see Berg, this volume). This “local turn” in the study of immigration-​related diversity forms the backdrop of ethnographic attention to superdiverse neighborhoods, workplaces, organizations, and a range of other sites shared by people of different backgrounds. Research in contexts characterized by immigration-​related diversification has also built on long-​standing sociological and anthropological traditions of urban neighborhood research. Since the early twentieth century, urban ethnographers from the Chicago school of sociology had been investigating how city dwellers, many of whom had arrived from various European countries and settled in so-​called “ethnic enclaves,” adapted to and interacted with each other (Park 1928, 1952). These in-​depth ethnographies of urban neighborhoods were just the beginning of ongoing ethnographic interest in urban areas that were undergoing unprecedented changes regarding population complexity, including research in European cities characterized by considerable post-​WWII immigration (Baumann 1996; Dench, Gavron, and Young 2006; Wallman 1982; Wimmer 2004). While earlier research had looked at specific ethnic groups and how they lived side by side, new conditions of migration and the increased diversification of urban areas, as well as the political and discursive backlash against multiculturalism mentioned above, has led to an increasing number of studies looking at social relations between groups and individuals of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. These studies also drew on ethnographic research on boundaries between variously defined social groups (Barth 1969; Baumann 1994; Wallman 1978). This “diversity turn” recognized that “previous ethnicity-​based clustering . . . no longer provides an adequate analytical lens for understanding the complexity and dynamism of urban multiculture” (Berg and Sigona 2013, 348). Importantly, research taking place in the aftermath of the multiculturalism backlash still primarily focused on ethnicity, race, and religion as primary categories of differentiation (Jayaweera and Choudhury 2008; Ray, Hudson, and Phillips 2008), and some studies also shed light on the intersections of ethnicity and class (Blokland 2003; Dekker and Bolt 2005; Tyler 2011). However, the shift from a focus on entities (defined by categories such as ethnicity or religion) to a focus on relations (Olwig 2013) was further complicated by the “diversification of diversity” (Hollinger 1995), resulting in superdiversity, characterized by increased differentiations not just along ethnic,

Ethnographies of Superdiversity    153 religious, and racial lines but also in terms of legal statuses and socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, etc. (Vertovec 2007). The notion of superdiversity added a new lens through which social scientists and ethnographers began to analyze such societies (see Hylland Eriksen, this volume). Rather than looking at the social life of specific (ethnic) groups or the relations between group A and group B, the superdiversity lens beckoned ethnographers to question the descriptions of individuals in terms of single social categories such as ethnicity, race and class. Although urban ethnographers, especially within sociology and anthropology, had been questioning the relationship between individuals, groups, and social categories for some time (Amit and Rapport 2002; Brubaker 2004; Cohen 1994; Jenkins 1996; Wimmer 2007), superdiversity highlighted these historically present complexities further and asked for heightened ethnographic attention to these complex realities and social relations. As stated by Blackledge, Creese, and colleagues, superdiversity does not only enable us to study different configurations of migrants, long-​established populations, and resident minorities; it also “aligns itself with critical approaches which reject simplifying and reifying conceptualizations of complex realities along national and/​or ethnic lines (Blackledge, Creese et al. 2018, xxiii; Blommaert, Spotti, and Van der Aa 2017; Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018). Ethnographic methods are particularly adept to study these complex social realities, as they are sensitive to individual experiences of difference, complex identifications and the importance of specific social contexts and situations in how people relate to each other. The remainder of this chapter addresses the kinds of places where ethnographies of superdiversity have been undertaken, the themes they have addressed and the kinds of ethnographic methods that can contribute to the study of superdiversity.

Ethnographies of Superdiversity in Place Ethnography is inherently embedded in places. As stated by Gidley (2013, 363), Ethnography, both as a method (the long-​term, up-​close and participative observation of a particular site) and as an epistemological orientation (the commitment to understanding social life through closely attending to how people do things), is best suited to capturing the everyday or commonplace nature of super-​diversity’s interactions.

Ethnographies of superdiversity have focused on specific, mostly urban, neighborhoods characterized by immigration-​related diversification, and, depending on the specific research questions, on superdiverse spaces within these, such as community groups, institutions, or public spaces like markets and cafés. This “local turn,” as a result of which a place rather than an ethnic group is the unit of analysis, helps to move away from

154   Susanne Wessendorf “methodologically ethnicist” (King 2001) approaches, allowing for categories of difference to emerge on the ground and from the research data. However, such neighborhood studies have also been criticized for their “methodological neighbourhoodism,” “which assumes the naturalness of neighbourhoods and reifies places even as it problematizes groups” (Berg et al. 2019 27; see also Berg and Sigona 2013; Galipo 2019; Gidley 2013). This focus on the local and the microdynamics of social relations in particular places also carries the danger of ignoring transnational practices and identifications which go beyond the local (Galipo 2019). Within specific urban areas or neighborhoods, ethnographies of superdiversity have typically focused on different spatial scales, ranging from public to semipublic spaces and, more rarely, to private spaces. Within these spaces, different ethnographic methodologies have been used. Researchers on superdiversity using ethnographic methods often start with observations in public spaces such as markets, street corners, cafés, and shops (see Boccagni, this volume). They examine who uses specific public spaces during certain times of the day, and how physical space itself can structure social relations (Hall 2012). For example, a comparative study of neighborhoods in Singapore, New York, and Johannesburg examined the use of public space by individuals and groups of different backgrounds, using methods such as visual ethnography, behavioral mapping, and transect walks with research participants (Vertovec 2015). The project also included ethnographic work in semipublic spaces such as libraries (Kathiravelu and Cieslik 2015) and community gardens (Aptekar 2015), which facilitated ethnographic participation that went beyond mere observation to also involve informal conversations and participation in activities. In fact, ethnography by definition requires engagement and interaction with research participants, which, in public space, is more difficult to achieve than it is in semipublic spaces. Such semipublic spaces have also been described as “micro-​publics” of social interactions (Amin 2002) or “contact zones” (Pratt 1991). Ethnographies of such micropublics build on a long-​standing tradition in urban sociology of looking at so-​called “third places” (Oldenburg and Brissett 1982), defined as places between the home and the workplace. Social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018; Latham and Layton 2019), such as libraries, community centers, religious sites, and so on, as spaces where people make connections across differences have featured particularly prominently in ethnographies of superdiversity because, in their very nature, they facilitate ethnographic participation (Bynner 2019; Hoekstra and Pinkster 2019; Wessendorf 2014; see Wise, this volume). In addition to this focus on social infrastructures, studies have also looked at the dynamics of superdiverse workspaces, for example, in hospitals (Wise 2017), among bus drivers (Wise 2016) and factory workers (Stull, Boradway, and Ericson 1992). Ethnographies of superdiversity have also ventured into the more intimate sphere of the home (see Yeoh, this volume) and housing, looking at neighborly relations (Wise 2007), and how people negotiate differences within the sometimes confined spaces of housing estates in the United Kingdom (Gidley 2013; Jensen and Gidley 2016), densely populated immigrant neighborhoods characterized by high churn in Istanbul (Biehl 2015), and squats in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (Wafer 2015).

Ethnographies of Superdiversity    155 Lastly, institutions have received ethnographic attention, for example, local municipality offices implementing diversity policy (Schiller 2016) and schools (Schuermans and Debruyne 2017; Vincent et al. 2018). As part of studies on superdiverse institutions, access to welfare in superdiverse contexts has been of specific interest, examining how the local state shapes experiences of diversity, for example, in schools, youth clubs, and maternity services, also conceptualized as “welfare micropublics” (Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019). These ethnographies in different spaces share an interest in how people negotiate differences within these contexts, and especially “how, what, when, where, why, and for whom differences are produced, made socially significant, experienced, and represented” (Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019, 2:2). The following section looks at a selection of different kinds of methods used as part of ethnographies of superdiversity.

Ethnographic Methods for Studying Superdiversity Depending on the locations of ethnographic research and the questions asked, different methodological approaches are required, and most ethnographies of superdiversity have used combinations of different methods. Participant observation as well as informal conversations, interviews, and focus groups represent the core of most of the ethnographic work on superdiversity. Although often not explicitly, many ethnographies of superdiversity use some kind of “situational analysis” to capture the historical and political context and the setting in which people interact, as well as the meaning people attribute to a situation and each other (Mitchell 1956). These more traditional ethnographic methods form the core of most ethnographies of superdiversity, but researchers have also drawn on other strategies to capture complex lifeworlds. Those focusing on public space have, for example, used visual methods such as film and photography, historical photos, and participatory photography to elicit and analyze behavior and interactions in public space, including research participants’ own perceptions of these spaces (Vertovec 2015; Gidley 2013). A less common participatory ethnographic methodology draws on self-​recorded audio, in which research participants make commentaries on what they see and feel or any thoughts triggered by their surroundings during their daily walks or journeys through the neighborhood. In this “walking voices” methodology, researchers are purposefully absent, and it is the participants who direct the content and length of the recordings as well as the journeys they take (Powell and Rishbeth 2012). Ethnographers have also used spatial methods. For example, mobile interviews or “transect walks” with research participants have been used to elicit how local residents use and experience an area and its local inhabitants, including perceptions of group boundaries along varied categorical lines (Kusenbach 2003; Vertovec 2015). A similar

156   Susanne Wessendorf mobile ethnography has been described as “shadowing ethnography,” whereby the researcher follows her research participants through their daily lives in their neighborhood and beyond (Negron 2013). Transect walks and shadowing ethnography can, for example, show how the meanings of categorical differences such as class or ethnicity can change depending on the space in which interactions take place or the persons with whom research participants interact. Alternatively, mapping techniques can be useful to analyze the spatial dynamics of superdiverse areas and superdiverse spaces within them. These include historical and contemporary maps, capturing changes in the population of an area, patterns of deprivation and, for example, ownership of local businesses (Vaughan 2018). Mapping techniques can also include eliciting people’s own mental maps, including their experiences of historical changes to an area. Such “participatory mapping” can capture experiences of social boundaries, spaces of inclusion, exclusion, and belonging, illustrating, for example how newcomers perceived as different can, over time, become accepted as part of the general population and be seen as insiders. Mapping can also capture temporal uses of public and semipublic spaces. For example, Hall (2012) captured the use of a café in South London, analyzing who uses the café during what times of the day, where people sit, and what kinds of interactions and encounters take place. Relatedly, work on “route-​ines” captures patterns of encounter that happen regularly and as a result of “habitually travelled pathways or routes (to work, shopping or leisure activities)” (Aptekar et al. 2015, 171). Lastly, mapping can capture social relations by way of “friendship maps.” Building social network analysis, research participants capture their social relations and the closeness and importance of their friends and acquaintances within superdiverse spaces by drawing maps (Ryan, Mulholland, and Agoston 2014; Vincent, Neal, and Iqbal 2018). Friendship maps can, for example, illustrate which kinds of differences (language, age, class, legal status, religion, etc.) play a role in intimate social relations within a superdiverse area or for a particular population group. Such friendship maps can also be elicited as part of biographical interviews in which experiences of social relations in changing superdiverse contexts can be captured narratively and through the history of individuals’ lives (Biehl 2015). Another form of mapping can be found in ethnographic research on language and superdiversity that has looked at “linguistic landscapes,” referring to “visual language emplaced in the neighbourhood” (Blommaert 2013, 3:3), for example, shop signs, graffiti, official signs, handwritten notes advertising housing or services, etc. If captured over time, such signs not only tell us about the linguistic history of a certain area, but also the story of its social, cultural, and political features. To map demographic changes over time, biographical and narrative approaches can be further techniques for representing superdiverse areas and how individuals experience changes to them (Goodson and& Grzymala-​Kazlowska 2017). Although not comprehensive, these ethnographic tools for studying superdiversity exemplify how most researchers use a bricolage of methods, depending on context, research question, and funding. Because of the complexity of superdiverse areas, sites, and institutions, it is almost impossible for a single ethnographer to undertake

Ethnographies of Superdiversity    157 comprehensive research. One of the main challenges of ethnographies of superdiversity relates to the acquisition of language skills and knowledge of origin-​country contexts, migration trajectories, legal statuses, generational dynamics, etc. within any given context (Berg and Sigona 2013). Because of these challenges, some scholars caution that traditional ethnography’s more conventional approach in which a single individual fieldworker undertakes an entire research project is inadequate to capture the complexity of superdiverse contexts. Instead, working in teams with researchers with varied expertise and language skills is more fruitful (Berg, Gidley, and Krausova 2019; Neal et al. 2018). Gidley (2013) argues that traditional models of ethnography fall short in meeting the challenge of adequately describing and understanding the multiplication and intensification of diversity in the contemporary city. Doing fieldwork when the field is so fragmented, so filled with incommensurate perspectives, and so complexly connected to so many elsewheres requires developing modes of ethnography that are collaborative and which draw on multiple registers of representation. (374)

Gidley suggests that involving local residents and, for example, young people in research can be an additional way to capture the complex realities of living in a superdiverse area. Such team research can build on a long-​standing tradition of “community research,” which has been highly insightful especially when researchers are working with vulnerable and hard-​to-​reach individuals and communities in complex social environments (Goodson and Phillimore 2012). Despite these challenges, ethnographic methods still represent fruitful and dynamic ways of studying complex superdiverse societies.

Conclusion One of the major concerns of studies of superdiversity has been to identify the role of categorical differences in people’s lives. The underlying assumption is that the presence of people who are different along various categorical lines shapes people’s lives and relationships differently from what they would be like in a non-​superdiverse context. Ethnographies of superdiversity have, accordingly, been interested in issues around how superdiversity shapes social relations, processes of identification, belonging, inclusion, exclusion, political activism and access to and competition for resources such as welfare, education and housing. Regarding all these issues, the superdiversity lens allows relevant categories of differentiation to emerge on the ground, without assumptions that certain categories are more relevant than others, highlighting which categories of difference make a difference and in what kinds of situations, why, and for whom (Bynner 2019; Wessendorf 2014). Blackledge, Creese and colleagues (2018) draw out several advantages that ethnography can offer to the

158   Susanne Wessendorf study of superdiversity: Ethnography facilitates sustained observations of everyday diversity, encounters, and negotiations of difference, and it enables researchers to highlight the situated nature of these processes. Even more importantly, they emphasize that because “complexity implies a lack of predictable features in social events and their outcomes, a meticulous ethnographic approach is the research method which guarantees best outcomes” (Blackledge, Creese et al. 2018, xxxvii; see also Blommaert et al. 2017). Ethnography’s strength also lies in its emphasis on participation, rather than just observation. Participant observation enables researchers of superdiversity to understand individuals’ categories of belonging, processes of boundary-​making, inclusion, and exclusion that look beyond visible differences such as race, ethnicity, and, sometimes, religion. Instead of fixing and essentializing those visible differences, ethnographies of superdiversity can further our understandings of difference by moving away from “ethnic, racial and national groupism, as well as from old binary oppositions of host majority culture versus immigrant minority culture(s)” (Blackledge, Creese et al. 2018, xxiii). Fine-​grained ethnographic attention to local contexts, histories, and transnational dynamics and relations thus enables ethnographers to uncover ongoing and new relations of power, inequality, and disadvantage, and how these differentially affect long-​established and incoming individuals and groups in superdiverse areas.

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Chapter 11

Migrants and New Me dia Digital Ethnography, Transnationalism, and Superdiversity Monika Palmberger

Introduction Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in relation to (forced) migration have been discussed in academic debates from three main but different angles: first, how migrants as agents make use of ICTs and the role these play in migrants’ lives; second, the significance of ICTs in portraying, controlling, and surveilling migrants and how they affect the general perception of migrants and migration movements; and third, the emerging academic debate that deals with “migrants as data,” drawing on computational methods to study digital migrant connectivity (Leurs and Prabhakar 2018, 253). While acknowledging that these fields are extensively interconnected and thus cannot be neatly separated, I draw attention mainly to the first: migrants as actors. More precisely, this chapter concerns itself with the particular relationship of migrants to new media and how the insights gained from this field of study may open up interesting areas of research for the debates around superdiversity. Of specific interest here is what Vertovec refers to as “new social formations” in connection with the concept of superdiversity, which include such areas of research as discussions on belonging; increasingly diverse daily lifeworlds, space, and contact; and increasing mobility and associated networking practices among and between “migrants” and “non-​migrants” (Vertovec 2019, 132). Of particular interest in this regard is the multidimensional perspective on superdiversity Vertovec proposes in his article “Super-​Diversity and Its Implications” (2007), where he goes beyond an ethnic-​group-​specific perspective and recognizes the coalescence of factors that shape people’s lives (Vertovec 2007, 1026). Although we could speak of the internet in general as an inherently “superdiverse space,” the discussion that follows concerns itself primarily with what has been

164   Monika Palmberger commonly referred to as Web 2.0, or the participatory and social web. Some scholars have compared the superdiversity of a variety of the social web’s virtual spaces with that observed in urban spaces. As Androutsopoulos and Juffermanns (2014) rightly point out, “The analogy to the urban spaces originally studied by Vertovec is not the internet as a whole, an entity as ‘superdiverse’ as the entire ‘world,’ but specific social spaces discursively constructed by its users” (4). At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the critical voices that have warned that the internet should not be understood as a place of happy and unreserved diversity. In this respect, Varis and Wang (2011) argue: “Though allowing for the continuous diversification of diversity, the internet is also a space where diversity is controlled, ordered and curtailed” (71). The internet, and the infrastructure behind it, is by no means neutral, and power relations and inequalities are intrinsic to it. This concerns such issues as access and digital literacy but also questions around race and racism, since preexisting racial discrimination is likely to be perpetuated by new technologies (Benjamin 2019). So far, few scholars have engaged explicitly with the concept of superdiversity in online spaces and at the intersections of online/​offline spaces (see Belling and de Bress, 2014). This work evolved particularly in the field of sociolinguistics, where superdiversity has become an essential conceptual tool and has even been employed for a methodological reassessment of the discipline itself (Vertovec 2019, 129; see also Spotti, this volume). Here, the close interconnectedness between ICTs and superdiversity is widely acknowledged, for example, by Deumert (2014), who writes: “From early on, the idea of superdiversity has been linked, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to modern communication technologies” (116). In a similar vein, Arnaut (2016) underpins the interrelation of ICTs and superdiversity by arguing that superdiversity can be taken “as a lens for looking at diversity” that is particularly suited to taking into account “the fluidities and complexities of diversity in the age of heightened mobility and digital communication” (49). Androutsopoulos and Staer (2018) identify digital media as a “key element in theorizing superdiversity” (118), whereby digital language practices have been at the core in sociolinguists’ discussion of superdiversity. Moreover, Deumert (2014, 119) argues that superdiversity as a conceptual tool allows sociolinguists to draw attention to the unexpected, and to the agency and creativity of the speaker. Outside sociolinguistics, there has been little direct engagement with superdiversity in the contexts of the internet and in connection with ICTs. This chapter will first provide a broad overview of the historical importance of information and communication technologies for migrants and the study of migrants’ lives and of the evolving research field of digital migration studies. It will then bring digital migration studies into conversation with the superdiversity debates, particularly through a (shared) focus on transnationalism. From a methodological perspective, a digital ethnographic approach is suggested for further interweaving these still widely separate research fields. As Wessendorf (this volume, 153) argues, ethnographic methods are particularly suitable for investigating complex social realities because “they are sensitive to individual experiences of difference, complex identifications, and the importance of specific social contexts and situations in how people relate to each

Migrants and New Media    165 other.” This also applies to digital ethnography, which further considers how increasing digitalization affects relationships and lifeworlds and looks at both online and offline practices shaped by the digitalization of the everyday (Varis 2020). Digital ethnography thereby combines research on the ground with online research, always situated and contextualized within its wider sociocultural settings (Horst and Miller 2012; Palmberger and Budka 2020; Palmberger 2021). Subsequently, I suggest that a digital ethnographic approach may bring scholarly debates on transnational migrants’ everyday practices with ICTs into productive conversation with debates around superdiversity. As I will argue, it is time to include digitalized lifeworlds, and, especially, practices related to new ICTs, in ethnographies of superdiversity to do justice to the social relations and complexities involved. A first step in this direction is the realization that relationships are built and maintained not only in physical proximity but also through digitally mediated contact. This, in turn, helps us to formulate research questions that take these new realities into account. Ultimately, the chapter will outline how a digital ethnography approach can advance conceptual and theory-​driven discussions about superdiversity. It ends by offering an outlook and raising key questions to be tackled.

Digital Ethnography Digital ethnography has provided many valuable insights about how personal relations are maintained, how communities are built online, and, more recently, how political activism draws on ICTs (Stavinoha 2019). Digital ethnographers mainly follow a non-​ media-​centric approach: Instead of focusing on specific media technologies, platforms, and devices, they investigate ICTs and how they are used and embedded in wider sociocultural life contexts (Pink et al. 2016). Hine (2015) argues that digital ethnography needs to remain open and flexible and “demands an adaptive, situated, methodological response” (3). Moreover, developing ethnographic methods that are appropriate for online spaces requires acknowledging that the contemporary internet is “embedded,” “embodied,” and “everyday.” Embedded because it has entered all different forms of social life. Embodied because we can no longer speak of going online as a single act; rather, it is as a continuation of different forms of being in the world. Everyday because it has become so mundane that we are no longer aware of its infrastructure and how it might restrict our everyday choices (Hine 2015; McDonald 2017). Digital ethnography most often relies on a combination of online and offline, and digitally mediated and face-​to-​ face, research. Digital ethnography thus becomes a mobile and multisited ethnography whereby “virtual” and “physical” worlds are not treated as two separate fields (Ahlin and Fangfang 2019; Horst and Miller 2012). Although the ethnographic field as a bounded entity has been questioned in anthropology since the 1980s and there has been a shift from a focus on entities to a focus on relations (see Wessendorf, this volume), research into the increasing digitalization of everyday lifeworlds confronts us once again with the

166   Monika Palmberger question of how to define the ethnographic field or the “ethnographic place.” Digital ethnographers, such as Pink and colleagues, define ethnographic place, not as a material space or a bounded entity, but rather as a collection of interrelated objects, people, and places (Pink et al. 2016; Pink 2015). At the same time, the concept of fieldwork remains open to adaptation and redefinition. The question to be explored in the following is how debates from the newly established field of digital migration studies, particularly those based on such a digital ethnographic approach and the intertwined debates on transnationalism, can possibly speak to current debates on superdiversity. Which questions and methodological issues does such a linking bring up?

Migration, ICTs, and the Newly Established Field of Digital Migration Studies Historically, different forms of media and communication technologies have been vital for migrants. They have enabled migrants to remain in contact with family and friends and to stay informed about ongoing developments in their former places of residence. Before the introduction of digital media and communication technologies, transnational connections were maintained primarily through letters, newspapers, telephone, radio, satellite television, and remittances. Migrants, who have traditionally depended on communication media more than others, have been very resourceful in seeking new ways of communicating over distances. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, when international phone calls were still costly, labor migrants in Europe sent voice recordings on cassettes back and forth to their home countries. These cassettes became a kind of “forerunner” of today’s digital voice messages (Palmberger 2022). ICTs allow people to construct shared social fields across geographical distances and to remain in relationships and to create support relations where physical co-​presence is not feasible. Digital technology, for example, in communication and transportation, has facilitated mobility in various ways (Urry 2007) and constitutes what Wang et al. (2014) refer to as “infrastructure of globalization.” That said, this does not mean that distance is no longer experienced and that new ICTs, enabling, for example, video calls, texting, and social networking, necessarily and at all times are able to create a sense of co-​presence. Furthermore, while new possibilities afforded by technological innovations make transnational linkages easier, it is arguable that these possibilities are the sole reason that migrants today maintain transnational connections (Glick Schiller et al. 1995). A certain skepticism toward technological determinism is advisable, especially when taking into consideration the long history of migrants’ use of communication media (Dahan and Sheffer 2001). The wide distribution of mobile media, especially the smartphone, with its numerous applications and easy access to social media platforms, has introduced new ways of

Migrants and New Media    167 staying connected. Migrants were early adopters and became skillful and heavy users of new media (Andersson 2019). The close entanglement of migration and ICTs even became part of a controversial public debate in Europe in 2015 over refugees’ possession of smartphones. At one end of the spectrum of debate, the possession of smartphones by refugees was evoked as an argument against their neediness (and ultimately their claim for refugee status); at the other end, refugees’ smartphones were seen as essential for their safe passage to Europe and for staying connected with their families (Palmberger 2022). Ultimately, refugees have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the forms of surveillance and control made possible by new ICTs. This includes different forms of migration management and border control, such as Frontex and EUROSUR (European Border Surveillance System). Moreover, individual biometric data is stored in the EURODAC (European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database), and social media data is used to verify asylum claims and flight routes (Bloch and Donà 2019; Leurs and Ponzanesi 2018). The increasing role ICTs play in migration processes has resulted in the emerging and growing research field of “digital migration studies.” Such studies focus on the “rapid developments in migration that happen in conjunction with the spread of ICTs (information and communication technologies)” (Leurs and Smets 2018, 2). Digital migration scholars engage with bottom-​up practices, particularly migrants’ everyday use of ICTs, as well as with top-​down governmentality and the role digital technologies play therein (Leurs and Ponzanesi 2018). Key questions in digital migration scholarship have been: How do new ICTs enable people to maintain close relations over geographical distances with family and friends? And how do such ICTs change experiences and understandings of sociality and temporality? On a more collective level, ICTs allow “new forms of agency in the building of imagined communities” (Appadurai 2003, 22). Concerning new forms of building imagined communities, the act of reading together (which Benedict Anderson (2006) linked to national newspapers) is “now enriched by the technologies of the web, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, creating a world in which the simultaneity of reading is complemented by the interactivity of messaging, searching, and posting” (Appadurai 2019, 562). Diasporic public spheres, including political participation and civic engagement, as well as collective mobilization, are thus today closely entangled with what is referred to as the “participatory and social web.” This also led scholars to introduce the term digital diaspora, which describes “a technologically mediated diaspora, a diaspora organized on the internet, an electronic migrant community, and an immigrant group that uses ICT connectivity to participate in virtual networks for a variety of communicational purposes” (Andersson 2019, 145). Digital diasporas are often discussed and linked to their engagement with politics in their home country but also with cross-​border political activism (Georgiou 2019; Oiarzabal and Reips 2012). Although most studies on migrants and new media focus on the transnational dimension, the question of how new media facilitate migrants’ navigation and “appropriation” of their immediate surroundings warrants attention (Leurs and Prabhakar 2018). In summary, we can state that the rapid digitalization brought by the new millennium has also increased and diversified the means of connectivity and boosted transnational

168   Monika Palmberger ties. “Enhanced transnationalism is substantially transforming several social, political and economic structures and practices among migrant communities worldwide,” argues Vertovec (2007, 1043). Interestingly, at the time the concept of superdiversity was introduced, it was closely associated with transnationalism and new technologies; however, both have seemingly dropped out of much of the subsequent discussion on superdiversity.

Transnationalism beyond Bifocality; or, How to Bring Digital Migration Studies and Superdiversity Debates into Conversation through Digital Ethnography ICTs, and especially the transnational connections they facilitate, have inspired work on transnationalism and diaspora from the very beginning and have been explored with respect to processes of identification and belonging. With the concept of “technoscape,” Appadurai (1996) outlined how new technologies create “diasporic public spheres.” More generally, these new technologies have been discussed as key players in globalization processes. In the early 2000s, Vertovec (2004) was already stressing the importance of new technologies for migrants’ connectivity across time and space, arguing that “nothing has facilitated global linkage more than the boom in ordinary, cheap international telephone calls . . . . [And] it is now common for a single family to be stretched across vast distances and between nation-​states, yet still retain its sense of collectivity” (219, 222). Cheap international phone calls, Vertovec claims, have given migrants new ways to stay in touch and to participate in discussions at the (virtual) family “kitchen table.” Cheap phone calls boost the dual orientation, or “bifocality,” that characterizes the everyday experience of transnational living. Miller and Sinanan made a similar argument ten years later when discussing the emergence of webcams, which offer not only audio communication but also affordable, synchronic visual communication. Webcams are used for not only video calls but also for remote “participation” in personal or religious festivities, long-​distance parenting, and mundane activities such as cooking. Participating in the everyday routines of faraway family members creates a particular feeling of intimacy (Madianou and Miller 2012; Miller and Sinanan 2014). Studies situated in the field of digital ethnography show that ICTs, particularly the smartphone and internet and its related means of communication, have greatly increased the ability of migrants to maintain transnational relations with their families and beyond (see, e.g., Al-​Sharmani 2007; Baldassar et al. 2007; Collin 2012; Lee and Francis 2009; Levitt 2011; Menjívar 1995; Palmberger 2016; Parreñas 2005). The smartphone is often referred to as the most intimate form of everyday digital media (Pink et

Migrants and New Media    169 al. 2016). In the early 2000s, a series of seminal studies on the use of smartphones was published (see, e.g., Fortunati 2001; Ito et al. 2005; Katz and Aakhus 2002; Ling 2004; Thompson 2009). This research based on digital ethnography shows that people stay connected and create intimate spheres of relationships by means of their smartphones. Relationships are maintained and intimacies created through frequent interactions via phone calls, text messaging, Skyping, streaming, or on social media, such as Facebook, Viber, Whatsapp, Twitter, and Instagram (see Licoppe 2004). The diversification of communication technologies has caused a shift from “simple ‘conversational’ methods where communication compensates for absence, to ‘connected’ modes where the services maintain a form of continuous presence in spite of the distance—​[and] has produced the most important change in migrants’ lives” (Diminescu 2008, 572). Scholars in the field of digital ethnography have theorized the connectivity that new digital technologies offer with such concepts as “connected migrants” (Diminescu 2008), “mediatized migrants” (Hepp et al. 2011), “digital diasporas” (Everett 2009), “smart refugees” (Dekker et al. 2018), and “polymedia” (Madianou and Miller 2012). Although the debates around these concepts differ, they all focus on the question of how ICTs allow people to construct shared social fields across geographical distances. Moreover, they show how ICTs allow migrants to remain in relationships and to create support networks where physical co-​presence is not feasible. “Whereas previously geographic distance was a significant barrier to taking part in the lives of those who live at a distance, ICTs enable shared social fields to be constructed across vast distances” (Wilding 2006, 138). Thus this research moves away from the concept of “bifocality,” which has concentrated primarily on the communication between the country of origin and the “host” country. Diminescu (2008) describes this new focus as “neither here nor there but here and there at the same time” (578). In response, Rigoni and Saitta (2012) state, “The idea of ‘not here, not there, but here and there at the same time’ can be used to describe those who belong to—​or who feel affinity with—​several geographical and social spaces rather than being situated ‘in-​between’ ” (6). In my own research with refugees in Vienna, I have observed that co-​presence is established across different geographical locations and that multiple co-​presences—​as well as shifting identities—​ coexist in varying physical and virtual environments (Palmberger 2022). But, though digitally mediated co-​presence occupies an important place in migrants’ social relations, physical in situ relations remain important. These insights are well-​established in current debates on transnationalism in digital migration studies, but less so in the current superdiversity debates, which, in the author’s view, do not yet take sufficient account of the increasing role of digitalization and the associated changes it is effecting in transnational ties. Ultimately, a debate on the issues introduced here, prompted by scholars working in the field of digital ethnography, is timely because advanced digitalization and associated new ICTs are enhancing and reconfiguring transnational connections and complicating the web of relations migrants find themselves in. “Technology has made it increasingly easy to transgress one’s immediate life-​world, extend it to and beyond the screen, and engage in local as well as trans-​local activities through previously unavailable means”

170   Monika Palmberger (Varis and Wang 2011). Moreover, such a debate opens up spaces for interactions and encounters that add a new complexity to the “bifocality” of transnational migrants. Thus, social network sites are more than a means of communication between two localities: They may “create a new form of domesticity” and emerge as “places within which migrants could be said to live rather than being merely technologies of communication” (Miller 2012, 156). Moreover, digitally mediated transnational communication and engagement are not directed to the home country alone but may include individuals and communities in other places and those who do not define themselves in territorial ways. I therefore suggest that in terms of methodology, a digital ethnographic approach may offer possibilities to further interweave digital migration studies and studies of superdiversity, two research fields that have remained widely separated.

Approaching Superdiversity through Digital Ethnography: An Outlook To summarize: Studies in digital ethnography—​which go beyond physical interactions and encounters to include virtual spaces—​explore the role new media and communication technology open up. This is not to say that virtual spaces are merely equivalent to or copies of urban spaces. Androutsopoulos and Juffermanns (2014, 4) argue they are not, and that therein lies the relevance of studying virtual spaces of interaction in superdiverse settings. Here, I have gone a step further and argued that in the study of new complexities (see also Negrón, this volume), as is the aim of scholars working around superdiversity, it is precisely the interplay of communication and interaction in virtual and physical spaces that requires our attention and needs to be further explored. Relationships are formed in urban neighborhoods and on the social web alike. I argue that instead of juxtaposing offline and online spaces, we need a methodology that can deal with new realities that emerge at the intersections and in the various entanglements of online and offline spaces (Kaufmann and Palmberger, 2022). This raises the following key questions for the study of superdiversity: • What does the entanglement of online and offline say about the lived experience of contemporary superdiversity? And how does it extend our understanding of the concept? • What further methodological adjustments are needed to adapt the concept of superdiversity to the complexity that new media and communication technologies add to changing social realities? Co-​presence across geographical distances is now achieved with the help of digital media and new communication technologies. These experiences affect perceptions of space, distance, and connectivity. “The idea of ‘presence’ has thus become less physical,

Migrants and New Media    171 less ‘topological’ and more active and affective, just as the idea of absence is implicitly altered by these practices of communication and co-​presence” (Diminescu 2008, 572). Thus, these new kinds of communication and mediation are also likely to generate novel understandings of sociality and the sociocultural practices associated with them. Investigations into the role of ICTs in relation to migration, particularly, in terms of migrants’ everyday meaning-​making and practices, can, I believe, provide important insights into phenomena related to superdiversity, especially with respect to “new experiences of space and contact” (Vertovec 2007, 1045). Moreover, a focus on ICTs in migratory contexts has the potential to advance a multidimensional perspective on superdiversity that moves beyond an ethnic group perspective and recognizes the coalescence of factors that define people’s lives (Vertovec 2007, 1026). In this respect, such a focus may offer, for example, nuanced understandings of diverging patterns of gender and age and shifting generational relations. This is particularly the case in regard to digital literacy and changing care expectations and responsibilities (Wilding and Gifford 2013; Palmberger 2022). In this vein, important work has been accomplished by feminist scholars who have shown the co-​constitution of gender and technology whereby technology is understood both as a source and consequence of gender relations (Wajcman 2010). A focus on new media and migration therefore has the potential to contribute to the debates on superdiversity, not least by identifying “new patterns of inequality and prejudices” (Vertovec 2007, 1045). But there is another aspect to consider—​namely, how the internet and new communication media enable novel forms of contact and networking. “With the internet being almost free to access, and with closeness made possible by digital tools (video transmitted over the internet, applications such as Skype, and so on), co-​presence becomes easy not only between scattered members of the same family, but also between migrants and non-​migrants over one or several geographical areas, and even between non-​migrants who are geographically dispersed but physically sedentary” (Rigoni and Saitta 2012, 6). While their physical place of residence (including their legal status) remains important for migrants, new media and media platforms allow for building and forming social relations and negotiating identities beyond territorially defined places. This also affects such categories as ethnicity and race, according to which migrants are often defined. Heyd (2014, 38) argues that “in computer-​mediated communication, social categories such as race and ethnicity have to be actively performed and constructed by participants in order to gain visibility.” If ethnicity and race in online spaces are only fully realized when actively performed and constructed, it may—​at least in some situations—​yield new and perhaps even liberating ways to negotiate identities and build relations. However, as stated earlier in relation to technology and racism, overly hasty optimism is certainly not appropriate here. But this is where a superdiversity perspective can be beneficial: It is a perspective dedicated to the interconnectedness of people and their relations that is not bound by migrant and nonmigrant categories. This makes it possible to move beyond a discussion that focuses on how migrants maintain their relationships through new means, and to have one about how online and digital communication entails a different kind of connection and community-​building in superdiverse contexts.

172   Monika Palmberger Such discussions can enrich the current debates on superdiversity and on digital migration studies by thinking through theories of mobility, place, and sociality and critically reworking theories of transnationalism and integration.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ralph Grillo, Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec for their thoughts and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful for the financial support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF V681) and of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna.

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Chapter 12

Superdiversit y, Syst e ms Psychody nam i c s , a nd M igrant Bu si ne s s Kiran Trehan

Introduction This chapter investigates the ways in which systems psychodynamic theory and practice can contribute to our understanding of how ethnic minority enterprises (EMEs) operate in superdiverse urban settings. Systems psychodynamics is an approach that explores the interaction between collective structures, norms, and practices in social systems and the perception, motivations, and emotions of the organizations within those systems. Vince (2008, 93) states that systems psychodynamics highlights the links between three domains of experience—​the rational, the political, and the irrational—​to provide one way of explaining organizational life (Hirschhorn and Barnett 1993). In applying a systems psychodynamic lens, I explore the relationship of the organization as a system, specifically how diversity, power relations, and emotions are experienced in the daily working lives of ethnic minority business owners. The political view of the small enterprise recognizes that the business owner is embedded in a web of social and economic relationships that both enable and constrain his or her scope for action. Systems psychodynamics—​with its heightened sensitivity to emotional and political context—​is particularly well-​placed to elicit the complexity and multilayered nature of diversity in small firms; this complements and advances our understanding of “superdiversity,” which as Vertovec (2007) outlines, draws attention to the new and complex social formations, characterized by a dynamic integration of variables (race, ethnicity, and social class, for example) in European cosmopolitan cities. Increased diversity has created a complex range of underexplored challenges to minority entrepreneurs, who work within and, most importantly, for such communities. Importantly, for migrant groups in the current climate of austerity, enterprise may be a way of promoting employment and local development, while also kick-​starting broader

178   Kiran Trehan business regeneration. Applying systems psychodynamics to study how ethnic minority enterprises (EMEs) operate in superdiverse urban settings is to gain an understanding of the relationship between power, control, and inequality by drawing attention to the political, structural, emotional, and social inequalities of ethnic minority entrepreneurship, instead of making the normative assumptions of entrepreneurship that emphasize economic growth and promoting wealth and prosperity and militate against leveling inequalities and entrepreneurship challenges to orthodox perspectives. The chapter reviews the key ideas and controversies of migrant entrepreneurship and illuminates how systems psychodynamic theory can enrich our understanding of how ethnic minority enterprise interconnects in encounters whose participants have different biographies, trajectories, and linguistic histories. Systems psychodynamics enriches our understanding by unveiling the everyday experiences of migrant enterprises through the study of the emotions and inequality that are part of the everyday experience of migrant entrepreneurs. These experiences are constructed from complex power relations, linking, processes, and relations; the connecting of questioning insight to complex emotions, unconscious processes, and relations; and the way enterprise is supported, avoided, or prevented through power relations. They provide insights into how migrant entrepreneurs engage with the micropolitical dimensions between business support agencies, policymakers, and their peer communities. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how a synthesis of systems psychodynamics and diversity in a UK context sheds new light on the complex and nuanced experience of migrant enterprise and the work territory migrant entrepreneurs are creating for themselves. Exploring migrant enterprise as an organizational system yields distinctive new systems psychodynamic and superdiversity perspectives, and helps us to identify and articulate new implications for small firms’ research and practice, by developing how we work with and study inequality, power, and emotions in context and through the lived experience of migrant entrepreneurs. The connection between systems psychodynamic theory and superdiversity lies in the contribution both might make to the understanding of how emotions, inequality, and politics collide and coalesce in the everyday processes of business.

Superdiversity, Small Firms, and Business The past fifty years have seen the growing participation of migrants in self-​employment in the United Kingdom, especially in establishing small businesses (Fairchild 2010). Migrant businesses contribute at least £40 billion a year to the UK economy, and this number is continually increasing as new national and international markets are opened up. In the United Kingdom, migrant entrepreneurs create one in seven companies and are reported to be twice as entrepreneurial as the British-​born working-​age population (Centre for Entrepreneurs 2014). Migrant entrepreneurs often provide employment,

Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business    179 particularly in deprived areas, and play a highly visible and dynamic role in sustaining neighborhoods and transforming the economic and social landscape of UK cities, as has been shown by the work of Hall et al. (2017). Small businesses have experienced an ongoing process of transformation as they have coped with austerity, new forms of competition, and the changing nature of work driven by new technologies, enhanced diversity, migration inflows, mutable local infrastructure, and alterations in the makeup of families and households. Self-​employment is a necessity for some migrants. Waldinger (1986) and Kloosterman et al. (1999, 2001) have identified three key motivating reasons why self-​employment is critical for migrant businesses. 1. Push factors. Migrants may be pushed into self-​employment because of the discriminatory practices of employers, who will either not employ them or fail to offer them opportunities for progression (Light and Gold 2000). Parker (2009) reveals factors that prevent migrants from finding employment, including employers’ refusal to validate their overseas qualifications, government regulation of the legal right to work, and funding cuts for language classes. Self-​employment becomes an imperative because other labor market opportunities are restricted. 2. Pull factors. These are related to migrants’ willingness and capacity to take advantage of economic opportunities. Business opportunities for migrants can include starting enterprises to meet a demand for goods and services that are specific to particular migrant groups. Portes (1995) suggests that such niche markets are frequently filled by migrant businesses. When migrants are faced with limited employment opportunities, self-​employment can be a necessary vehicle for upward mobility. 3. Survival. For migrant business owners, the drive into self-​employment can be viewed as a survival mechanism in response to job losses which, in a discriminatory job market, affect migrants more heavily than other workers. It is also important not to underemphasize the barriers migrants face in the wider job market, which may lead them to set up their own businesses. For example, a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) found: Migrants tend to be more likely to do temporary and part-​time jobs—​in Spain, more than half of immigrants, about 56%, have only temporary work, compared with 31% of locals. And, increasingly, immigrants are becoming self-​employed. The reasons for this vary: It could indicate that immigrants are becoming more well established in their adopted countries and have the financial means to set up businesses; or it could be a sign that the barriers to finding a job are so high that it’s easier for them to work for themselves. (OECD 2014, 90).

A report by Hart and Mickiewicz (2016) finds that migrants are likely to have unique human capital compared to nonmigrants, which can help them in developing and

180   Kiran Trehan sustaining new ventures. This is also important in a globalized economy because it opens up new opportunities for developing transnational networks. Glick Schiller et al. (1992) explain that “trans-​migrants” become firmly rooted in their new country but maintain multiple linkages to their homeland. Similarly, Harris (2014) points out that, unlike earlier migrant generations, migrants to the United Kingdom from Poland and other East European countries since 2004 have retained easy access to their homeland, and to goods and services. These transnational exchanges can have important implications when migrants choose to set up a business. Although entrepreneurship can be seen as a source of emancipation for minority entrepreneurs, it often does little to free them from societal oppression. Furthermore, entrepreneurship offers an inherently precarious and vulnerable living for minority entrepreneurs; the survival of ethnic-​run businesses is more likely to be threatened than for non-​ethnic-​run enterprises. This can push migrant entrepreneurs further into poverty instead of alleviating the poverty they face, as can the fact that they are forced into market sectors that are overconcentrated in low-​entry-​threshold activities where the scope for upscaling or diversification into mainstream markets may be limited. Migrant entrepreneurs can also be forced to operate in the informal economy, mainly because of a lack of formal finance mechanisms and limited mobility and access to information and networks. This, again, hinders scalability. Policies and programs aimed at ethnic minority entrepreneurs are often developed based on overly positive assumption of success. I will make the case for a more critical approach to the study of EMEs by exploring alternative, often marginalized, narratives and shining an important light on the experiences of minority entrepreneurs by applying psychodynamic and superdiversity perspectives, which have the potential to extend our thinking about the experiences of EMEs.

Systems Psychodynamics Systems psychodynamics is an approach that • engages with emotions in action; • engages with the unconscious dynamics at work, as well as defenses against anxiety, that help to shape, constrain, or avoid individual learning; • offers an alternative to the rational and economic methods for the study of diversity; • offers an insightful retort to the challenge of understanding the lived experience of ethnic minority businesses operating in superdiverse urban settings; and • recognizes that the business owner is embedded in a web of social and economic relationships that both enable and constrain his or her scope for action. Enacting systems psychodynamics thus requires not so much a template as a genuine commitment to engage with emotional and political dynamics.

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Central Strands of Psychodynamic Approaches A psychodynamic approach recognizes the centrality of emotional and power relations as a vehicle for examining the tensions and dynamics of the daily realities of EMEs. The linking of theory, learning, and action is one of enduring appeal. Psychodynamics attempts to supplement an individual’s experiences of action (learning from experience) with the reflection of existing organizational and emotional dynamics created in action (learning from organizing). The latter process is an explicit recognition of the role that politics and emotions can play in facilitating, and constraining, the scope for learning (Vince 2001). In the context of EMEs, psychodynamics exemplifies the ways in which emotions and power interact through the process of organizing insight. Vince illustrates how organizing insight becomes possible when there is an examination of the politics that surround and inform organizing. To comprehend these politics it is often necessary to question these political choices and decisions, both consciously and unconsciously (Vince 2004, 74). But what does this mean in practice? How is a psychodynamic approach implemented? First, a psychodynamic approach needs to be incorporated into the design of interventions, particularly in relation to EMEs. Second, researchers adopt the dual role of researcher-​facilitator. This allows them to engage in a process of deliberation without necessarily compromising their commitment to the facilitation, which leads to the recognition of, surfacing of, and active engagement with the social, emotional, and political processes associated with power relations, instead of simply managing the research interactions. A variety of methods can be used to record the interactions with the EMEs. These can include stories in action, unstructured interviews, process notes to document what is observed as the political and power-​related dynamics unfold during meetings. This makes it possible to gather detailed information, including documentation and any written material that the entrepreneurs generate during the inquiry (such as minutes, emails, and personal reflections). Data are analyzed in accordance with the key research themes, supplemented by categories that emerge during the inquiry. All interactions are qualitatively analyzed, and it is an iterative rather than a linear process.

Superdiversity Superdiversity refers to the diversification of diversity. The term was first introduced by Vertovec (2007) with reference to ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom, who noted that government policies, social service practices, and public perceptions had not kept pace with the rate of change in the landscape of British diversity. In its original form, Vertovec referred to changes in the patterns of immigration to Britain, away from

182   Kiran Trehan migration from a few Commonwealth nations to a situation where smaller numbers of people were arriving from many different countries, and being in turn stratified by varying legal statuses, genders, ages, qualification levels, and degree of English-​language proficiency. The term has been widely used throughout the social sciences and beyond, although the concept continues to be a work in progress without a fixed definition in each field where it is applied (Vertovec 2017). Certain aspects of the term continue to be underused; it is frequently employed to refer to a larger number of ethnic backgrounds among migrants, without the gradations proposed by Vertovec (Yamamura and Lassalle 2019; Meissner and Vertovec 2015). The criticism of superdiversity falls into two major clusters. The first considers how superdiversity can neglect intersectionality and the associated notions of power structures and social injustice. Such criticism rejects the performative nature of the term, which serves to “other” communities that are “superdiverse” and fails to reckon with systems of racial privilege and social hierarchies (Högberg et al. 2014). Superdiversity has been accused of neglecting power relations and notions such as disadvantage and prejudice. Jones et al. (2014) note that research on migrant enterprise in the United Kingdom is often reluctant to identify racism as a constraining factor for EMEs. The second major criticism of superdiversity is that it perpetuates a Eurocentric or, rather, a Western European–​centric worldview while at the same time superficially appearing to criticize it. In this critique, superdiversity has been identified as part of a broader orientation within academia toward Western exceptionalism, conceptually privileging trends in Western Europe and the United States above the rest of the world. Ndhlovu (2016) criticizes superdiversity as another iteration of the cosmopolitan or multiculturalist policies of the Global North that are underpinned by a tendency toward the homogenization of cultural and social groups and, at the same time, uncritically embrace neoliberalism. Superdiversity thus fits into a long history of presenting Western Europe and the United States as furthest along a development pathway to which the rest of the world should aspire.

Is Mixed Embeddedness the Answer? Following from such debates, it is important to consider how EMEs are embedded in not only their ethnic community networks but also wider cultural networks, which presents an opportunity for “breaking out” of a niche; in other words, EMEs can break out of the low-​growth business model they are typically associated with (Daniel et al. 2019). EMEs benefit from being embedded in multiple cultural milieus but also a wider common political-​legal and economic structure with the opportunities this presents. The mixed embeddedness approach does provide a counter to some of the criticisms illuminated above. Kloosterman et al. (2000) provide an important illustration of how a mixed embeddedness approach in an ethnic minority context can provide advantages and new business opportunities for entrepreneurs. This was also the approach of Storti (2014), who

Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business    183 found divergent business models and outcomes among Italian migrant entrepreneurs in Germany who started pizzerias and gelaterias. In one case, the entrepreneurs tended to procure and hire locally; in another case the entrepreneurs procured and hired staff from Italy in a transnational process that marked the product out as more distinctive. Such transnational entrepreneurial activities were also noted by Jones et al. (2010) in the case of Somali entrepreneurs in Leicester, who benefit from international diasporic links and social, financial, and human capital from local co-​ethnic ties. However, it is important to note despite some of these benefits, the EMEs could not overcome the barriers of being embedded in a discriminatory political-​economic context. Furthermore, the mixed embeddedness framework, as Ram et al. (2016) argue, pays insufficient attention to the role of regulation and its impact upon ethnic minority enterprise activity, the need to incorporate racist exclusion, market ghettoization, and gendered structures of migration and labor market processes, and a greater sensitivity to historical context. The evidence presented here makes clear that migrants play a vital economic role in urban economies, but studies of the local context and everyday practices, which attempt to supplement an individual’s experiences of action (learning from experience) with the reflection of existing organizational and emotional dynamics created in action (learning from organizing), are scarce. While superdiversity and mixed embeddedness have advanced our understanding of EMEs, they lack insights to the study of the emotional encounters of EMEs as living enterprises. Emotions are an integral aspect of the political interventions of EMEs, and yet there is little discussion about the ways in which emotions and power are related in the debates on EMEs. Systems psychodynamics and superdiversity have the potential to address this gap.

Superdiversity and Systems Psychodynamics This section explores how a synthesis of psychodynamics and superdiversity could cast new light on the complex and nuanced experiences of migrant business owners and the new space they are creating for themselves. The political view of migrant enterprise recognizes that the business owner is embedded in a web of social and economic relationships that both enable and constrain his or her scope for action. Appreciating the importance of this context involves extending one’s gaze behind the often-​mythical notion of the “entrepreneurial individual.” Instead, it requires an explication of “organizing insight” (Vince 2001). A systems psychodynamic approach—​with its heightened sensitivity to emotional and political context is particularly well placed to elicit the complexity and multilayered nature of life in migrant businesses (Ram and Trehan 2010). What makes the psychodynamic approach viable and valuable is the ability to explore emotion and power relations within the context of migrant entrepreneurship,

184   Kiran Trehan which simultaneously limit and legitimize individual action. The lived experience of migrant business owners is often neglected in small firms’ organizational and management theory (Kets de Vries, Carlock, and Florent-​Treacy 2007; Vince 2002; Blackledge and Trehan 2018). Psychodynamic theory can help us to explore the unconscious nature of entrepreneurial work by studying the extent to which migrant entrepreneurs are constrained by organizational arrangements and their capacity to disrupt the status quo to effect change. Furthermore, the approach offers an additional view to the rational and economic approaches to work (Sievers 2009). There is an emphasis on the centrality of unconscious processes and balancing the view of organizations as rational entities with that of organizations as emotional and emotion-​generating environments (Hirschhorn 1993; Gould, Stapley, and Stein 2006; Vince 2002; Stein 2005, 2007; Trehan and Glover 2017). Psychodynamic approaches, therefore, recognize that the unconscious dynamics of individuals can have a significant impact on life in organizations and vice-​versa (e.g., Newman and Hirschhorn 1999). This is a critical theoretical underpinning when one is exploring the role of emotions in migrant entrepreneurship, and it leads to a deeper understanding of the tensions and dynamics operating below the surface (Newman and Hirschhorn 1999; Trehan 2007; Vince 2002). Even though entrepreneurship research recognizes the importance of emotion in understanding decisions and actions, Brundin and Härtel (2014) argue that there are still substantial gaps in the study of emotions. The empirical research that explores relationships and how they affect the different group dynamics in business is limited (Dunn 1999; Zachary 2011). An important yet largely neglected point of intersection between the two fields is the role of emotion (Shepherd 2016). Shepherd (2016) and Jiang et al. (2016) advocate exploring the micro foundations of small firms, and it is here that systems psychodynamics offers the greatest contribution, by seeking to engage openly with the individuals’ emotional and power experiences in organizational settings, and with their personal experiences in the world. Systems psychodynamics enables us to explore the close connection between a person’s internal world and personal experience in the world, collective emotional and political dynamics, and the structures of power or control within which we conform to and contest those power relations. Focusing on psychodynamics gives us a vehicle for examining the tensions and dynamics, the desires and aspirations, of EMEs and illustrates the merits of an experiential approach to researching EMEs. A synthesis of psychodynamics and superdiversity with research and practice facilitates the valuing of phronesis (knowledge derived from practice and deliberation) and metis (knowledge based on experience). Vince (2010) highlights that the complexity of relations and the “interplay between emotions and politics creates surprising, self-​limiting, unexpected, uncomfortable and unwanted structures for action” (S28). This interplay can happen on both a conscious and an unconscious level and in a system in which emotions are inseparable from power and how it is exercised and contested. This presents challenges for the ways in which entrepreneurship is inclusive, and explores the connection between diversity, minority enterprise, social development, and economic development with respect to

Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business    185 entrepreneurial activities. Evidence from the United States suggests that supporting the leadership ambitions of growth-​oriented minority entrepreneurs can be effective in promoting inner-​city regeneration. This is important in light of the high level of economic disadvantage experienced by minority businesses.

The Politics of Diversity Exploring the politics of diversity in migrant enterprise from a psychodynamic perspective is enigmatic in that the understanding of this context involves broadening perspectives beyond the intangible notion of the “entrepreneurial individual.” Instead, as Ram and Trehan (2009) argue, it requires an explication of “organizing insight” (Vince 2001). This is particularly valuable in the context of migrant businesses, where “the real world is so complex that the notion of perfect rationality must also be abandoned” (Gasson and Errington 1993, 89). Much policy attention is focused on promoting enterprise in disadvantaged areas and among underrepresented groups. For example, Marti and Mair’s (2009) and Hall et al.’s (2017) study of entrepreneurship in a context of poverty illuminates the resourcefulness and efforts of individuals to overcome adversity. This kind of work has echoes in the more celebratory accounts of migrant entrepreneurship. It reminds us of the resilience of such communities and of their potentially valuable contributions to the “mainstream” economy. However, in other contexts, Heilbrunn and Ioannone (2020) note significant weaknesses in the field. These include the total absence of some major refugee groups in research on EMEs (such as Palestinians and Kurds) and a persistent neglect of refugees’ personal experiences and biographies, “despite these experiences and journeys differentiating them from all other entrepreneurial migrant groups” (Heilbrunn and Ioannone 2020, 23). A systems psychodynamic approach could address this gap and contribute to our understanding of the political, and emotional, work performed by migrant entrepreneurs to change taken-​for-​granted practices. Migrant entrepreneurship is an emotional and political endeavor; it is not simply about resourcing and planning but also about intervening in the emotions and emotionality of organization life (James and Arroba 2005, 302). Finally, it is important to understand how minority entrepreneurs exercise personal authority to manage power dynamics by mediating, maneuvering, and negotiating various manifestations of emotions and the discomfort of learning how to operate in new environments while simultaneously experiencing the adventure of venturing into new markets.

Concluding Reflections Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in driving economic and social change, aiming to achieve sustainable, equitable prosperity, and it is crucial to developing an equal

186   Kiran Trehan society,—​a refrain that is heard from all quarters. A synthesis of superdiversity and systems psychodynamics provides the potential to explore the lived experience of migrant business owners by unveiling social inequalities through the study of power, emotions, and social relations in migrant firms. Superdiversity and systems psychodynamics share elements that are complementary and synergistic. Systems psychodynamics throws into sharp relief the importance of working with the social and political dynamics of the lived experience of migrant business owners. Some broader implications arise from this understanding. First, a commitment to systems psychodynamics engenders practical commitments that require serious attention if there is to be a congruence between philosophy and action in our understanding of how migrant businesses operate in superdiverse urban settings. Vertovec (2007) draws attention to the new and complex social formations characterized by the dynamic integration of variables (race, ethnicity, and social class) in European cosmopolitan cities. The study of migrant enterprise requires an articulation of philosophical assumptions so that the constitution of practice can be assessed. Hence, systems psychodynamics provides an opportunity to explore and work with emotions and the political dynamics of the lived experiences of migrant entrepreneurs. Second, the congruence between superdiversity and systems psychodynamics illuminates and helps us to recognize that the business owner is embedded in a web of social and economic relationships that both enable and constrain his or her scope for action, which are continuously reconfigured in light of diversification processes highlighted by superdiversity. Recognizing the significance of this context involves looking beyond the often-​mythical notion of the migrant entrepreneurial individual. Rather, it requires an explication of “organizing insight” (Vince 2001) as outlined in section on superdiversity and systems psychodynamics. Third, systems psychodynamics advances the mixed embeddedness approach, which has been substantially utilized in the study of migrant entrepreneurs as a mechanism for placing superdiverse environments in a wider economic and political context. Kloosterman (2010) explains mixed embeddedness as a framework for analyzing migrant entrepreneurship that combines the microlevel of the individual entrepreneur and their resources, the mesolevel of the local opportunity structure, and the macrolevel of the institutional framework. Such analysis therefore places social capital within the context of the political-​economic environment of the market and the legal structure that regulates it. Finally, a synthesis of superdiversity and systems psychodynamics highlights the value of adopting an approach that engages and works with the intersection of emotions, power, and politics. The chapter demonstrates how insights from these perspectives can be integrated to develop an analytical approach that is both sensitive to complexity and able to offer a feasible way of studying the everyday experiences of migrant entrepreneurs. This would shine a light on how different national regimes constrain and facilitate the capacity of migrants to pursue self-​employment.

Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business    187

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Chapter 13

Cap turi ng Su perdiver si t y i n Official Data How the Decennial Censuses in Britain Are Responding Peter J. Aspinall

Introduction Superdiversity as a concept and approach has gained widespread saliency across the social sciences since the early 2000s. Indeed, around 10,000 citations now include the term, and over 5,700 cite Stephen Vertovec’s original paper on “superdiversity” (Vertovec 2007), where he describes “significant new conjunctions and interactions of variables” with migration as a focus and of “multiple dimensions of differentiation.” The concept has attracted a wide body of research in multiple geographical contexts, referenced in a review by Vertovec (2019) and belying its analytical acuity. Surprisingly, however, a rapid review by the author of the superdiversity literature revealed relatively little that looks at the challenges of measurement, measurement techniques, and the limitations of the current data sources. A range of views has been expressed, from the pessimistic to the challenging. Arnaut (2012, 11) wrote of “the melt-​down of the diversity measurement system which super-​diversity has provoked.” Deumert (2014) argued that “the use of ‘superdiverse’ as a descriptive adjective is a theoretical cul-​de-​sac, because the complexities brought about by diversity in the social world ultimately defy numerical measurement.” These gloomy views may have resulted from unfamiliarity with the richness of recent census outputs or the growing sophistication of such analytical techniques as data visualizations. Others have offered a more positive assessment. Meissner (2015) suggests that “it is necessary to distinguish between superdiversity as a malleable social science concept—​a set of variables that researchers conjunctively investigate—​and superdiversity as a context in which these

192   Peter J. Aspinall variables play out in complex social patterns.” Similarly, Longhi (2013) argues that the multidimensionality of superdiverse configurations invokes the need to take multiple variables into account. Therein lies the challenge. There are now census data in Britain (and other countries) on a multiplicity of individual variables, and it is possible to look at their efficacy in contributing to the diversification of the population individually. However, superdiversity requires something more: the measurement of complexity and the intersectionality of these variables. So, can we specify the variables (or traits) that are needed for the multidimensional and intersectional measurement of superdiversity? Sources of evidence that help with this task include the narrative literature on superdiversity and studies that have operationalized the concept through measurement. The superdiversity literature has identified attributes which, in their changing and fluctuating combinations, are key to the concept: age, gender, country of birth/​origin, migration channels/​legal statuses, sedentary/​short-​term/​transitory migration, length of time in the country, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, class, and human capital. Others have added, perhaps somewhat questionably with respect to the work the superdiversity concept can be expected to do, variables in the socioeconomic domain, such as economic status, education, income, health, inequalities, and deprivation (Pride 2015; Pemberton and Isakjee 2017); these may be better regarded as outcomes that are partly shaped by the superdiversity nexus. However, the boundary between superdiversity variables and outcomes is blurred, and there may be a case for adding derived, intermediate outcome variables, such as ethnic embeddedness, the context of reception/​co-​ethnic contact and support, and the characteristics of emerging social networks. Other scholars have focused on the superdiversity of the concept’s constituent dimensions, such as “religious super-​diversity” (Stringer 2014) and “linguistic superdiversity” (Duarte and Gogolin 2013) rather than context-​driven superdiversity as a “global” or holistic nexus of interacting variables. Only a few studies have sought to specify and incorporate variables into the measurement of superdiversity. Meissner (2020) used the variable set consisting of migrant, time in city, visa category, occupational group, ethnic background, pan-​ethnic background, gender, age, and life course (marital status and parent) in her work on superdiverse socializing contexts in London and Toronto. The website Superdiversity in Canadian Cities (https://​super​div-​can​ada.mmg.mpg.de/​) offers visualization tools which have operationalized a similar census-​sourced variable set, encompassing age, gender, immigration history, mobility, ethnic origin/​ancestry, religious affiliation, language spoken at home, and socioeconomic situation (education, employment, income, and housing). Clearly, when not confined to census data, more exploratory and refined measures of variables, such as migration trajectories and postmigration social networks, can be developed for use in customized surveys, as Meissner’s work shows. Using recent census data to achieve such measurement raises several important issues. The first requires identifying the key variables for analysis. Because superdiversity is migration driven, some measure of the person’s migration status is needed, optimally, the variables country of origin, migration channels or statuses, when migration occurred,

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    193 and whether the migration is transitory or not. The census has traditionally collected country-​of-​birth data, but recent censuses have added new migration variables. The census also captures other forms of differentiation, such as ethnicity, language, religion, and national identity, although it is the interaction of these variables with migration that is central to the concept. Secondly, a range of population units may be superdiverse, from individuals and families/​households to sociocultural groups, small areas such as electoral wards, neighborhoods, towns and cities, and entire countries, though much routine data collection (such as government social surveys) severely constrains this choice. Additionally, superdiversity is a dynamic process that constantly undergoes change. Yet many of our data sources, including censuses and most surveys, are cross-​ sectional and provide snapshots in time of social processes and patterns. Record linkage might partially mitigate this drawback; it has been achieved across censuses for a small population cohort. Finally, the most effective tools for capturing and understanding many configurations of superdiversity—​such as new social formations, networks, and patterns of contacts within and across diverse communities—​are likely to be customized, including qualitative research methods. The cross-​sectional analysis provided by census data, however, has a unique and important place, enabling comparisons across the country and at a small-​area level. The utility of the decennial census as a data source or tool for capturing superdiversity is the subject of this chapter. Its utility has been questioned by several scholars. Vertovec (2007, 7) has written: “In Britain much public discourse and service provision is still based on a limited set of Census categories . . . these categories do not begin to convey the extent and modes of diversity existing within the population today.” Writing from the perspective of migration, integration, and social cohesion in the United Kingdom, Rutter (2015, 87) observes: “Many researchers now argue that growing super-​diversity means that the 17 or so broad ethnicity categories used in the Census are obsolete; it would be better to use country-​of-​birth variables alongside extended ethnicity codes to analyze evidence about integration.” Superdiversity has increasingly challenged the utility of the census ethnic group classification and presents a dilemma for scholars wishing to explore specific diaspora groups in the United Kingdom. In addition to the limitations of variables and categorizations, the census is a one-​off decennial exercise that is not updated between enumerations. As Rutter (2015) reminds us, “The Census is undertaken at ten-​yearly intervals in the United Kingdom. In between, new migrant groups may arrive and the characteristics of migrant populations can change” (84). This is clearly a drawback as the decade progresses. Moreover, the 2021 Census is likely to be the last in the United Kingdom, the government’s stated aim being that “censuses after 2021 be conducted using other sources of data.” Notwithstanding that they take place every ten years, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (see the website: https://​www.ons.gov.uk/​abou​tus/​whatw​edo/​paids​ervi​ces /​long​itud​inal​stud​yls) provides some linkage across censuses. Yet the decennial census does offer some advantages for the measuring of superdiversity. First, it has power and authority as an “official statistic,” the outcome of extensive testing, which confers confidence in its design, data collection, and the

194   Peter J. Aspinall robustness of its findings. The census also seeks to capture all people and households in the national population. Second, because it is a compulsory exercise that assures respondents long-​term confidentiality, it largely succeeds in this endeavor: The ONS Census Coverage Survey (Office for National Statistics 2012) estimated that 94 percent of the population was captured, though the numbers were lower in metropolitan inner-​ urban areas. This coverage enables analyses at the small-​area level, though with some limitations: The counts will be affected by the level of nonresponse and imputation and, to a lesser extent, by record swapping to protect confidentiality. The substantially complete enumeration of the population also enables the release of multiple-​way contingency tables that provide insight into the intersectionality of these variables, but mainly for the whole country or large geographical areas. Third, because the census asks an extensive set of questions on socioeconomic position, as well as on cultural characteristics and migration/​mobility, census data outputs constitute a powerful tool with which to examine the interaction between the superdiversity variables and the wider socioeconomic environment. Additional to tabular outputs that are made up of data aggregates, the release of anonymized records of individual persons and households (termed census microdata in the UK) enables researchers to undertake exploratory data analysis, including the use of regression methods.

Evidence for Growing Superdiversity in the British Population and the Need for Measurement A range of evidence has been cited that the ethnic/​cultural diversity of the country’s population has increased over the last several decades (Aspinall 2016). There is now an increasing number of mainly migrant ethnic minority populations—​including diversification in the EU-​born population (Lessard-​Phillips and Sigona 2018)—​who are not captured in census and survey questions on ethnic groups, and some of these are large, growing in size, and, for the most part, confined to and concealed within the residual “other” write-​in ethnic group categories in the 2011 Census. They can be identified in recent country-​of-​birth estimates and include Poland (a community of 827,000 migrants in 2018–​2019), Romania (434,000), Germany (305,000), South Africa (255,000), Italy (246,000), Nigeria (207,000), Lithuania (186,000), France (183,000), United States (174,000), Portugal (149,000), Spain (146,000), Philippines (144,000), and Sri Lanka (134,000; see Office for National Statistics 2019). Indeed, in 2000–​2001, twenty-​two overseas countries of birth had an estimated 50,000 or more residents; the numbers had doubled to 44 by 2018–​2019. Over a longer time period, the ONS has reported that in 2011 the top ten non-​UK countries of birth accounted for 45% (3.4 million) of the total foreign-​born population (7.5 million), a marked shift from 60% (1.1 million) of the foreign born (1.9 million) in 1951.

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    195 When country of birth at a fine-​grained level is cross-​tabulated with other variables, a picture of substantial complexity emerges, as revealed by a census evidence base stratifying the fine-​grained country of birth categories by 18 ethnic groups and four periods of arrival (when the migrants came to live here). And these are but two of a growing set of census variables; the 2011 cultural question set included questions about national identity, main language, proficiency in English, and religion. The intersections between these variables—​including country of birth—​have the potential to reveal substantial further complexity. If it is envisaged that successive decennial censuses will provide cumulative layers of complexity at various geographical levels, then the analytical challenges become demanding. How best to measure this increasing superdiversity presents census agencies with substantial challenges, including the problems of small numbers and disclosure risk. Moreover, the census does not ask questions on reasons for migration, so major gaps on migration channels and statuses will persist, though there will be opportunities for record linkage. Now, the potential of recent UK censuses to capture superdiversity will be examined.

Changes to the 2001 and 2011 Censuses That Have Enhanced Capture of Superdiversity In the 2001 and 2011 England and Wales Censuses, a number of changes to the cultural and demographic question sets substantially increased the capture of variables that measure superdiversity. In the 2001 Census the “White” group was broken down to include “British” and “Irish” predesignated options and “Mixed” categories added. Five duplex free-​text boxes (20 character spaces) were introduced to the “Other” options (one for each of the “White,” “Mixed,” “Asian/​Asian British,” “Black/​Black British,” and “Chinese or other ethnic group” sections). A new voluntary question on religion comprised eight tick boxes, including “none” and a free-​text “any other religion.” In 2011, “Gypsy or Irish Traveller” and “Arab” ethnic categories were added, and the Chinese option was relocated to the Asian/​Asian British section. A new question was asked on national identity, respondents being invite to “tick all that apply” from the response options “English,” “Welsh,” “Scottish,” “Northern Irish,” “British,” and a write-​in “Other.” For the first time, form-​fillers were asked their “main language,” with options of “English” and a write-​in “Other;” the latter were asked a supplementary question about how well they spoke English (“very well”, “well,” “not well,” or “not at all”). However, the free-​text boxes were shortened to 17 characters. Migration was also the site of substantial changes. In 2001, as in previous censuses, migration was captured by a country-​of-​birth question (via the options of the four home countries, Republic of Ireland, and a free-​text “elsewhere” option) and “usual address one year ago.” However, in the 2011 Census, persons not born in the United Kingdom

196   Peter J. Aspinall were asked for the first time, “When did you most recently arrive to live here (Do not count short visits away from the UK).” Those who had arrived in the twelve months before census day were also asked: “How long do you intend to stay in the United Kingdom,” with response options of “less than 6 months,” “6 months or more but less than 12 months,” and “12 months or more.” The new questions on migration introduced a measure of differentiation to the migrant resident population as a whole, beyond those who had migrated during the previous year. The “most recently arrive” question was similar to one asked in the 1971 Census for those born outside the United Kingdom, which had invited respondents to write “the year in which you first entered the United Kingdom.” However, in 13.4% of cases, the 1971 Census quality check revealed that the question was either answered incorrectly or omitted, and it found a strong relationship between errors and year of entry to the UK (Hattersley and Creeser 1995, 32). Form-​fillers recording the year the person first entered the UK to establish permanent residence rather than the year they had first visited the UK, accounted for many of the errors. Clarifications in the 2011 Census avoided such errors. Several additional questions on migration and mobility contribute to the wider picture of superdiversity. The 2011 England and Wales Census included a one-​year migration question (as had all censuses since 1961): “One year ago what was your usual address?” If it was different from the address now given, respondents were asked to write in another address in the UK or, if outside the UK, the country. This question is used to measure international migration and within-​UK migration. With respect to the intention-​to-​stay question for migrants who had arrived in the UK within the last year, Duke-​Williams (2009, 2011) viewed this subjectively prospective question as “problematic. The results may be of poor quality, and the question may harm general response to the Census. The submission advises dropping this proposed question.” These reservations aside, the question does provide some measure (albeit prospective) of the short-​term and transitory nature of some migration flows. Finally, a question asked for the first time in 2011 on passports held (with tick all that apply response options of UK, Irish, free-​text “other,” and “none”) is regarded as a useful proxy for citizenship and nationality. The England and Wales census agency and that for Scotland did not consider the census to be an appropriate instrument for capturing reasons for migration nor migrants’ different legal statuses, not least because of the complexity and multiplicity of reasons that might underlie these decisions and also their sometimes sensitive nature. Thus, the census is not able to disaggregate migration flows by main reasons for migration, which may include employment reasons, formal study, being the spouse/​ dependent of a UK citizen or of someone coming to the UK, arriving to get married/​ form a civil partnership, seeking asylum (humanitarian migration), coming as a visitor, or some other stated reason. Estimates of the number of migrants arriving for several main reasons (work-​related, formal study, accompany/​join, and other) for a selection of around twenty world regions/​country groupings are reported from Annual Population Survey data. Attempts have been made to probabilistically attach reasons for migration

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    197 to country-​of-​birth data in censuses and large-​scale surveys; Kausar and Drinkwater (2010), for example, differentiated four groups of migrants based on country origins: refugees and asylum seekers; mixed refugees and economic migrants; mainly economic migrants; and economic migrants. However, these approaches can only provide indicative evidence.

Census Data Outputs The ONS census data outputs from the questions in the migration and cultural question sets transformed the capturing of superdiversity. The granularity and complexity of these data, in both standard and customized tables, has been notable with respect to the 2011 Census. Census data are released for a range of area levels of output, from country (UK or England and Wales) to local authorities, wards, and “output areas,” the smallest unit for which census data are published, containing at least 40 households and 100 persons. Most data are published as standard tables on various online platforms, such as NOMIS, and mainly comprise univariate and two-​way contingency tabulations. A second body of publicly available, and frequently more complex, data comprises special tabulations commissioned by census data users. Some of these tables are of particular utility for measuring superdiversity because one or more of the variables are granular and there are some three-​way contingency table data. Thirdly, new outputs for “small populations” (too small for standard tables) mainly identified in the ethnic group free-​text responses or country-​of-​birth question have been released as special datasets, their granularity and cross-​tabulation by age and gender offering insights into superdiversity. The outputs from the 2011 Census are voluminous. For example, on one platform alone (NOMIS) 44 tables include country of birth; 33 include passports held; and 21 include year of arrival in the UK, numbers that are difficult to comprehensively preview. Here, the focus is on user-​commissioned tables, numbering 154 in the ethnicity, identity, language, and religion (EILR) set and 38 in the migration set. Some of these comprise formats that capture complexity across two or more variables and use fine-​grained categorization, as illustrated below. Two sets of customized granular, cross-​tabular data focus on the “when you most recently arrived” question and reveal their utility for capturing superdiversity. One ONS table derives information from the questions on country of birth, ethnic group, and year most recently arrived (for the periods pre-​1981, 1981–​2000, 2001–​2006, and 2007–​2011).1 The table matrix comprises 227 country-​of-​birth categories (the most granular census coding, with a threshold of 100-​plus usual residents), cross-​tabulated against the four periods of arrival, each of the latter being broken down by the full 18 ethnic categories. The full matrix of over 17,000 cells provides data for all 7,505,010 usual residents born outside the United Kingdom, broken down for more than 4,000 migrant ethnic categories, yielding unprecedented detail on the ethnic group of migrants and

198   Peter J. Aspinall when they came to live here. A companion table is available for country of birth by year of arrival by religion, again for all usual residents in the UK.2 The table comprises the full set of countries of birth, cross-​tabulated against the four periods of arrival, each broken down by nine categories of religion. The full matrix (9,040 cells) yields data for 2,034 discrete country-​of-​birth religion categories. This type of release directly addresses the intersectional nature of superdiversity as it relates to migration patterns and outcomes, and at the same time provides access to granular data for country-​of-​birth and census classifications for ethnic group and religion, but only at the geographical level of England and Wales. However, a number of customized tables at lower spatial scales provide granular one-​and two-​way cross-​ tabulations for country of birth. For example, counts have been produced for 227 country-​of-​birth groups for each of London’s 32 boroughs and the City of London.3 “Small Population” tables,4 a new census output in the 2011 Census, contribute to the measurement of superdiversity through tabular data for granular population categories and also offer scope for intersectional analysis through some three-​ way cross-​ tabulations. Their value lies in providing information on groups that are concealed in the standard output classifications, establishing a point of access to a differentiation that otherwise would be concealed. They are sourced from the coded open-​response options in the ethnic group, national identity, and religion questions, though these only partially count their populations (some of which will have selected a pre-​designated category). Further differentiation is yielded by cross-​tabular configurations by age band by sex for most populations and by the scope these datasets offer for triangulation with other customized datasets. In other words, these datasets are contextual in nature and provide evidence of the complexity and multidimensional patterns of the superdiversity variables. For example, communities of origin may conceal particular segments of the population differentiated by religion and linked to patterns of forced migration, such as the Tamil refugees within the Sri Lankan migrant flow. These “Small Population” outputs comprised tables stratified by five-​year age bands by sex for 13 ethnic groups based on the write-​ins (Afghan, Filipino, Greek, Greek Cypriot, Kurdish, Latin Central South American, Nepalese, Polish, Somali, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Turkish, and Turkish Cypriot) and 17 country-​of-​birth groups (Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Cyprus EU, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Somalia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Turkey). These 30 tables are released for “merged local authorities.” In addition, 17 tables covering key characteristics such as age, sex, economic activity, main language (English or Other) and proficiency in English, qualifications, and socioeconomic classification—​and providing some three-​way tabulations—​were released for each of Kashmiri, Nepalese, and Sikh (ethnic groups), Cornish (national identity), and Ravidassia and Jain (religions), but no country-​of-​birth groups. These data are released at a finer spatial scale (Middle Layer Super Output Areas of 5,000–​15,000 population). The provision of this volume of granular data for small populations represented a step change compared with outputs from the 2001 England and Wales Census. Even though the country-​of-​birth tables are limited to configurations of age and sex, these can be important in superdiversity terms, for

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    199 example, Filipinos have an overrepresentation of females (male:female ratio of 1:1.5 in the Filipino ethnic group and 1:1.7 in Filipino migrants) linked to their recruitment to the low-​paid health-​and social-​care sectors, sometimes working on time-​limited visas or charged high visa renewal fees. The 2011 Census outputs have also yielded substantially more granularity in the cultural question set. Although the critical literature dismisses the idea that superdiversity simply means “more ethnicity” or that ethnicity is the sole or optimal category of analysis (Vertovec 2019), ignoring the multidimensional nature of categories, there has been a needed focus on ethnicity as a variable. This has included the fuzziness of ethnic boundaries and concealed granularity or divisions within ethnic groups. Ethnic group is one of several important variables with respect to measurable intersectionality and justifies exploration. It has been argued that ethnic group categorization that is open response rather than pre-​designated may better capture superdiversity (Aspinall 2012). The 2011 Census has yielded substantially more of such data than did previous censuses. Only two write-​in options were offered in the 1991 Census ethnic question. However, the 2001 and 2011 Censuses brought distributed residual open response categories, one for each of the five pan-​ethnicities (six in Scotland in 2011). Their use has substantially increased over the last two decades, from 740,257 (1.3% of the population) in the 1991 Great Britain Census to 2.11 million (4.0%) of the England and Wales population in 2001 and 4.23 million (7.5%) in 2011, clearly indicating an increasing desire among respondents to identify in self-​defined terms. In the 2011 Census, the ONS released counts for regions, counties, London boroughs, districts, and unitary authorities for all 94 coded write-​ins in the “other” categories, including, for example, 57 coded responses for “any other White background.” Free text provides important indicative evidence for local jurisdictions in deciding their fine-​grained ethnic categories and is also useful to monitor the efficacy over time of the prespecified categories (indicating the need for new categories). There are less intersectional data at this fine spatial scale, though the ONS produced a customized cross-​tabulation of the 94 ethnic categories by religion (9 categories), a matrix of 846 distinctive ethnoreligious categories, at the geographical level of England5. Further, linkage of microdata from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses in the ONS Longitudinal Study has provided an evidence base on stability and change in self-​identified ethnicity, providing an insight into ethnic options and the blurriness of ethnic boundaries. The proportion of people who change ethnic group doubled, from 2% between 1991 and 2001 to 4% between 2001 and 2011 (Simpson and Jivraj 2015). The “Mixed/​Multiple” group and census data on interethnic unions also merit scrutiny because they provide a point of access to new patterns of population mixing in areas of high transnational migration. The ONS also released counts of the write-​ins for other questions in the cultural question set. For religion, the data comprise 50 categories—​including Ravidassia, Pagan, Spiritualist, a manufactured mixed religion, Jain, and Ravidassia—​released at the local authority level and cross-​tabulated by 11 types of rural and urban areas.6 National identity write-​ins are available as a univariate table of 14 categories involving mixes of British/​English/​Northern Irish/​Scottish/​Welsh/​Cornish, singly and in combination,

200   Peter J. Aspinall and 74 write-​in categories at the level of England and Wales.7 The granular data for “main language” comprises 100 main languages recorded in the “other, write in” category, cross-​tabulated by 10 types of urban and rural areas. These data are produced for country, region, local authority, and lower levels, and therefore have particular utility for small-​area mapping.8 Finally, detailed data on passports held (71 categories) has been released at the geographical level of London borough down to Lower Super Output Area level.9 These datasets demonstrate that census categorization in the cultural question set can no longer be characterized as comprising a limited number of broad groupings that mask heterogeneity, have become reified through repeated usage, or have origins in Britain’s colonial past, which may be only partially or situationally meaningful for respondents. Rather, it is clear that the tabulation of these variables has yielded to the need for fine-​grained categories that reflect the self-​descriptions of the form-​ fillers. Moreover, these granular data are appearing in cross-​tabular outputs that in some cases provide access to intersectionalities that are important to the concept of superdiversity.

How Census Data Has Been Used to Describe and Analyze Population Superdiversity Despite the breath and richness of 2011 Census outputs (only a fraction of which are referenced here), surprisingly little use has been made of this evidence base to address superdiversity, whether through lack of knowledge of the outputs or difficulties in navigating their multiplicity. Such data have been used in two main ways to describe population-​level superdiversity: first, to unravel the complexities of ethnicity and country origins in mainly migrant minority populations. Studies by Mok and Platt (2020); Aspinall and Chinouya (2016); Aspinall (2019); and Poots et al. (2018) have in common the use of the customized three-​way migration tabulation. Secondly, the 2011 Census data have provided a source for mapping at a small spatial scale (Output Areas) to reveal superdiversity (Krausova 2018). Mok and Platt (2020) draw on pooled Labour Force Survey and 2011 Census data to show the distinctive labor market experiences of five Chinese subpopulations concealed in the self-​identified “Chinese” census ethnic category: Hong Kong–​born; mainland Chinese; the Taiwanese, Malaysians, and Singaporeans; the Sino-​Vietnamese; and the UK-​born children of all these communities. They relate these differences in outcomes to a complex set of intersecting factors, including different countries of origin; different times of arrival; different migration trajectories/​routes of arrival (whether they arrived as labor migrants, through chain migration, as refugees, students, or illegal migrants); differences in the skills and resources they brought with them (including main spoken

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    201 languages, proficiency in English, and intragroup language barriers); differences in the extent to which they were embedded in ethnic communities; and political differences/​ nationalist loyalties. Aspinall (2019) used an extensive body of 2011 Census data to characterize the demography and socioeconomic position of the Sri Lankan community of descent in the United Kingdom, a population that is not captured in the census predesignated ethnic group categories. The Sri Lankan–​born migrants in England and Wales (127,242 in 2011) were identified by the four periods of arrival, these migrant cohorts being related to the wider literature on migration routes/​trajectories, including family reunion migration, Tamil student migration, and, notably, the Sri Lankan civil war, which began in 1983 and did not end until 2009. Evidence on those who were forced to flee tallies with the flows of arrivals and numbers of asylum applications made by Sri Lankans, nearly all of whom are likely to have been Tamils. Since about 2000 there has been an onward migration of Tamils to the United Kingdom from European Union countries for economic reasons. The three-​way migration tabulations were used to examine the changing patterns of ethnicity and religion across these four periods of arrival. Moreover, religion, language, and ethnic write-​ins from the census provide a point of access to the more granular categories of “Tamil” and “Sinhalese.” Attempts were made to explain Sri Lankan migrants’ generally more favorable circumstances on key socioeconomic variables (including generic health status and mortality) than other diaspora populations from South Asia. In addition, a monograph has focused on the migrant identities and experiences of the “Black African” population, demonstrating the utility of the 2011 and earlier censuses to investigate the demography, cultural identity, and migration experiences of this population, including its concealed heterogeneity (Aspinall and Chinouya 2016). This includes the mapping of pie charts of Black Africans who arrived pre-​1981, 1981–​2000, 2001–​2006, and 2007–​2011 by country of birth (numbering 14–​20 countries in each period) for all countries contributing 1%+​of migrants per period (Aspinall and Chinouya 2016, 38–​41). The country composition varies dramatically over the four periods. The contribution of Ghanaian migrants, for example, declined from 30.5% pre-​1981 to 8.9% in 2007–​2011. In 1981–​2000 many new countries made their appearance, including Angola, Congo, Congo DR, and Eritrea, which were not former British colonies. The data also reveal that in the last three periods, Black African migrants from EU countries (primarily the Netherlands and Sweden) probably reflect the secondary or onward migration of second-​generation Somalis to England and Wales, a pattern also documented by research studies. Cohort analyses for Black African study, work, and family migration (including outcomes) were based on the Home Office’s Migrant Journey report and table data (Home Office 2015). Fine-​grained categorization for ethnic group, religion, main language, and national identity were used to explore group identities and their fuzzy boundaries. The second main area of usage is the development of an index and mapping of superdiversity. The former is intrinsically difficult because superdiversity encompasses the intersection of a detailed set of variables. Simpson (2013) has

202   Peter J. Aspinall developed a “diversity index” (based on ethnic group proportions), and the Greater London Authority has extended this to language, religion, and country of birth, all using 2011 Census counts. It has also identified six additional census diversity indices (including ethnic group) and used these diversity domains to capture a measure of “multiple diversity.” Structured literature searches have identified few indices specifically for “superdiversity” (with the exception of the “entrepreneurial superdiversity index” (Yamamura and Lassalle 2020) and an experimental “superdiversity index” comparing diversity from the point of view of the emotional content of language in different communities (Pollacci 2019). Meissner (2016, 50) found that there was “no “superdiversity index” that would dictate how to measure differences.” Subsequently, Krausova (2018, 8, 24) has proposed a tentative composite measure of superdiversity that aggregates the number of ethnic groups, countries of birth, and religions (/​ 1,000) in each area. The value of this approach is that it taps into “the potentially compounding effect of different diversities.” Consequently, with respect to the mapping of superdiversity, most studies have used multiple mappings of the different contributory dimensions. The various approaches include the use of census variables to map neighborhood-​ level superdiversity, nicely demonstrated by Anna Krausova’s work on the use of 2011 Census data to map superdiversity in the inner London neighborhood of Elephant and Castle; Katherine Stansfeld’s work on mapping superdiversity in the inner London neighborhood of Finsbury through participatory research, photography, maps, and videos (by way of contrast to census approaches; Stansfeld 2017); and a range of international studies that have used data from the census and statistical agencies and brought to bear the power of innovative visualization techniques as ways of seeing emergent patterns in complex data—​notably, in the city maps of Vancouver, Sydney, and Auckland (Vertovec et al. 2018). Krausova’s work is especially relevant in its use of 2011 England and Wales Census data. She maps a number of census-​derived indices at Output Area level for Elephant and Castle: “non-​White British residents as share of population”; “non-​UK-born residents as share of population”; “super-​diversity index”; and “percentage of deprived households.” London and its local authorities have also exploited 2011 Census data for policy purposes through small area and microlevel mapping. As the main commissioner of special census tabulations, the Greater London Authority has published a wealth of data from the 2011 Census10 and has attempted to provide a measure of multiple diversity (Greater London Authority Census Information Scheme 2014). Among the Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) which appear among the most diverse across the foregoing multiple domains, those LSOAs in the top 25 percent or “most diverse” were selected. The LSOAs were then scored according to how many of the domains they were most diverse in (six being the maximum). Two maps outline this measure of multiple diversity for 2001 and 2011. Among local authorities’ mapping endeavors, the London Borough of Harrow, for example, has mapped at LSOA (an average population of 1,500 people or 650 households) residents whose main language is Gujarati, Tamil, Romanian, Polish, and Farsi/​Persian,

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    203 and the category of “not English” or who “do not speak English well” (Harrow Council 2013). Clearly, the mapping of multiple census variables at a small-​area level lends itself to the visualization of these as multiple layers. Drilling down through these layers for particular small geographies may be a useful approach for generating hypotheses about the relationship between the variables. For example, Krausova (2018) found that for individual Output Areas the most deprived areas were not generally the most diverse ones. The mapping of superdiversity variables at a small-​area level can be further enhanced through the use of census microdata samples though no examples of such work have been identified. Similarly, the methodology of small area estimation and use of synthetic estimation models may have some utility in enabling reliable estimation at smaller spatial scales.

Conclusion Developments that may further enhance the utility of census data in the future for capturing superdiversity are now examined. In the 2021 England and Wales Census, new voluntary questions were asked on gender identity and sexual orientation (both with a write-​in provision). A “Roma” category and an “African background” free-​text field were added to the ethnic group question, administrative and respondent burden setting limits to the number of new categories that could be included. The type of cross-​ tabular data that these new questions and all others will yield is now being decided though likely to comprise a mix of predefined univariate and two-​way tables. Adding to this mix, a flexible dissemination system or tool has been developed to allow users to create their own output by selecting the geography, population base, and variables they require (Fowler 2017). This is likely to further enhance users’ ability to capture the multidimensional configurations that are key to the concept of superdiversity and has been enabled through a new, dynamic, statistical disclosure control methodology to protect data confidentiality. Record linkage involving individual census records and other social/​ economic datasets has been enhanced by enabling legislation—​the 2007 Statistics and Registration Service Act—​but remains largely underexploited, though there have been important developments in Scotland, where census records have been linked to health databases. The potential utility of this general approach is substantial and has been demonstrated by the linking of port-​of-​entry screening records—​which record immigration status (students, long-​stay visitors, and refugees/​asylum seekers) and year of entry for new entrants to the United Kingdom—​with the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) database. It is also exemplified by census practices in Canada and Australia (Hiebert 2019). Statistics Canada has linked questions on where born and landed immigrant status to Canada’s immigration database, enabling year of arrival and category of admission to be added to the master census database. Similarly, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has linked the census to administrative databases, including the Australian Census and

204   Peter J. Aspinall Migrants Integrated Dataset, 2016, in a new microdata file to enable variables on immigration and socioeconomic status to be cross-​tabulated. There will likely remain a number of notable limitations to the use of census data to capture superdiversity. First, there is a trade-​off between the complexity of the data and the area level for which the data is produced. The most complex data (with respect to intersectionality and granularity) is usually at a national level. At lower spatial scales, such complex releases risk disclosure through the small numbers problem. However, with respect to the key variables for measuring superdiversity, recent censuses have been successful in identifying more granular categories. Substantial uncertainty remains with regard to the capture of such data in the future as Britain plans for an administrative census post-​2021, the paucity of data on population diversity being flagged as a key issue. However, the Migration Statistics Transformation Programme’s work on linking multiple government datasets promises a more complete picture of who is arriving and resident in the United Kingdom.

Notes 1. Table CT0263. 2011 Census. Country of birth by year of arrival by ethnic group. England and Wales. https://​w ww.ons.gov.uk/​p eopl​e pop​u lat​i ona​n dco​m mun​i ty /​pop​ulat​iona​ndmi​grat​ion/​popu​lati​ones​tima​tes/​adh​ocs /​003485ct02632011censuscountryofbirthbyyearofarrivalb​yeth​nicg​roup​engl​anda​ndwa​les. 2. Table CT0265. 2011 Census. Country of birth by year of arrival by religion. England and Wales. https://​www.ons.gov.uk/​peopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity /​pop​ulat​iona​ndmi​grat​ion/​int​erna​tion​almi​grat​ion/​adh​ocs /​003486ct02652011censuscountryofbirthbyyearofarriv​alby​reli​gion​engl​anda​ndwa​les. 3. Table CT0048. Country of birth (detailed). Geographical level: London Boroughs. https://​w ww.ons.gov.uk/​p eopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity/​p op​ulat​iona​ndmi​grat ​ion /​popu​lati​ones​tima​tes/​adh​ocs/​0048c​t004​8cou​ntry​ofbi​rthd​etai​led. 4. Office for National Statistics. 2011 Census Small Population Tables for England and Wales. Accessed at: http://​www.nomis​web.co.uk/​cen​sus/​2011/​small​_​pop​ulat​ion. 5. Table CT0575. Ethnic group (write-​ in response) by religion. England. https://​www .ons.gov.uk/​ p eopl​ e pop​ u lat​ i ona​ n dco​ m mun ​ ity/ ​ c ultu ​ r ali ​ d ent ​ ity/ ​ e thnic ​ ity/ ​ a dh ​ o cs /​005528ct05752011censusethnicgroupwrite​inre​spon​seby​reli​gion​engl​and 6. Table QS210 EW. Religion (detailed). England and Wales. https://​www.nomis​web.co.uk /​cen​sus/​2011/​qs21​0ew. 7. Table QS214EW. National identity (detailed). Regions, counties, London boroughs, districts and unitary authorities in England and Wales. https://​www.nomis​web.co.uk /​cen​sus/​2011/​qs21​4ew. 8. Table QS204EW. Main language (detailed). Multiple geographies. https://​www.ons.gov.uk › census › 2011-​census › rft-​qs204ew. 9. Table CT0060. Passports held (detailed). London Boroughs and LSOA. https://​www.ons .gov.uk/​peopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity/​pop​ulat​iona​ndmi​grat​ion/​popu​lati​ones​tima​tes /​adh​ocs/​0060​ct00​60pa​sspo​rtsh​eldd​etai​led. 10. London Assembly. London Datastore. https://​data.lon​don.gov.uk/​dem​ogra​phy/​.

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    205

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206   Peter J. Aspinall UK.” Discussion Papers in Economics DP 08/​10. Guildford, UK: Department of Economics, University of Surrey. Krausova, Anna. 2018. “Elephant and Castle: Mapping (Super-​)Diversity in the 2011 UK Census.” Working Paper no. 142. Centre on Migration Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Lessard-​Phillips, Laurence, and Nando Sigona. 2018. Mapping EU Citizens in the UK: A Changing Profile. Birmingham, UK: Institute for Research into Superdiversity. Longhi, Simonetta. 2013. “Impact of Cultural Diversity on Wages, Evidence from Panel Data.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 43 (5): 797–​807. Meissner, Fran. 2015. “Migration in Migration-​ Related Diversity? The Nexus between Superdiversity and Migration Studies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 556–​567. https://​doi .org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2015.970​209. Meissner, Fran. 2016. Socializing with Superdiversity: Relational Diversity through a Superdiversity Lens. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Meissner, Fran. 2020. “Describing and Disentangling Superdiversity through Social Networks.” EUI Working Paper MWP 2020/​06. San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy: European University Institute. Mok, Tze Ming, and Lucinda Platt. 2020. “All Look the Same? Diversity of Labour Market Outcomes of Chinese Ethnic Group Populations in the UK.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (1): 87–​107. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13691​83X.2018.1524​291. Office for National Statistics. 2012. Census Coverage Survey: 2011 Census Evaluation Report. London: Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics. 2019. “Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality.” November 28. https://​www.ons.gov.uk/​peopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity /​pop​ulat​iona​ndmi​grat​ion/​int​erna​tion​almi​grat​ion/​datas​ets /​populationoftheunitedkingdombyc​ount​ryof​b irt​hand​nati​onal​ity. Pemberton, Simon, and Arshad Isakjee. 2017. “Typologies and Logics of Welfare Bricolage in the UK.” IRIS Working Paper Series, No. 19/​2017. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. Pollacci, Laura. 2019. “Superdiversity: (Big) Data Analytics at the Crossroads of Geography, Language and Emotions.” PhD thesis. University of Pisa. https://​etd.adm.unipi.it/​the​ses /​availa​ble/​etd-​10142​019-​100​652/​unres​tric​ted/​Super​dive​rsit​y_​Ph​DThe​sis.pdf. Poots, Kathyrn Spellman, and Reza Gholami. 2018. “Integration, Cultural Production, and Challenges of Identity Construction: Iranians in Great Britain.” In The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher, 93–​124. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pride, Michelle. 2015. “Measuring Superdiversity: Constructing A Theoretical Multi-​ dimensional Framework.” Unpublished MA diss., School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham. Rutter, Jill. 2015. Moving up and Getting On: Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in the UK. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Simpson, Ludi. 2013. Does Britain have plural cities? CoDE/​JRF Briefing on the dynamics of diversity. Manchester, UK: CoDE, University of Manchester. Simpson, Ludi, and Stephen Jivraj. 2015. “Policy Implications.” In Ethnic Identity and Inequalities in Britain, edited by Stephen Jivraj and Ludi Simpson, 217–​225. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Stansfeld, Katherine. 2017. Mapping Superdiversity. London: Blurb Books UK.

Capturing Superdiversity in Official Data    207 Stringer, Martin D. 2014. “Evidencing Superdiversity in the Census and Beyond.” Religion 44 (3): 453–​465. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00487​21X.2014.903​649. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–​1054. Vertovec, Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139. Vertovec, Steven, Daniel Hiebert, Alan Gamlen, and Paul Spoonley. 2018. “Superdiversity:Today’s Migration Has Made Cities More Diverse Than Ever –​in Multiple Ways.” Accessed at: https://​super​div.mmg.mpg.de Yamamura, Sakura, and Paul Lassalle. 2020. “Approximating Entrepreneurial Superdiversity: Reconceptualizing the Superdiversity Debate in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (11): 2218–​2239.

Chapter 14

Multidim ensiona l i t y a nd Su perdive rsi t y Some Reflections Laurence Lessard-​P hillips and Veronika Fajth

Introduction Multidimensionality, here broadly defined as the understanding that multiple, interactive, and interdependent dimensions are inherent within specific concepts, has been an ongoing feature within superdiversity scholarship since its inception. Yet, as in other disciplines that have been dealing with multidimensionality, an issue that arises is that of how to consider multidimensionality in an empirical manner. This is especially relevant if taking a quantitative perspective, which is what we are doing in this chapter, as a sort of empirical thought experiment. These concerns have also been at the forefront of discussions within many fields. This is especially the case in the “migrant integration”1 (for lack of a better term) literature, where scholars have emphasized the identification of different dimensions (or domains) deemed relevant for integration, as well as the way in which those dimensions are measured and analyzed empirically (Harder et al. 2018; Lessard-​Phillips 2017; Ager and Strang 2008; Penninx and Garcés-​ Mascareñas 2016). Within this literature, which we are more familiar with, this is an especially welcomed move as the aim is to theoretically and empirically move from more static, unidimensional and uni-​directional concepts to more dynamic, multidimensional, and multi-​directional ones. One challenge associated with this has been in trying to operationalize, and thus empirically measure, multidimensionality. This is a common, but not unique, feature and challenge of quantitative research and its application to the “social world” (Heine and Oltmanns 2016), although it does not necessarily need to arise from a positivist, or even empiricist, standpoint (Williams 2003). Here, we are extending this empirical

210    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth engagement with multidimensionality to superdiversity to see how it can help further develop multidimensional research approaches. We argue that to further engage with multidimensionality from a quantitative perspective, we need to delve deeper into superdiversity’s engagement with multidimensionality and consider potential refinements as put forward by extant literature. This “thought experiment” could contribute to the further (quantitative) empirical engagement of superdiversity research with multidimensionality.2 To do this, we first deepen our definitional and conceptual understandings of multidimensionality, focusing on its prevalence in the superdiversity literature and beyond. We then evaluate the implications of these understandings for researching multidimensionality and potential challenges that may arise, including data-​and methods-​driven implications and challenges. Such implications and challenges are important to consider should researchers—​within and beyond superdiversity—​wish to further engage with multidimensionality from a quantitative perspective.

What Is Multidimensionality? As mentioned in the introduction, the general understanding of multidimensionality revolves around the presence of multiple domains that ought to be taken into account jointly and separately when thinking about, for example, individuals, institutions, and—​ as we are doing here—​concepts or constructs. Before we delve into multidimensionality as conceptualized within superdiversity and the related literature, we thought it useful to explore its definition as a way to better understand how it can relate conceptually and empirically. While multidimensionality may entail a variety of conceptual and methodological implications across different disciplines and authors, underlying all these different approaches is, arguably, the same fundamental notion of multidimensionality as “the quality of a construct that cannot be adequately described by measuring a single trait or attribute,” as defined by the American Psychological Association (2020, no. 1). Moreover, scales and other forms of measurement can also be multidimensional if they are able to measure more than one dimension of a construct or concept (no. 2). In a recent review, Liu and colleagues (2018) define multidimensionality as comprising bundled (mostly individual) attributes and social relations. They highlight three perspectives on multidimensionality and how they have been handled methods-​wise (see Liu et al. 2018, 200): intersectionality, fault lines, and multiplexity. From the intersectionality perspective, multidimensionality is defined as the intersections of main “social identities” and measured through the multiplicative effects of these multiple identities. The fault-​lines perspective describes multidimensionality as the bundling of demographic and psychological attributes that causes a division between individuals. The measurement of multidimensionality here stems from looking at “objective” and “subjective” measures creating those fault lines using clustering methods. Finally, the multiplexity approach

Multidimensionality and Superdiversity    211 considers multidimensionality in the bundling of multiple social relations, which are measured through overlaps in social relations. These approaches and the associated measurement proposed imply that, when thinking about multidimensionality from a (quantitative) empirical perspective (as is the case in this chapter) and reflecting on the measures associated with the various domains of a multidimensional concept, there are multiple indicators to consider. While these tend to be derived from the original dimensions, their simultaneity and cross-​dimensionality are important aspects to consider (Alkire and Jahan 2018), as this allows to “create a more comprehensive picture” (OPHI n.d., para. 2) of circumstances or characteristics that go above and beyond what their individual consideration would allow. What we have outlined here shows that, on the one hand, multidimensionality has a complex, multifaceted nature; on the other hand, it means that to measure or describe that phenomenon, multiple aspects need to be considered simultaneously. How to tackle this empirically is an important issue to consider, requiring a better understanding of what constitutes multidimensionality in the superdiversity literature. We now turn to this.

Multidimensionality within Superdiversity and Related Scholarship Multidimensionality has been acknowledged within the superdiversity literature since an early stage. In fact, early conceptualizations of superdiversity perceived it as a multi-​dimensional perspective on diversity, both in terms of moving beyond “the ethnic group as either the unit of analysis or sole object of study” (Glick Schiller et al. 2006, p. 613) and by appreciating the coalescence of factors which condition people’s lives. (Vertovec 2007, 1026)

Conceptualizing superdiversity as multidimensional thus represents, by extension, an idea of the diversification of conditions or processes, or both (Vertovec 2007), with a focus on individual attributes. This conceptualization is also found elsewhere in the literature. Multidimensionality of conditions is seen in Geldof ’s (2018) conceptualization of superdiversity as a way to deal with the different types of diversity and in Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore’s (2018) review of the features of superdiversity and its focus on the multidimensionality of background characteristics (to very briefly summarize).3 There have also been discussions of the ways in which the diversification of processes, such as migration patterns, also contribute to the multidimensional

212    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth perspective on superdiversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Meissner 2015b). However, in many instances, a multidimensional view of superdiversity encapsulates the diversification of both conditions and processes (see, for example, Acosta-​García and Martínez-​Ortiz 2015), which have not only spatial but also temporal components (Meissner 2019). Moreover, multidimensionality has also been conceptualized from a multiplexity perspective, which makes the case for a relational understanding of diversity by demonstrating the complex diversity of social networks in superdiverse spaces (Meissner 2015a). In this—​so far fairly rare—​approach, (super)diversity applies not to background characteristics but is instead the very outcome observed, manifesting as a feature of social relations (in the latter example); spatial configurations, such as neighborhoods (Nathan 2011); or actors, such as migrant entrepreneurs (Yamamura and Lassalle 2020). Despite being acknowledged, superdiversity’s focus on multidimensionality, with some exceptions, has often remained abstract in its empirical application, at least with regard to quantitative methods. While this focus on multidimensionality is an important first step, especially if we wish to think about how to operationalize this feature in the empirical research, we feel it is also useful to compare extant theoretical and empirical approaches to multidimensionality in related (but by no means the only) fields: those of social exclusion, migrant integration, and race studies. As we will discuss, quantitative empirical applications of multidimensionality have been attempted and can serve as a good starting point. This will allow us to further explore the implications and issues linked to the empirical application of multidimensionality from a superdiversity perspective.

Social Exclusion In the social exclusion literature, multidimensionality has been recognized as a feature of inequality and poverty for several decades (see Atkinson and Bourguignon 1982; Omtzigt 2009), especially in its policy applications. We see the concept of multidimensionality, for example, in the United Nations’ (1995) definition of poverty, which links poverty to an extensive list of areas of life, including various forms of material deprivation as well as various social dimensions. Similarly, a 2001 report for the European Commission highlights that the dynamics of social exclusion are attributable to its multidimensional nature. Using the example of political and economic exclusion, the authors of the report illustrate how one type of exclusion can lead to another, but also how inclusion in one area can attenuate exclusion in another (Cremer-​Schäfer et al. 2001, 19). Multidimensional deprivation indices are widely used to assess poverty in various areas. The UK’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) combines seven domains of deprivation (income, employment, education, skills and training, health and disability, crime, housing and services, and living environment), using varied weights, into a single index for specific geographic areas (Noble et al. 2019). Both the Multidimensional Poverty

Multidimensionality and Superdiversity    213 Index (MPI; OPHI 2018) and UNICEF’s Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA; see Neubourg et al. 2012; UNICEF 2020) incorporate an expanded range of dimensions—​spanning education, nutrition, health, water, sanitation, housing, assets/​ information, and, in the case of MODA, violence (see Hjelm et al. 2016). MODA further pays attention to the degree of overlap across these dimensions as an indicator of severity of the deprivation, thus “capturing both the width and depth of poverty” (Hjelm et al. 2016, 10). Whereas the IMD looks at area-​level deprivation, the MPI looks at deprivation at the household level, and the MODA allows the inclusion of individual-​level data. The calculation of these indices involves various stages, including analyses from single and multiple domains of deprivation (which are predetermined and dependent on the type of data used); deciding on thresholds for defining deprivation; aggregating and weighting that information; and finally, the methods by which indices are derived from that data/​information. It is not possible to cover all the analytical details in this chapter (see, instead, Neubourg et al. 2012; Hjelm et al. 2016; McLennan et al. 2019), but it is nonetheless useful to consider them as a source of inspiration, despite the issues linked to the practice of using indices (see, for example, Deas et al. 2003; Kaika 2017).

Migrant Integration Research The concept of multidimensionality is more recent, in the research on migrant integration, and is increasingly being adopted, albeit in a less standardized way. From the early 2000s onward, mentions of migrant integration as “multidimensional” have emerged in the policy reports commissioned by the European Commission (e.g., Entzinger 2000; Entzinger and Biezeveld 2003; Penninx 2005; Bosswick and Heckmann 2006). These resemble the conceptual approach taken by the multidimensional social exclusion literature. In fact, the social-​exclusion literature has at times considered migrants to be a subset of socially excluded subgroups (see, e.g., Cremer-​Schäfer et al. 2001). Some of these early reports focused on the multidimensionality of integration policies, exemplified by the separate but interrelated examination of policies in the legal-​ political, socioeconomic, and cultural spheres (Entzinger and Biezeveld 2003; Penninx 2005). Later works tend to focus on the multidimensionality of outcomes—​for instance, evaluating how migrants are doing with regard to labor market participation, political participation, housing quality, and other indicators of integration (Di Bartolomeo, Kalantaryan, and Bonfanti 2015; Eurostat 2011; OECD/​EU 2019). In reviewing the multidimensional frameworks presented in the recent European integration research (Spencer and Charsley 2016; Ager and Strang 2008; Ndofor-​Tah et al. 2019; OECD/​EU 2019), one may note a tendency to expand the range and/​or detail of these dimensions and related indicators. Incorporating an increasing number of domains is a theoretically meaningful choice. For a long time, migrant integration research tended to focus on just two main areas: economic integration and sociocultural integration (with the aspects of social mixing, identity, culture blending together) and often even assumed that they go hand-​in-​hand

214    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth (Bean et al. 2012; Lessard-​Phillips 2017). Expanding the areas to be considered is meaningful because it adds detail to evaluations of integration; it also allows for the possibility that at a given point in time, outcomes may differ across areas, as migrants may be more “integrated” in one area than another.4 In connection with the latter point, there are differences in the integration literature in terms of how “dimensions” are defined and categorized. As Bean and colleagues (2012) have also discussed, the literature often differentiates between “dimensions” on a simply thematic (or intuitive) basis, informed by distinctions across disciplines (e.g., economics, political science, psychology, etc.) or policy areas (e.g. labor market access, legal/​civic rights, etc.). A prominent example of this “intuitive” approach is the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) and European Union’s biannual overview report on migrants’ outcomes in Europe (OECD/​EU 2019). It features a fairly wide-​ranging set of indicators across multiple “dimensions.” The report does not include an explanation of why the various categories were chosen, but they seem to be delineated on an intuitive or common-​practice basis (for a different example, from the US literature, see Harder et al. 2018). Another example is the work around the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), which, with a stated aim of multidimensionality, evaluates integration policy environments across eight “policy areas” (Huddleston et al. 2015).5 Although the examination of multiple areas of life is in itself an acknowledgment of the presence of multiple dimensions of integration, their separate examination does not necessarily take interactivity and interdependency of domains into account. An emerging strand of literature (Bean et al. 2012; Fajth and Lessard-​Phillips 2022; Lessard-​Phillips 2017) builds on a notion of multidimensionality that is centered around (potentially) diverging integration-related outcomes. Dimensions here are used to group (and distinguish) integration-​related outcomes that tend to co-​vary (or show diverging patterns), building a multidimensional analytical framework whose categorization is empirically grounded.6 This latter approach underscores that beyond the phenomenon of “just” involving multiple areas of life, multidimensionality implies a complex set of relationships between those areas, which may be directly related (but develop at different speeds or with different intensity), inversely related, or even unrelated. One of many useful conceptual frameworks to draw on can be found in the work by Spencer and Charsley (2016), who used qualitative methods to implement it. This emerging body of work explores the complexity of multiple, potentially interrelated dimensions relevant to integration with methods common in psychology—​another field in which multidimensionality has long been a topic of analysis—​such as factor analysis. As noted, researchers in psychology apply multidimensionality to measure complex concepts for which there is no single, direct indicator, such as intelligence or mental health (Fischer and Karl 2019; Mood, Jonsson, and Låftman 2016; Tsai and Wu 2013). Factor analysis, by using multiple indicators to measure latent, unobserved constructs (Fischer and Karl 2019), and potentially create “scores” based on these factors can allow for this level of refinement and be applied to the study of integration outcomes, but is not without its limitations, as we will discuss below. We will expand on this later.

Multidimensionality and Superdiversity    215

Race Studies Applications of multidimensional measures are also emerging in the field of race studies. An overview by Roth (2016) summarizes the growing body of scholarship that distinguishes between multiple dimensions of race, stressing that people increasingly experience race “not as a single, consistent identity but as a number of conflicting dimensions” (Roth 2016, 1310). Although the different dimensions of race may influence one another, Roth argues, they are not necessarily the same. This point is well illustrated by López and colleagues (2017), who empirically operationalize the concept of race via a three-​dimensional measure (street race, socially assigned/​ascribed race, and self-​perceived race). A combination of measures is thus used to better capture a complex concept (race), albeit in separate analytical models. López and colleagues’ multidimensional measurement of race is validated by the results of their study, where they found that using each of the three measures led to widely different reporting in terms of race categories. This study confirmed the relevance of using separate measures to engage with intersectionality, because one cannot be clearly inferred from the other. Liu and colleagues (2018), using an intersectionality approach, also highlighted research that has separately analyzed each relevant intersection as using a multidimensional approach. Unlike literature from the fields of migrant integration and social exclusion—​but similar to some of the superdiversity literature—​in this case multidimensionality is applied to the background characteristics of the population under study, not their outcomes. As discussed by Roth (2016), this type of variation in relevance across dimensions is a common focus of multidimensional race studies. The literature reviewed by Roth tends to examine such topics as the impact of conflicting dimensions of race, the relationship between different dimensions, and the way in which different dimensions of race might relate to outcomes differently. López and colleagues’ (2017) aforementioned study, for instance, finds that one measure (dimension) of race can predict mental health outcomes while another cannot; similarly, Saperstein (2012) found that observed race revealed a greater degree of racial income inequality than self-​classified race did. These types of findings further underscore the necessity to use multiple dimensions in the case of complex concepts (whether characteristics or outcomes) to more accurately capture their relationship to related phenomena. They allow for the development of a better understanding of the mechanisms behind some of the effects, which may require further validation and/​or examination.

Contrasting Approaches to Multidimensionality Our brief review of the concept of multidimensionality in superdiversity and related literature highlights a few interesting points. First, we come across two different interpretations of multidimensionality, which we roughly distinguish as interpretations based either on (background) characteristics or outcomes. In contrast with some of the other approaches mentioned, but in line with the definition of Liu and colleagues (2018),

216    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth the superdiversity literature to date, at least to our knowledge, seems to mention multidimensionality primarily to refer to diversity of different background characteristics (e.g., age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, migration channel, legal status). That said, some works approach (super)diversity as an outcome—​of migration patterns and other diversification processes—​to examine in its own right via a multidimensional lens as it manifests in social networks, spatial configurations, and so on. (Vertovec 2019; Meissner 2015a; Nathan 2011). It is useful to keep both approaches in mind when thinking about how to study superdiversity empirically. Second, there appears to be a contrast between applied (or policy-​oriented) and academic approaches to multidimensionality. The two can overlap, and have done so, but overall have led to various ways of investigating multidimensionality. Third, but relatedly, the level of operationalization matters, as do the methods that have been developed within the various approaches to deal with multidimensionality. These distinctions are not yet well developed in the superdiversity literature. Of course, operationalization in is strongly linked to methodological orientation, especially as one gets closer to the positivism end of the spectrum (although measurement can be conceptualized from a critical realist perspective; see Williams (2003) for a discussion). To further develop empirical applications of multidimensionality within superdiversity, we find it useful to consider how other fields have approached multidimensionality, conceptually and methodologically. This provides a good opportunity to gain insights and inspiration and to develop the scholarship. In this next section, we expand on some of these established practices.

Multidimensionality and Research Methods: Implications and Potential Challenges Multidimensional approaches have the potential to add depth to the study of superdiversity (and other fields) from a quantitative empirical perspective. However, the increased conceptual complexity and the empirical measurement of multidimensionality also bring a set of new implications and challenges, which we now discuss.

Multidimensionality of Characteristics With regard to background characteristics, a multidimensional approach entails a more detailed consideration of each characteristic. A core notion of superdiversity is the combined nature of background factors such as nationality/​country of origin, ethnicity, migration channel/​legal status, age, and gender (Meissner and Vertovec 2015). In its recognition of the latter dynamic, superdiversity has noted parallels with the notion

Multidimensionality and Superdiversity    217 of intersectionality from gender studies, which is increasingly adopted in migration studies as well (Gkiouleka and Huijts 2020; Yuval-​Davis 2007; Bürkner 2012; Anthias 2013; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018). One proposed avenue for doing this is through the introduction of multiple, relevant indicators and looking at both looking at both their individual and combined importance, as is already being advanced in the race studies literature. In practical terms, a multidimensional concept can be operationalized in multiple ways. One solution would be to perform separate analyses for specific intersections of characteristics, as proposed by some intersectionality research (e.g., Gkiouleka and Huijts 2020). For regression models in particular—​arguably the most common tools of quantitative analyses in migration and related fields—​the combined importance of background characteristics could be assessed by calculating interaction effects, broadly understood as calculating the additional effect of the simultaneous or joint occurrence of two or more factors (Lavrakas 2008). If interaction effects are useful for a multidimensional analysis of characteristics, they also raise issues with how they are set up analytically. Interaction effects usually require setting up a reference category against which to compare various subgroups. Traditionally, this has tended to consist of using a benchmark reference group, quite often contested categories such as “white,” “native-​background,” or the so-​called “mainstream” population. This approach can thus be incompatible with the very idea of superdiversity and may end up reproducing existing power structures in the production and dissemination of results. Of course, there are potential solutions to this problem. One possibility is to use a different type of coding for interaction effects that require not a reference group but a comparator, such as deviation coding. Incorporating migrants’ perspectives when determining categories and benchmarking is also an increasingly common suggestion (Fee 2019; Tyson 2017; Pittaway, Bartolomei, and Doney 2016). Another concern is that even two-​way interaction effects can be quite difficult to understand from an interpretation standpoint; this can make analytical approaches that aim to tackle multidimensionality difficult not only to implement but also to meaningfully interpret. Finally, when using multiple indicators and interactions, or even when performing analyses on separate groups, another issue that arises is that of decreasing sample sizes, which will affect the analyses. It is important to be aware of these issues, which may also present avenues of further research. Moreover, common background characteristics relevant to the analysis of superdiversity (and migration studies in general), such as race, ethnicity, class background, or even legal status could all be measured with multiple dimensions each. For example, as previously mentioned, assigned and self-​identified race and ethnicity may diverge, not to mention the case of multiple racial or ethnic heritages. Socioeconomic status could be measured in a myriad of ways. Even legal status may be complicated by multiple overlapping reasons for migration and changes in status over time. This raises the question of what multidimensionality entails exactly in terms of the depth to be pursued when considering the multiple dimensions of a characteristic. This is, of course, a subjective matter. At this point, multidimensionality of characteristics is still in an exploratory phase. As more studies “test” this approach by seeing whether multiple

218    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth measures of a concept return different categorizations, and whether (and if so, how) those different measures connect to outcomes, the width and depth worth considering for key characteristics will become clearer (see, e.g., how specific dimensions of “race” are already becoming more established in race studies; Roth 2016). With an increasing volume of background factors as a multidimensional lens is used, the analysis of their interactions becomes ever-​more complicated, but also more nuanced, which is an exciting avenue for empirical inquiries. Combining this with the challenges of incorporating further spatial and temporal dynamics—which, it has been argued, ought to be taken into consideration (Meissner 2019)—only adds to the complexity of the endeavor. The availability of data based on a sufficiently detailed collection of respondents’ characteristics and a sample size that is large enough to allow for the study of ever-​more-​specific subgroups, as well as the methods refinements these require, will be challenges that researchers need to contend with.

Multidimensionality of Outcomes Although outcomes are not typically a focus of multidimensional research in superdiversity, their use in related literature also raises issues and challenges worth discussing, especially if researchers wanted to venture into the impact of superdiversity on outcomes. Multidimensional outcome patterns become even more interesting when analyzed across diverse subgroups, as superdiversity (and intersectionality) would suggest. Following this line of investigation, Lessard-​Phillips (2017), for example, finds differences in multidimensional adaptation patterns among subgroups defined by the intersection of ethnic background and generational status. Zuccotti (2015) finds differences in the link between educational and occupational attainment across groups defined by different combinations of ethnic and parental class background. The nuanced insights provided by these types of studies confirm that, though methodologically complex and potentially data-​hungry, further research along these lines will be well worth the effort. There is the question of how wide a net we should cast when seeking a multidimensional examination of outcomes: How many dimensions, and how many indicators within each dimension? Regarding the former, the topical scope in migrant integration studies, for example, has yet to reach a cap, and recent studies have considered an increasingly wide range of outcomes. There is also the question of how to delineate dimensions whose indicators often may be related or overlap. In this regard, factor analysis can be a useful method for analyzing the relationship between outcomes and deducting the number (and content) of distinct dimensions accordingly; whereas cluster analysis can allow us to see how individuals group along certain dimensions of integration (Bean et al. 2012; Lessard-​Phillips 2017). Yet when thinking about these types of analyses, the issue remains of how the values of individual indicators are determined because indicators are needed but can also recreate normative assumptions about constitutes “successful” or “positive” outcomes; as discussed earlier, this may be problematic.

Multidimensionality and Superdiversity    219 It is important to note that a multidimensional approach to outcomes is based on the recognition of the possibility that the outcomes in question may develop at least somewhat independently from one another but also simultaneously. Indeed, if we could safely assume a simultaneous, hand-​in-​hand, linear development of all relevant dimensions, then measuring a single aspect would suffice. With multidimensional phenomena, however, this is not the case—​even if the dimensions may and, in all likelihood, will still be related to one another. Implicitly, the multidimensional nature of a concept thus also tells us something about the interconnectedness of its dimensions; the relative importance of the domains, and the way to deal with this empirically. The analysis of this interrelatedness among dimensions, which is at the heart of hypothesized mechanisms of migrant integration, for example, along with how dimensions and indicators are selected, constitute an empirical challenge with key implications for theory (or a theoretical challenge with key implications for empirical work!).

Conclusion and the Way Forward In this chapter, our aim was to explore the concept of multidimensionality within the superdiversity literature, highlighting its use and links to related literature and, drawing on this, to discuss some ways of empirically dealing with quantitative methods. Given that this topic remains relatively unexplored, we view this contribution as a thought experiment. Our key takeaways may be summarized as follows: First, in regard to our examination of the different definitions and conceptualizations of multidimensionality, we note that multidimensionality may be observed from three different vantage points: intersectionality, fault lines, and multiplexity (see Liu et al. 2018, 200). We also note that multidimensionality entails more than simply the existence of several aspects; rather, it refers to a complexity of structure, as well—​much in the way that superdiversity does not simply mean “more diversity” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015). In reviewing varying notions of multidimensionality from different fields, we note two main ways of conceptualizing multidimensionality: as a feature of background characteristics or a feature of the outcome examined (or, in terms of quantitative analysis, multidimensionality on the independent variable side or the dependent variable side). Although the outcomes approach is common in the longer-​established multidimensional approaches of the social-​exclusion literature and most migrant integration literature, the superdiversity literature, so far, seems to focus on the multidimensionality of background characteristics (such as legal status, ethnic background, etc.). That said, we also note some studies that have examined superdiversity as a multidimensional outcome per se, manifesting in different arenas, an intriguing avenue of research. Moving to the practical applications of multidimensional perspectives (from a quantitative perspective), we highlight potential methods such as subgroup analysis, the analysis of interaction effects, and factor analysis and the related methodological challenges, including operationalization, benchmarking, interpretation, and

220    Laurence Lessard-Phillips and Veronika Fajth data availability. These challenges are not unsurmountable but need nonetheless to be reckoned with by researchers who wish to substantially engage with multidimensionality in a quantitative empirical manner. Notable conceptual and methodological challenges notwithstanding, the notion of multidimensional quantitative empirical research presents an exciting—​and necessary—​avenue of future inquiry for superdiversity and related scholarship.

Notes 1. Here we are using the current terminology with the European literature despite known and contested issues with the concept and related debates (see, for example, the argument made by Schinkel [2018]), and the responses it generated: Meissner [2019]; Hadj Abdou [2019]; Favell [2019]) for a re-​emerging debate on the issue (Heine and Oltmanns 2016), which we do not engage with here. 2. Note that we see that qualitative research methods, by their very nature, lend themselves more “easily” to the empirical representation of multidimensionality and the embeddedness of context, and the complexities that emerge from this. In this chapter, we thus emphasize the implications and challenges of representing multidimensionality in quantitative analyses. 3. As also discussed later on, we find it meaningful to differentiate between approaches that concern (using a more quantitatively oriented language) multidimensionality in “X” (background characteristics/​independent variables) versus multidimensionality in “Y” (outcomes/​dependent variables). 4. Although the implications of this still to be developed. 5. Note that the connection between policy and actual integration outcomes is in itself a topic of contention (Bilgili, Huddleston, and Joki 2015). The multidimensionality of policy interventions thus may be different than that of integration outcomes, which may well lead to different multidimensional frameworks. 6. But not empiricist and only data-​ driven, as it is influenced by existing theoretical frameworks.

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Chapter 15

Innovation in t h e St u dy of Su perdi v e rsi t y Methodology, Methods, and Approaches Rosalyn Negrón

Introduction: Complexity Thinking and Methodological Innovation Vertovec (2020), Blommaert (2015), and others challenge scholars to think in terms of complexity when studying superdiversity. The study of superdiversity encompasses a range of research questions to describe and explain the social organization of difference in complex urban settings. Henceforth, I will use the term urban social complexity as shorthand for this sort of research. Complexity thinking is surely important for developing research questions and conceptual frameworks. But when it comes to empirical study, complexity thinking meets the limits of human senses and cognitive processing. How do we translate complexity thinking into research practice? The answer is innovative methods. I will first provide a framework for thinking about methodological innovation in the study of complex social environments in urban settings. I then outline innovative methods to meet the challenges of such research. There are at least three ways in which we can understand what makes methods innovative: (1) a method is new/​emerging and not in wide use; (2) a method is an adaptation of an existing method; and (3) a method is widely practiced in other fields but seldom applied to examine superdiversity (Wiles et al. 2011). New methods emerge because new technologies make them possible. For example, as with smartphones before them, the use of sensors has grown in social research as the technology has become smaller and more robust, accurate, and wearable. Indeed, the use of sensors to map people’s movement across both small-​and large-​scale spaces is an important innovation in urban mobility studies (Kostakos et al. 2010; Noulas et al.

226   Rosalyn Negrón 2012). Such tools make it possible to visualize whether daily interactions are constrained to particular localities—​for example, to examine how patterns of daily work mobility overlays onto residential segregation. For transnational analyses, Facebook apps sending geolocated pings at regular intervals can “sense” when a person has left one country and arrived in another (Metaxa-​Kakavouli et al. 2018). Yet despite their promise, mobility sensor data cannot in a fine-​grained way tell you what people do, where they are, or the nature of their interactions—​unless their activity is recorded in some way by a person’s app use. Sensor data also raise ethical questions related to tracking and surveillance. In terms of adapting existing methods, we see this with the variations on ethnographic methods (e.g., autoethnography, visual ethnography, virtual ethnography) throughout the social sciences, including migration studies (Darvin and Norton 2014; Mai 2018; Schrooten 2012). Conventional ethnographic methods such as participant observation have been adapted to the study of complex social environments, with shadowing (Trouille and Tavory 2019; Negrón 2011, 2012), walk-​alongs (Warren 2017), and the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in studies of urban space (Verd and Porcel 2012). Social network analysis (SNA) is another set of long-​standing methods adapted to describe urban social complexity. The field has been around since the 1930s, but advances in computation have made visualization of the complex data about individuals and their contacts easy. This allows participatory discovery with the interviewee about their social environment, diminishing the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative that hamper methodological innovation in the social sciences. SNA also illustrates the third way to talk about innovative methods—​when a method that is widely used in one field is applied in novel ways to diversity. I find it useful to think in terms of boundary objects and boundary concepts. Diversity is a boundary concept that is ambiguous but subject to common-​sense understandings. These understandings facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges from which new applications for old methods can arise. Diversity is a boundary concept in social science fields such as sociology, linguistics, anthropology, geography, and political science. But it is also a concept in biology and related transciences such as ecology and genetics. The diversity index (Blau 1977; Kolo 2012) is another method that has long been in use in sociology that originated elsewhere. The diversity index operationalizes diversity as the even distribution of cases in a dataset across a set of categories (e.g., ethnoracial categories). Skewed distributions signal greater homogeneity. Applied to the study of urban social complexity, the diversity index depends on being able to collect or have access to quantitative data about populations and categorical distributions.

Methodological Innovation through Transdisciplinarity The transdisciplinary turn in fields such as environmental science, public health, and the arts offers inspiration for grappling with urban social complexity. Of central importance to transdisciplinarity (TD) is the integration of knowledge from nonacademic

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    227 stakeholders who are very close to the issues or problems of concern. TD’s participatory stakeholder engagement further benefits the study of superdiversity through an explicit attention to power, injustice, and the desires and futures that community members in complex urban environments imagine for themselves. On a continuum of disciplinary integration, TD occupies the end of the spectrum where the highest levels of integration happen. A fully realized TD approach would result in the creation of new ideas, modes of thinking, concepts, and/​or methods. This applies to the TD work being done by a lone researcher and to team research, and the level of integration is such that the knowledge produced goes beyond each of the disciplines. One of the hallmarks of TD research is its openness to experimentation (provided it is done rigorously and purposefully, not haphazardly) and the flexibility that it engenders in researchers and infuses into the research process. Through an iterative process, new insights are taken from the initial data collection. These insights lead to reworked approaches or new methods that are responsive to emerging findings and needs. Although the Global Diversities project was not entirely a TD project, in important ways, (Vertovec 2015) it had multiple elements of TD in its design. The project unfolded at each site through collaboration between researchers bringing different types of expertise. In a series of structured workshops and meetings, teams at each site and between sites discussed study findings and insights to facilitate knowledge sharing and the emergence of unique insights through colearning. The project pulled from different methods (ethnographic, geospatial, visual), in recognition of the multidimensional, multisensorial, and multiscalar nature of highly differentiated and complex urban communities. Thus while the methods themselves were traditional within the social sciences, how they were brought together to meet the complexity of the empirical context was innovative. The result is that TD approaches push the boundaries of methodological innovation ever closer to integrating all human knowledge (the highest order of complexity). One particularly generative insight from TD studies is that of the included middle, which has practical implications for social complexity studies. Knowledge integration across disciplines is hampered by seemingly incommensurable perspectives, whether they are ontological, epistemological, or axiological, and by seemingly contradictory facts, among other things. Nicolescu (1999) and others developed the included middle idea as a way to think beyond contradiction and binary thinking. Crucial to the idea of the included middle is understanding the world in terms of levels of reality. As Nicolescu argues, two incommensurable elements existing at one level of reality are no longer contradictory and may even be complementary when researchers introduce another level of reality. Beyond making new perspective taking across levels possible, methods can also make multiple levels of reality accessible to researchers. The included middle idea is grounded in theories from quantum physics in which levels of reality run the gamut from the quantum to the planetary level. Along these lines, Max-​Neef (2005) organizes levels of reality in terms of sets of questions: (1) What exists? (e.g., empirical

228   Rosalyn Negrón research); (2) what are we capable of doing? (e.g., pragmatic studies such as architecture); (3) what do we want to do? (e.g., norms); and (4) how should we do what we want to do (e.g., values and ethics)? The result of efforts to answer these questions may include understandings that we gain through emotional resonance, spiritual reflection, or empirical investigation. Seeing the possibilities of holding multiple levels as potentially analytically fruitful opens up methodological options. Accordingly, a study project could bring together knowledge and understanding from the arts, the sciences, and philosophy. When TD’s included middle approach is applied to superdiversity studies, the potential for innovative research design is boundless, in ways that go beyond questions about what methods to use. For example, a project on the “music of superdiversity”—​ with music and artistic expression as the level of reality—​holds promise for bridging what Vertovec (2021) refers to as configurations, representations, and encounters (see Martiniello 2015). Taking music as a point of entry taps into the social formations that make new and hybrid expressive forms possible. Artistic collaborations can reveal new levels for understanding structure and agency in highly diverse places, how music engages with or resists discourses that are circulating in society, and the encounters these artistic and expressive forms make possible in public and intimate space. Finally, such an approach would access an affective level of reality for understanding social complexity, both concerning embodied emotional experiences invoked by music, and as a way to understand the multiple ways of life in superdiverse cities. Such a study could integrate ethnographic methods with arts-​based methods for coming to terms with the expressive and affective levels of reality, as well as quantitative data and community-​ or population-​level analysis to describe the multiplicity of actors, and categories interacting in a given locale. As this example suggests, applying a TD lens to questions of research practice centers on the “innovative researcher” (Liamputtong 2019). For example, doing fieldwork where multiple axes of diversity are densely written into multiple domains of public life—​of the kind that engage the five senses—​places unique demands on the researcher, who must negotiate various roles and engage with multiple analytical dimensions (see Rhys-​Taylor 2013). Indeed, in my own ethnographic research in superdiverse Queens, New York, I became aware of how the task of observing and describing diversity had impacted my cognition, behavior, and understanding of myself. Observation sharpened my sensitivity to continuity, change, and complexity—​ even in the most quotidian experiences. This sensitization has several benefits for researcher in terms of proficiency and creativity, which are key to iterative processes of methodological innovation.

Why Innovate? Now that I’ve run through some possible whats and hows of innovation, let’s consider the why. Although I love the flights of methodologically creative fancy, the whole point

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    229 of innovation in methods is that our research questions are not encumbered by methodological limitations. If we don’t yet have the tools we need to study the things we want to study in the ways they should be studied, then, by all means, let’s have methodological innovation please, and more of it. However, conventional methods may be just what we need to answer many interesting questions in the study of superdiversity—​indeed, hundreds of studies have demonstrated that this is so (Vertovec 2019). What makes participant observation and interviewing so effective and so widely used is that they are templates, customizable tools that can reliably get the information we need. These methods are also effective in the study of urban social complexity because they are just more self-​aware, systematic, and theoretically informed versions of activities we do daily: observe our surroundings, watch what people do, engage in conversation, and so on. As such, they are minimally invasive means of studying the quotidian, a relevant concern in the study of encounters in complex social environments. For example, simple ethnographic observation is perfectly suitable for capturing the unpredictable and surprising. Spending long stretches of time observing everyday social scenes increases the chances of witnessing the unexpected. This is exactly how things played out when I did fieldwork in Queens: I was able to “catch people in the act” of switching their ethnic identification (Negrón 2007). Some of the most compelling cases of ethnic identity invocation happened where, theoretically, ethnicity should be the least salient—​not in cultural festivals and ethnic food markets, but in cell-​phone stores, during classroom activities, and in breaktimes at work. The point of innovation is to advance the goal of “developing a language through which contemporary superdiversity in the world can be described, conceptualized, understood, explained and researched” (Beck 2011, 53). Further, methodological innovation can help address critiques of superdiversity. First, critiques of the superdiversity concept may in some ways be addressed through sound, theoretically grounded, research practice. Meissner (2015) and Vertovec (2019) point out that few studies actually offer clear descriptions of how the superdiversity concept is used and how one might know that it exists in a given empirical case. Horvath and Latcheva (2019) talk about this in relation to validity in mixed methods research—​and the importance of justifying analytical categories. Other critiques call out researchers who deploy the superdiversity concept for ahistorical theorizing, inattention to power, especially in the context of neoliberal global forces, and for reifying categories of difference (Aptekar 2019; Flores and Lewis 2016; Pavlenko 2018; Piller 2016). These critiques of superdiversity point to areas that are ripe for innovation. For example, the “superdiversity as ahistorical” critique offers the potential for innovation using comparative or historical methods or both—​which are not widely used in studies of superdiversity—​coupled with urban ethnography of present-​day superdiverse communities (De Bock 2014). As I mentioned above, the ethical and committed adoption of participatory research practices can help address critiques about inattention to power in the study of superdiversity (Goodson and Grzymala-​Kazlowska 2017). Methodological innovation is not always necessary or desirable. When studying superdiversity, there might be a predilection toward innovation that may complicate

230   Rosalyn Negrón attempts to nail down the what of superdiversity, and a tendency for research to be driven by methods rather than research questions. There is nothing wrong with the use of standard methods such as surveys, interviews, and participant observation. Surveys can work quite well for capturing data at multiple time points, along with context data (e.g., spatial context) and then using multilevel modeling for studying change over time (Estrada-​Martínez et al. 2017, 2019; Lee and Estrada-​Martínez 2020; Wegener et al. 1986).

Innovative Methods for Studying Urban Social Complexity In the preceding discussion, I showed that there are different ways to think about methods innovation to describe and explain urban social complexity. We can apply old methods in novel ways, borrow from seemingly incompatible disciplines, or devise innovative research designs. Here, I discuss cutting-​edge methods that hold promise for the study of social complexity. Some of these are already in use to study superdiversity (e.g., data visualization); others have not yet caught on. I begin by laying out features of complexity that have special relevance for the study of urban social complexity (Vertovec 2020): 1. Multiplicity of agents or variables 2. Diversity in agents’ or variables’ characteristics 3. Interdependence of agents and variables 4. High outcome-​contingency 5. Unpredictable, nonlinear, multicausal trajectories 6. Emergent conditions, systems, and dynamics 7. Self-​organizing dynamical systems I provide examples of methods that can be used to exemplify each of these aspects of complexity. Table 15.1 presents each of the traits, along with applicable methods. I have organized these into categories, but many of these methods can be used across the features of complexity.

Multiplicity of Agents or Variables Handling a multiplicity of agents or variables creates challenges for the selection of units of analysis and for sampling and tracking the interaction of those units. These challenges can also depend on a project’s scales of analysis. It is easier to grapple with a multiplicity of agents through direct data collection at the neighborhood block level

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    231 Table 15.1. Innovative Methods for Studying Urban Social Complexity Data Analysis

Spanning Collection & Analysis

Complexity Trait

Data Collection

1. Multiplicity of agents or variables

Spot observations

Cultural domain analysis

Bernard 2017)

Dengah et al. (2020)

Rogoff (1978) Ruel and Arimond (2002)

Principle components analysis /​factor analysis Abdi and Williams (2010)

2. Diversity in agents’ or variables’ characteristics

Citizen science -​ Sociolinguistics

Structural equation modeling

Agostini et. al. (2019)

Liu et al. (2013)

Rymes and Leone (2014) Svendsen (2018) Ethno-​race ID open response in demographic surveys Aspinall (2012) Factorial surveys Rossi and Nock (1982) Negrón (2007) Multiple ethno-​ race ID category ranking Negrón (2007) 3. Interdependence of agents and variables

Multimodal /​sensorial research Dicks et al. (2006) Pink (2015) Sparkes (2009) Transethnography Hall (2015)

(continued)

232   Rosalyn Negrón Table 15.1. Continued Complexity Trait

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Spanning Collection & Analysis Multimodal visualization Vertovec et.al. (2018)

Agent-​based modeling

4. High outcome-​ contingency

Edmonds et al. (2020) Lemos et al. (2020) Structural Equation Modeling Liu et al. (2013) Microsimulation models Bélanger et al. (2019) 5. Unpredictable, nonlinear, multicausal trajectories

Shadowing ethnography Negrón (2011) Trouille and Tavory (2019)

Process-​tracing Beach and Pedersen (2019) Checkel (2008)

6. Emergent conditions, systems, and dynamics

Sensors Agent-​based modeling Kostakos, Edmonds et al. (2020) et. al. (2010) Lemos, et al. (2020) Noulas, et. al. (2012) Big data–​ Social media Arnaboldi et al. (2016) Multisensorial mapping Powell (2010)

Egocentric and socio-​centric network analysis Meissner (2016) Negrón (2011, 2014)

Longitudinal or dynamic social network analysis Lubbers et al. (2010) Meeussen, et. al. (2018) Ryan and D’Angelo (2018)

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    233 Table 15.1. Continued Complexity Trait 7. Self-​organizing dynamical systems

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Spanning Collection & Analysis

Agent-​based modeling Edmonds et al. (2020) Lemos, et al. (2020)

than it is at the city level, for example, where large-​scale population level surveys are common. At lower scales, traditional ethnographic methods have been used with good effect to study a multiplicity of agents (i.e., people). But there are innovative directions in which to take ethnographic research. Spot sampling or observation (Bernard 2017; Rogoff 1978; Ruel and Arimond 2002) is a variation on traditional ethnographic observation that has novel applications for urban social complexity. Spot observations marry ethnographic granularity with the potential to directly observe large numbers of people. These brief but detailed observations involve randomly selecting points when people are doing an activity of interest and then recording (often with a structured questionnaire and field notes) details about their behavior and characteristics. This method works in many different locations, including public spaces and households. Both large surveys and spot observation can capture as much multiplicity as possible in complex social environments. But numbers alone aren’t what makes a multiplicity of agents or variables relevant for studying complex social environments. Often, what we really want to understand, and what is more challenging, are the relationships and interactions among large numbers of people, and for that we need methods that do not yield simplistic categorizations. Some of the categories most used in diversity research, such a nationality, stand in for a few different things, such as culture and immigrant status. Because nationality and other identity categories are made to do so much (Brubaker and Cooper 2000), we need methods that can help us test our assumptions about the categories we use to understand large, diverse groups. One set of methods seldomly applied in urban diversity research is cultural domain analysis (CDA), a sociocognitive approach for studying cultural variation (Dengah et al., 2020). CDA methods are simple yet powerful ways to better understand the extent to which groups of people who are assumed to be members of the same group actually perceive (socially construct) the world in the same way. The assumption is that these views guide, often tacitly, everyday social practice.

234   Rosalyn Negrón

Diversity in Agents’ or Variables’ Characteristics So far, I have touched primarily on agent multiplicity. Analyzing variable multiplicity requires methods for assessing multidimensionality and facilitating data reduction and aggregation. Principal components analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA) are standard, yet underused methods in urban social complexity research to identify a subset of variables that contain as much of the information in the larger set of variables (see also Lessard Phillips and Faith, this volume). PCA and FA have been used, for example, to develop socioeconomic indices (Kolenikov and Angeles 2009) and can be used to better come to terms with—​in a given local, state, or national context—​the many variables that Vertovec (2007) cited in his original call to understand superdiversity: ethnicities, countries of origin, immigrant statuses, labor market positions, gender, age, patterns of spatial distribution, and so on. Importantly, the methods for collecting the data required in these analyses can make the research participants full collaborators in marking the aspects of their identities, characteristics, and experiences that they think are relevant for their everyday life and interactions. Citizen science is an approach where the public voluntarily participates in the research process. The participation can include generating research questions, collecting and analyzing data, developing new technologies, techniques, and approaches, or problem-​solving. The Internet has facilitated each of these ways by providing crowdsourcing platforms and communication pathways that integrate contributions from many participants at local, national, and global levels. Citizen science projects often entail two layers of data collection. One layer deploys local, nonscientist participants who gather information on the ground. On the other layer, the findings from these efforts can be fed into scientific research plans, by highlighting target areas that scientists then visit using state-​of-​the-​art tools to get finer-​grained readings of an identified site. One particularly promising innovation in citizen science is its use in sociolinguistic research. Here, research participants are given recorders and tasked with capturing spontaneous speech. Spontaneity is particularly useful for studying the nonlinear, unpredictable nature of complex social phenomena, events, actions, and processes in everyday life over days and weeks (Agostini et al. 2019). This method can be used to capture the many small instances of linguistic, discursive, and relational practices that surround one individual—​and therefore allow the researcher to come to terms with individual complexity. Similarly, rather than relying on categories of identity such as those used in census questionnaires, collecting open-​ended responses about ethnic and racial identification (Aspinall 2012) and having people rank these categories gives research participants more say in defining the multiple categories of identification that are relevant to them. Factorial surveys (Rossi and Nock 1982; Wallander 2009) take this further by asking participants to (1) list the ethnoracial identifications that are relevant to them; and then

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    235 (2) through responses to many different vignettes, to provide data on how those multiple ethnic identifications are used across contexts (Negrón 2007).

Multimodal research exposes the interdependency of agents/​variables We can talk about multimodal research in two ways. First, there is multimodality that can be understood in terms of mixed methods research where, for example, an ethnographer has collected different types of data looking at different dimensions of social life and then does an integrative analysis pulling in these different types of data to develop a holistic picture (Dicks et al. 2006). Hall (2015), for example, used a range of methods, including ethnographic observation, photography, drawings, and film, to capture the intense ethnic diversity on a street in Peckham, south London, where immigrant businesses were packed together. Hall and her team used this mixed-​methods approach to facilitate transethnography that looked across micro-​, meso-​, and macrolevels to get at both hidden and overt manifestations of superdiversity. At the macrolevel, Hall used large demographic datasets to visualize the distribution of immigrants within London. At the mesolevel of the “collective city,” Hall focused on the day-​to-​day practices at the scale of the city street where immigrants’ shops were located, using face-​to-​face surveys and mappings. And at the microlevel, Hall examined shop interests through mappings, interviews, and observations to get at the intimate, more hidden, mutual forms of cultural and economic exchange and cooperation. Hall’s bridging across these levels is an apt way to look at the interrelationship and interdependency between global, municipal, neighborhood, and microsocial scales. In this way, we can examine the interdependencies of daily talk (e.g., the audio recording of naturally occurring conversation), societal discourse (e.g., documenting comments made in online forums), physical space (e.g., taking photographs of shops, parks, and households), aesthetic visuals (e.g., putting artistic representations of diversity themes for viewing in public places), and other dimensions, including music and objects. We can also talk about multimodal in a more sensorial sense (Pink 2015; Sparkes 2009), so that the focus is on the researcher or analyst as an instrument capturing as many multisensorial details of complex social environments where the researcher and research participants are present as possible. This embodied form of research can employ the entire body and potentially deploy its power in perceiving complexity and helping make sense of it. This complex suite of sensing and knowing bodily tools can, unexpectedly, match the complexity present in social environments. At larger scales, where quantitative data are collected in answer to the challenges of analyzing a multiplicity of agents and variables interacting within a large neighborhood or a city, multimodal visualization makes it possible for the human eye to see and interact with multiple agents and variables. Multimodal visualization facilitates seeing, but hands-​on learning also trains the analyst’s ability to work with complexity.

236   Rosalyn Negrón

High Outcome-​Contingency and Unpredictable, Nonlinear, Multicausal Trajectories When the many possible outcomes in a complex social interaction are dependent on as yet unseen or inactivated actions or behaviors, it is difficult to predict outcomes. This poses problems in urban planning and policy development (Vertovec 2020), but here I bring attention to how this may play out in the context of local interactions that the researcher may observe. Shadowing (Trouille and Tavory 2019) is one way to be present for continuous stretches of time to observe unpredictable behaviors in action. It requires the presence, often participation, and patience of the researcher and the research participant, whose actions, movements, and interactions, and utterances are tracked closely. This is the idea of being ready and prepared to catch unpredictability as it unfolds. Process tracing, in contrast, is a post-​hoc method for understanding the series of steps, events, agents, discourses, and interactions that unfolded and led to an (unpredictable) event (Collier 2011). Frequently used in political science and international relations, process tracing involves collecting and describing evidence about a sequence of events for a given case to carefully reconstruct causal mechanisms. Through a process that takes the researcher through each step, the analyst describes each point in a sequence to characterize the change that emerged from a prior step or point in the sequence. Process tracing builds on understandings about social phenomena that help organize the analysis, including conceptual frameworks, “recurring empirical regularities,” and theories (Collier 2011, 824) that push the researcher’s understanding of complex phenomena, and it demands reflection, reasoning, and an exploratory mindset to develop a coherent model for why events unfolded as they did and yielded the outcomes that they did. Ethnographers will find that their skills transfer to this method well. Agent-​based modeling (ABM) is frequently cited as a key tool in complexity studies (Edmonds et al. 2020; Lemos et al. 2020). It is appropriate for studying contingency, unpredictability, interdependencies, emergence, and self-​organization in complex systems and is thus well suited to studies of superdiversity. ABM can also be used to understand the relationship between broader, overarching scales and the microcharacteristics and behaviors of agents in a system. Once the parameters, traits, and behaviors of agents in a model are established, ABM simulates actors, their actions, interactions, and the sequence of events that unfold dynamically. Multiple traits can be assigned to actors, to capture intra-​agent diversity. Typically, these simulations are visualized to facilitate observation and to complement the statistical models that are outputs of agent-​based models. Emergent patterns, discussed next, can be traced back to factors in the model. Structural equation modeling (SEM) enables a systematic, theory-​ driven analysis of multicausal phenomena—​such as complex systems where multiple outcomes are possible and one set of outcomes can lead to additional outcomes. For example, my research team and I used SEM to study multicultural identity complexity in multiethnic students in Boston, Massachusetts. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, we

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    237 developed a questionnaire with twenty-​one items—​personal traits and behaviors—​that characterized multicultural identity complexity and then used SEM to confirm the fit of our model. The challenge with SEMs is multicollinearity, or correlation between causal variables. For example, predicting the labor market positions of newly arrived immigrants in cities such as New York and London may include causal variables such as social ties, occupational background, neighborhood of settlement, gender, and age, among many others. However, social ties and neighborhood of settlement may be highly correlated, making it difficult to determine which is a more important predictor of future labor market position. Causal variables like social ties are often measured through variables like family ties and co-​ethnic ties, which, in turn, may be highly correlated. Nevertheless, because SEM is a confirmatory statistical tool, the researcher must specify a full model of hypothesized relationships beforehand. This benefits the study of social complexity by demanding that the researcher specify model parameters, account for all relevant dimensions of a complex construct, and specify relationships. In this way, constructing SEMs sharpens researchers’ thinking by checking assumptions, fully developing conceptual frameworks, and coming to terms with complex social phenomena.

Emergent Conditions, Systems, and Dynamic Self-​Organizing Systems Most of the methods discussed in the previous section assume a certain determinism—​ interactions among variables or agents that lead to direct or indirect effects. However, complex systems give rise to emergent conditions that cannot be traced to specific interactions or sequence of events. Emergent conditions, systems, dynamics, and behaviors are new patterns that are unplanned and uncontrolled in any centralized way yet are ordered and self-​organized. Spontaneous, collective behaviors, such as decentralized mass protest movements, are examples of emergent behavior. An emergent entity has properties that the constituent parts of its source system do not have. As such, emergence and self-​organization are perhaps among the most challenging patterns to analyze. This can vary depending on the research question. Research questions concerned with describing emergent conditions, systems, dynamics, and behaviors are perhaps the easiest to get a handle on, as long as such description does not hinge on being able to characterize how or why the pattern emerged. Descriptions can also depend on the emergent condition being sufficiently lasting to enable observation. Emergent neighborhood formations in superdiverse cities are perhaps one example of a lasting condition that can be described over the long term. On the other hand, research questions aimed at understanding the organizing principles that lead to emergence, say, in complex social environments are as challenging as they are exciting. Some tools are particularly well suited to the study of emergence—​such as agent-​ based modeling—​however, the methods I include here are considered in the spirit of

238   Rosalyn Negrón exploration. Most of them are tools for studying emergent social network structures, which is of special relevance to the study of cross-​ethnoracial relations in complex urban environments. Here, longitudinal or dynamic social networks analysis and the mixed methods analysis of personal social networks have been fruitful for studying transnational social ties, multiethnic social networks, and the dynamics of preferential attachment in social networks (Avin et al. 2020; Herz 2015; Lubbers et al. 2010; Meeussen, et. al. 2018; Meissner 2016; Negrón 2011, 2014; Ryan and D’Angelo 2018). Another idea motivating my selection of some of the methods used here has to do with putting the researcher at ground zero for the emergence of patterns. For example, wearable sensors that track movements can be used to assess social network structures that emerge from face-​to-​face contact in public gatherings (Kestens et al. 2016; Kostakos et al. 2010). Other sensors, such as smartphones collecting geocoded data, have been used to study large-​scale urban mobility patterns, facilitating the comparison of such patterns in different cites (Noulas 2013; Noulas et al. 2012). Other options for studying emergence in large-​scale systems is the use of geotagged big data, such as from Facebook and Twitter (Arnaboldi et al. 2016), which enable pulling geo-​delimited data to focus analysis by nation, city, and even neighborhood. But, though big data are widely used to model emergent group behavior on massive scales, they are rife with platform-​specific biases that can obscure or distort data on human behavior (Ruths and Pfeffer 2014). Taking us beyond big, quantitative data, I end on a final note about the innovative use of qualitative data for understanding emergence. Philosophers and artists remind us of the emergent properties of artwork, as a “dynamic sequence of instances of a creative process which continuously evolves” (Annunziato and Pierucci, n.d.). Annunziato and Pierucci (2002) have used participatory art to explore and visualize emerging social structures. Using qualitative methods, Powell (2010) also drew on evocative arts-​based methods, along with multisensory ethnography, design, and planning to produce maps of a Panamanian neighborhood. Powell’s research suggests that, in contrast to space, place may be studied as an emergent condition.

Conclusion The move toward thinking in terms of complexities that is now stimulating the study of superdiversity parallels developments in other areas throughout the natural and social sciences, and even the arts and humanities. Indeed, the move toward inter-​and transdisciplinarity, when looked at historically, is a move away from hyperspecialization—​the compartmentalizing of human knowledge to better be able to understand it—​and toward an integrationist stance that helps us understand the connections across different fields. This integrationist movement calls for greater cooperation and collaboration between and among researchers. We know that no single study can capture all the complexity in a given urban context. The broader methodological question is: How do we get different people who are looking at diversification in a

Innovation in the Study of Superdiversity    239 complex way to talk to each other, learn from each other, build on each other’s work, and develop joint projects? Such a project would mean developing a shared language. This is challenged by ambiguities in the way superdiversity is defined (Vertovec 2019), but those very ambiguities have the potential to animate vigorous interdisciplinary debate. In addition to developing a common language in the study of urban social complexity, I argue strongly for developing methodological versatility and rejecting simplistic notions about qualitative versus quantitative data. Here, I have provided examples of the many tools that are at our disposal for studying complex social environments at multiple scales. Clearly, many existing innovative methods are suitable for exploring the range of questions covered in this handbook. I also have given a sense that superdiversity is exciting for methodologists because of the ways it is fertile ground for methodological innovation. Technological advancements will continue to be key for methodological innovation. Many of the available methods for studying social complexity are computationally intensive. Not everyone is schooled in these tools, which, again, makes the case for team-​ based research on superdiversity. Nevertheless, though the study of social complexity often leans on computationally intensive methods, it remains important to develop tools and approaches that are widely accessible.

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Pa rt I I I

SPAC E S A N D S C A L E S

Chapter 16

Migrat i on, Superdiversi t y, a nd Enc ounters of t h e Intimate K i nd i n Home-​S pac e s Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Introduction: Home-​Spaces as Sites of Superdiversity In recent decades, migration scholars have expressed “growing discontent with culturally and ethnically essentializing discourses of multiculturalist frameworks” and turned instead to migration and (super)diversity frameworks to capture the complexity of migrant-​citizen coexistence and interaction (Biehl 2015, 596). In his recent reflection on the expanding universe of superdiversity, Vertovec (2019, 135) argues that the term gains traction as a result of the diversifying force of global migrations and the “increasing and intensifying complexities in social dynamics and configurations at neighborhood, city, national and global levels.” The smallest scale mentioned here is the neighborhood, obviating consideration of an even lower level spatial scale—​that of the home. This is not surprising. Much of the literature that has drawn on the concept of superdiversity is focused on the “urban” as a space that assembles and generates difference (Isin 2002). Themes such as “micro-​publics of everyday life, cosmopolitanism hospitality, and new urban citizenship” have predominantly been explored in the urban context (Valentine 2008, 323; Yeoh and Lin 2012), and a growing list of case studies are centered on public spaces such as neighborhoods (Wessendorf 2013), streets (Leitner 2012; Hall 2015), community centers (Matejskova and Leitner 2011), shops (Everts 2010), cafés (Laurier and

248    Brenda S. A. Yeoh Philo 2006), trains (Bissell 2010), and buses (Wilson 2011). Contemporary migration is hence seen as a compelling force creating superdiverse cities and urban places, generating identity struggles and group claims-​making along intersecting axes of differentiation. This chapter argues that to stop at the neighborhood scale is premature, and that there is much scope to broaden consideration to encompass the interrelated threads of migration, diversification and the politics of encounter in the microlevel spaces of the home as privatized space. This chimes with geographers’ insistence of acknowledging the merits of considering all manner of scale—​starting with the “body” and spanning outward to the “global,” or closing in from the “global” to the “body”—​and to rethink the politics of diversity and migrant encounter across a range of public and private spaces. Focusing on the home in interrogating the politics of superdiversity first of all recognizes the fact that accessing housing and making a home feature among the most crucial yet racialized and distressing experiences for newly arrived migrants in the city (Biehl 2015). Highlighting home-​spaces also accords with Nava’s (2006, 2007) work on “domestic cosmopolitanism,” where cosmopolitan practices may emerge from engagement with otherness not just in the public sphere but within the privacy of the home. Yet despite the increasing attention in the migration and diversity literature to “mundane, seemingly unimportant, . . . everyday contact experiences” (Dixon, Durheim, and Tredoux 2005, 703), the home as an unspectacular, ordinary, lived-​in space of daily routines and encounters seems to have slipped through the net. In this light, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the Asian context, this chapter draws attention to the intimate sociabilities of home-​space—​construed as both the physical dwelling place and the meanings and sentiments associated with the space (see Boccagni 2013; this volume)—​as a means of rethinking superdiversity through encounters of care and intimacy. The next section briefly reviews the literature on the geographies of encounter before discussing migration drivers that have led to an increasing diversification of the home as a space of homogeneity, where members are assumed to be unified by race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and class. This is followed by a closer look at the politics of superdiversity in home-​space using the growing literature on live-​in migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants as illustrative examples. The conclusion returns to the question why a deeper understanding of superdiversity should no longer be harnessed to the urban public realm but include considerations of encounters of the intimate kind in the privacy of home-​spaces.

Geographies of Encounter, Global Householding, and the Migration-​ Driven Diversification of Home-​Space Scholars wary of the claims that intercultural contact is the best way to reduce prejudice and increase dialogue and respect between social groups have turned instead to the

Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of Intimate Kind   249 “geographies of encounter,” a growing body of literature that focuses on “how people negotiate difference in their everyday lives” (Wilson 2017, 451). As Wilson (2017, 454) explains, “the concept of encounter has been most frequently used to examine contact where a lack of commonality is assumed or where some form of existing conflict, prejudice or unease is present.” In other words, encounters are profoundly about overcoming some degree of inherent emotional struggle, ranging from anxiety to antagonism, as people grapple with difference, the strange and often the unknown. As a potentially more productive approach to understanding the tenor of “living with difference,” the analytical lens of “encounters” advances at least three lines of argument, which can usefully be applied to home-​spaces. First, some scholars have followed Amin (2002) and Wise (2014) in arguing that we need to move the focus away from theoretical debates about multiculturalism and discussions about multiculturalist policies at the national level because these are often abstracted from real life experiences. Instead, they encourage giving attention to “actually existing multiculturalism” (Uitermark et al. 2005) by observing how ordinary people live with difference and engage with diversity and asymmetries of power to make sense of each other in the microspaces of everyday life. The growing body of academic scholarship on everyday multiculturalism puts the emphasis on the need to examine informal social interactions in the “doing” of multicultural encounters, where “differences are negotiated on the smallest of scales” and often in “unpanicked and routine ways” (Wilson 2011, 635). Encounters in the stream of everyday life are thought to have meaning-​making capacity and redemptive or transformative potential: “meaningful encounters are also about how people come to recognize simultaneous similarity, developing new relations that shift pre-​existing stereotypes through some appreciation or experience of connection or commonality” (Askins 2015, 473). In this light, I would argue that the quotidian quality of the home renders it a ubiquitous and enduring space to investigate meaning-​making in encounters of the intimate kind. Second, scholarship on encounters with difference often goes beyond examining group-​level practices and transactions to emphasize the centrality of the corporeal and the affective in contact spaces. As Wilson (2017, 455, 459) puts it, encounter as a conceptual lens refocuses attention onto “the embodied nature of social distinctions, . . . the unpredictable ways in which similarity and difference are negotiated in the moment, [and] the unspeakable nature of affective experience and [visceral] intensity.” Encounters are powerful meaning-​makers precisely because they are bodily apprehended and experienced through the senses, whether they are more akin to the “rage, incomprehension, and pain” (Pratt 1992, 39) felt in traumatic, exploitative colonial encounters or the empathetic, hopeful moments when the diverse interests of different body-​subjects come together in acts of openness, respect, and solidarity (Inceoglu 2015). The affective domain is crucial to an understanding of spaces of encounter because sensory and visceral intensities often shape the capacity of the body to act in ways that may or may not accord with prevailing social rules. Precisely because of its privatized nature, the home is a space of encounter more likely to be inhabited by unfettered emotions and close embodied interaction away from the regulating effects of social norms and public acceptability.

250    Brenda S. A. Yeoh Third, the encounters lens invites us to engage with different temporal modalities in order to deepen our understanding of the transformative possibilities of (as well as limits to) encounter in spaces of multicultural diversity. While some scholars (Matejskova and Leitner 2011; Valentine and Sadgrove 2012) have privileged “sustained” forms of encounter and questioned the efficacy of the “fleeting” and “ephemeral,” Wilson (2017, 462, 463) notes that “encounters are not free from history and thus whilst the taking-​place of encounters might be momentary, they fold in multiple temporalities . . . [hence making it] possible that encounters accumulate, to gradually shift relations and behavior over time—​to both positive and negative effect.” Hence, there is a need for attentiveness not only to duration but the dynamics—​the rhythms and ruptures—​of encounters that afford (or erase) opportunities for a process of learning and unlearning about the relationship between Self and Other. Encounters that are short-​lived may fold into more routine temporalities, become habitual and hence effect gradual change in disposition; at the same time, encounters that are momentary, sporadic, or unanticipated but ridden with intense emotion may sometimes be powerful enough to leave an indelible mark on the way relationships between different body-​subjects are (co)-​constituted. Both forms of encounter inhabit the spaces of the home, becoming part of routines, rupture, and other temporalities. The utility of the encounters approach to understanding how people live with and negotiate difference and togetherness in a variety of locales has gained ground in recent years. However, despite the ubiquity of home-​spaces as everyday, affective spaces of sustained or sporadic (or both) contact among individuals, domestic geographies of encounter have eluded attention (with some exceptions, such as Yeoh and Huang 2010; Schuermans 2013; Biehl 2015). This lacuna is rooted in the prevailing view of the home as “a safe, private and intimate cocoon where stable identities are formed and reproduced . . . [and] where events are predictable and understandable” (Schuermans 2013, 680). Undergirding this view, the home is usually assumed to be a space of the family, and the family is often treated as constructed by ties of affinity and intimacy rather than incommensurate difference. Feminist scholarship on the home, however, has shown that though the home is often idealized as a space of safety and familiarity, it is also a site of struggle, conflict, and oppression (Brickell 2012). As a space of encounter, the home reflects meaning-​making at the confluence of the everyday and the symbolic, the embodied and the imagined, and the mundanely routinized and the emotionally intense. While the home is invariably seen as integral to an individual’s sense of belonging, scholars note that people who are co-​present within the home are differentially positioned on a range of social coordinates and hence negotiate home-​space differently and relationally (Blunt and Dowling 2006). In the context of Asia particularly, feminist scholars have noted that the family is “the primary unit of regulation and the vehicle of state power” (Ong 1999, 71), where decision-​making is expected to be hierarchical (read “patriarchal”; Stivens 1998). Yet training a “geographies of encounter” approach on domestic space can reveal the micropolitics of individual subjects’ agency and claims-​making in a sphere of control and struggle. As a spatial unit linked to “ ‘transnational’ households with new gender

Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of Intimate Kind   251 and citizenship complexities,” the home is a site of power that “exposes the centrality of ‘the private’ ” within the workings of a global economy (Peterson 2010, 280). Attending to the politics of home-​space as a site of engagement and encounter assumes growing salience as home-​ space becomes increasingly diverse as a result of what Douglass (2006) calls global householding strategies. The term “global householding” references the myriad ways in which processes of social reproduction over the life course increasingly occur across national territorial boundaries, as exemplified by cross-​border marriages, international adoption, the importing of migrant domestic and care labor, sending children to be educated overseas, and retirement migration (Douglass 2006; Peterson 2010). As the need to outsource social reproductive work expands in postindustrial societies worldwide, global householding implies the increasing co-​presence of household members who are not necessarily united by blood, affinity, or culture but by economic transaction or material exchange. As a result, contemporary home-​spaces are becoming culturally and ethnically diverse frontiers as key social processes such as family formation, social reproduction, and care provisioning increasingly involve the incorporation of migrant ethnic others into home-​space. In the more developed economies in Asia, for example, the twin phenomena of delayed marriage and rising singlehood among more educated citizen-​women have catalyzed the demand for female marriage migrants from developing countries in the region and given rise to mixed-​status, cross-​nationality families (Jones and Shen 2008; Cheng and Choo 2015). In the same vein, plummeting fertility rates and rising elderly dependency ratios have led to increasing reliance on migrant labor, usually feminized, to plug care deficits within the family (Fong and Yeoh 2020). In other words, in response to an international (but gendered) division of household labor, the rise of global care chain migration has rendered the family a complex social formation that is increasingly diversified, composite, layered, and unequal (Sigona, cited in in Vertovec 2019). In Asia, migrant-​led diversification of home-​space as part of the changing ethnoscape has penetrated even societies that traditionally perceive themselves as racially homogeneous. Feminized streams of both marriage migration and care labor migration have been particularly consequential in changing the complexion of the home. Research in the last two decades has pointed to the growth of female marriage migration in the region, following the social norms of “transnational hypergamy” wherein women from poorer Southeast Asian countries migrate to marry men from richer economies such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan (Piper 2003; Wang and Belanger 2008; Toyota and Thang 2012; Kim 2013; Chee et al. 2012). Also in recent decades, the cross-​ border transfer of female reproductive labor from poorer labor-​surplus countries to middle-​and upper-​class households in the more affluent countries as part of the global care chain constitutes a significant force in the diversification of home-​space (Yeoh, Huang, and Cheng 2015). Migrant domestic labor—​of the paid and unpaid varieties—​ has almost universally been identified as a site of multiple exploitations by gender, class, race/​ethnicity, and nationality, and Asia is no exception (Yeoh et al. 2020). Incorporated into home-​space, migrant wives and migrant domestic workers navigate the politics of both proximity and difference, as indispensable substitutes for family reproductive

252    Brenda S. A. Yeoh work, on the one hand, and as uncomfortable if not disruptive threats to the ethnocultural integrity of familial relations, on the other (Yeoh and Huang 2010). This echoes Fortier’s (2007, 116) point that anxieties about “multicultural intimacies” are constructed out of ambivalent imaginings of obligations to, as well as dangers of, proximity, where ambivalence is “refracted through articulations of ‘race,’ class, and gender.”

The Politics of Superdiversity “Up Close and Personal” Away from the public gaze, the politics of diversity and migrant encounter may be even more fraught terrain in private spaces, where the rules of civility that govern conduct in public spaces (whether born of low-​level sociability or political correctness) are no longer operable in regulating coexistence. Instead, encounter becomes heightened by emotion, intimacy, and privacy. This is where “the other” may not be “strange” and “unfamiliar,” but may well be “intimate” and even “familial.” Inasmuch as superdiversity implies a complex politics that goes beyond set categories of difference, the home is no longer a physical and psychological refuge to get away from “too much diversity.” As the prime site for “doing” family, the home itself is sustained, shaped, and supercharged by the inextricable entanglements of proximity and diversity, of emotional interdependence and anxious othering (Yeoh and Huang 2010). Yet the home is also replete with opportunities for new encounters that suggest mutual interdependence. As prosaic yet carefully guarded, interior places, home-​spaces are not only microcosms of deeply felt fears and unutterable prejudices, but also “places in which people discover each other as multifaceted, complex and interdependent” (Askins 2015, 476). The politics of diversity in globalized home-​spaces often reveal the dark side of superdiversity at work. This is particularly the case when the migrant/​ethnic other inserted into home-​space is disadvantageously positioned within unequal grids of power. Reflecting the “dialectics of distance, proximity and reciprocal dependencies among the different races” (Mbembe 2004, 387), Black domestic workers continue to be subjected to “practices of micro-​segregation and surveillance” in White homes in post-​Apartheid South Africa (Schuermans 2013, 681). In Asia, Japan represents one end of the care continuum, where, despite a looming eldercare crisis, the home remains a privatized sphere, impervious to foreign others, because migrant caregivers are not considered to have sufficient “cultural intimacy” (that is, intimate knowledge and mimicry of Japanese traditions and culturework) to provide appropriate home-​based care (Lan 2018). At the other end of the continuum, faced with similar aging populations and care deficits, the developed economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have resorted to importing migrant domestic workers from neighboring developing countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines to provide live-​in care and encourage aging-​ in-​place. When paid domestic labor is performed by migrants, it tends to be devalued as

Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of Intimate Kind   253 unskilled and lowly work, and the cultural differences between domestic workers and their employers are comprehended through stereotypical lenses, exacerbating the already uneven employer-​employee power relations that exist in the privacy of the home. Referring to a “global culture of servitude,” Qayum and Ray (2010, 112–​113) note that dominance-​dependence power structures “channeled through the discourse of class and culture distinction” are the universal “hallmarks of domestic service.” Several features of live-​ in domestic work place migrant women in precarious situations: the blurred boundaries between work and home and between re/​productive labor; their isolation within privatized households and restricted access to social support systems; and their status as lowly paid foreigners performing undervalued women’s work all serve to set up migrant domestic work as a “site of multiple exploitations by gender, class, race/​ethnicity, and nationality” (Yeoh et al. 2015, 298). For live-​in migrant domestic workers, the contradictions between the notion of the home as the site of familial bonds and intimate encounter, on the one hand, and as a work site with asymmetrical power relations between people who are essentially strangers (in culture, class, race, and nationality), on the other, may work to transform home-​spaces into spaces of confinement and control, if not covert abuse and surveillance, linked to hierarchies of ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class (Lan 2003; Yeoh and Huang 2010; Johnson et al. 2020). In other words, “home,” as experienced by migrant domestic workers, is paradoxically a “public space” of work, out of their control, and a “private space” of dwelling within which curtailment of rights and forms of abuse are shielded from the public eye (Huang and Yeoh 2007). While the home is a microcosm of social inequalities for migrant domestic workers, scholars have also acknowledged that the salience of home-​space to understanding citizen-​migrant relationships cannot be comprehended without attending to the domestic politics in the negotiation of sociospatial boundaries over food, space, and privacy (Lan 2003). Pande (2012, 399) writes that for migrant domestic workers in Lebanon who face multiple surveillance and restrictions on their movements, “balcony talk”—​to forge alliances with and find support networks among neighboring migrant workers—​ provides a first step in “the continuum of resistive activities . . . [that] challenges the dichotomies often constructed between public (overt and organized) and private (individual and symbolic) forms of organization and resistances.” In Singapore, where one in five households employs a live-​in migrant domestic worker, Yeoh and Huang (2010) conceive of the home as a space of encounter animated by ground rules set by employers to fix and confine the migrant body to prescribed spaces and postures, on the one hand, and by the strategies of domestic workers to circumvent these rules and regain a semblance of mobility and personhood, on the other. The everyday spatialized politics of the home provides a view of power that does not exist in immanent categories but takes effect in relational terms and is continually at play. In Asia, somewhat analogous to the practice of middle-​class families recruiting migrant domestic workers for householding purposes, working-​class families without the financial means draw on unpaid care labor by recruiting, from less developed countries, “foreign brides,” who are considered more “traditional” and willing to take on

254    Brenda S. A. Yeoh procreation and caring roles in sustaining the household (Yeoh, Chee, and Vu 2014). Marriage between migrants and citizens has become an important site that throws into sharp relief the ethnonational sensitivities surrounding women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction, while also challenging ethnocentric assumptions about the maintenance of racial boundaries in reproducing the family, and by extension, the nation.1 With the rise of mixed-​race families and children of binational parentage, the larger structural inequalities of gender, race, class, culture and citizenship operating across a transnational stage become equally integral to an understanding of the politics of familial encounters in home-​space. In response to the growing scale of international marriage migration involving mainly Southeast Asian women, for example, the Korean state has embarked on policies and programs to support so-​called “multicultural families,” even if these state projects also paradoxically promote cultural assimilation and patriarchal ideologies that confer social rights on the basis of gendered reproductive roles (Kim 2013). As scholars have argued, “The endeavors that construct migrant [wives] as those who need to be assimilated paradoxically serve to highlight ethnic or cultural differences between migrants and host country members” (Kim 2013, 458, citing Newendorp 2008). Ironically, the label “multicultural” applied to migrant women, children, and families marks them out as different and becomes a stigma in a still homogeneous Korean society (Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015). In a parallel context, though Japan is often typified as a “monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation [that] leaves no space for diversity,” the small but growing presence of haafu or “mixed roots” children (e.g. children of Japanese-​Filipino parentage) provokes a challenge to the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity from the locus of the family (Seiger 2018). Although the extant scholarship on marriage migration in Asia tends to focus on the discrimination and marginalization of women and children in host societies, more recent work has shown that the family realm is a terrain of struggle that presents both limits and opportunities for empowerment (Kim 2013). Inducted into the family as “reproductive citizens” (Turner 2008) and having only partial access to the public sphere (given a lack of linguistic, social, and economic capital), marriage migrants in Singapore often begin their empowerment journey within the family sphere, taking steps in home encounters (with husbands and in-​laws) to recalibrate the patriarchal bargain and exercise agency in everyday claims-​making practices in order to transcend oppressive status categories (Yeoh et al. 2021). Notwithstanding its dark side, the everydayness of home encounters and interdependence of care relationships may also have recuperative potential. Nava (2006, 49) writes that “the familiar domesticscape” provides an everyday, cumulative context for normalizing difference. Over time, and with subsequent generations, the increased presence of marriage migrants in families and societies may generate new valorizations of mixed ethnicity and produce a momentum toward recognizing hyphenated identities and hybrid cultures (Yeoh et al. 2021). And despite the retrogressive contours of migrant domestic work, the throwntogetherness of home-​space may also create opportunities for cultural learning, mutual care, and acceptance of hybrid ways of

Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of Intimate Kind   255 living (Yeoh and Soco 2014). Similarly, Schuermans (2013, 686) argues in the South African context that “close contact with [Black] domestic workers could encourage middle class Whites to put their own privilege in relation to the hardship of the people working for them, . . . [and this] could not only stimulate understandings across class lines and racial boundaries, but also localized practices of generosity.” Such encounters may not immediately redress unequal power relations or counter racialized stereotypes; however, they present opportunities to disrupt preconceived attitudes, categories, and boundaries (Schuermans 2013). As in the case of incidental encounters in public space that reflect fleeting civility and superficial conviviality toward migrant/​ethnic others (Matejskova and Leitner 2011), the potential of domestic encounters depends on the quality, strength, and mutuality of the interaction, as well as the conditions under which the encounter takes place. Arguably, in comparison to public space interactions, home-​space encounters are rooted in relationships of interdependence and reflect “stronger and longer engagements across class and race lines . . . [thereby increasing] the potential to change people’s thoughts and deeds” (Schuermans 2013, 687). The recuperative potential of domestic encounters also depends on the uneasy balance between hierarchical and reciprocal power relationships within the home, but can operate across affective, affinal, and economic lines that divide.

Conclusion In arguing for the utility of superdiversity as an analytical concept that allows the researcher to examine how “variable differences materialize and become entangled,” Biehl (2015, 596) advocated a move in the scale of analysis “from the neighbourhood down to the living spaces that migrants inhabit.” Extending the superdiversity focal lens to include the spaces of the home allows us to recognize the home as a significant site where “relational systems of difference and power are problematized, constantly negotiated and enacted on an everyday basis” (Johnson et al. 2020, 277). While traditionally associated with “that which is private, intimate, familial and familiar,” home-​space presents “a fertile ground for understanding how (super)diversity permeates space in the contemporary era” (Biehl 2015, 605). Turning the analytical spotlight on home-​space helps reveal the intimate relations and affective structures that undergird a broad range of familial and nonfamilial relations. Such an endeavor need not be seen in contradistinction to the customary urban focus on the public sphere; instead, these kinds of interrogations are vital to a more holistic understanding of affective practices and living with difference in cities, as the way intimacies and intimate labor are performed in home-​space not only reflects but also reinforces larger structural inequalities of gender, race, culture, and citizenship across national and transnational contexts. It is in the spaces of the home that “families and households absorb, process and act on opportunities or threats caused by major

256    Brenda S. A. Yeoh structural changes, thus acting as the all-​important link between macro and micro factors of socio-​economic and political change” (Yeoh, Huang, and Lam 2018). Not only does attending to domestic geographies of encounter allow us to extend the spatial by enlarging the superdiversity lens to include the intimate scale, an interrogation of “living with difference” within the home works to disrupt a too-​rigid dichotomy between the “public” and the “private.” As Schuermans (2013, 686) concludes, “Both public and private spaces are rather ambiguous and ambivalent when it comes to encounters: streets and homes are both marked by exclusion and interaction.” In this light, home-​ spaces deserve to be given full consideration in constructing the superdiversity lexicon, alongside other kinds of spaces that manifest “multi-​layered [if irreconcilable] realities and stories” (Berg and Sigona 2013).

Note 1. Ethnocultural politics of interracial unions are, of course, not unique to contemporary Asia. In the context of European colonialism, Stoler (2010) writes that sexual unions between Europeans and the colonized races and their mixed-​blood progeny, were seen as a dangerous subversion and threat to European prestige and identity.

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Chapter 17

Homemak i ng i n Superdiv e rse Pu blic Spac e Paolo Boccagni

Introduction How (far) people feel and make themselves at home in public space, wherever there is no self-​evident majority group, is an intriguing question for research on superdiversity. This chapter outlines a framework for the study of attachment and appropriation of public space in superdiverse urban areas, with the attendant claims for visibility, belonging and control. It does so through the lens of homemaking in the public (Blunt and Sheringham 2019; Boccagni and Duyvendak 2021), which scales “up” the notion of home to capture competing views and uses of superdiverse public space, given the infrastructures available and the power (un)balances between groups of residents and users. Such a lens raises substantive issues on the access, use, recognition and even “ownership” of urban public space. The notions of both superdiversity and home hold a remarkably evocative power, albeit to different audiences, and are often taken as self-​evident—​which, in fact, they are not. It is important to discuss not only their meanings and implications but also the potential of their intersection in research on the lived experience of urban diversity. This chapter provides, on one hand, a conceptual overview (“A Conceptual Background: Why Homemaking and Superdiversity?”), which extends also to public space as a “stage” for negotiating the meanings, locations, scales, and infrastructures of home (“Unpacking the ‘Public’ as a Stage for Homemaking in Superdiverse Urban Space”). On the other hand, the chapter outlines a comparative research agenda on the ways in which home is framed, felt, and claimed, at the core of majority-​minority relations in the city (Approaching the Superdiverse Public Space as Home: Framing, Feeling, Claiming). This is a precondition for exploring the factors whereby different social

262   Paolo Boccagni actors and groups have unequal rights, opportunities, and inclinations to feel at home in superdiverse public regions such as streets, parks, and leisure or shopping facilities. Such an effort is revealing of the prospects and dilemmas for identification and engagement with public space as a proxy of home, both within and across groups. In principle, the empirical field of reference of this argument is as large as the one to which the notions of homemaking in the public and superdiversity apply—​that is, large-​ scale metropolises, wherever they are located. In practice, due both to the uneven distribution of empirical research so far and to my own research limitations, I will use mostly examples from multiethnic urban areas in Western countries.

A Conceptual Background: Why Homemaking and Superdiversity Home, as an idea and a lived experience of place, does not necessarily overlap with domestic space, if any. It may also stretch to people’s ways of being in the public space and inform them with its imaginative, emotional and moral underpinnings. The city, in particular, can be approached as a “geography of home” in its own right (Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013). This is particularly relevant to the negotiation of public space in a superdiverse neighborhood. However, what home means and how it is “made” under conditions of superdiversity, and how the latter notion contributes to the social study of home, are questions that await a specific conceptualization. As a way to advance this, I revisit the debate on superdiversity, drawing from the recent literature on homemaking in Western cities (Hondagneu-​Sotelo 2017; Blunt and Sheringham 2019; Wilkins 2019; Boccagni and Duyvendak 2021). This includes several illustrations of how different people and groups, including marginalized ones, articulate a sense of home and struggle to emplace it in the public space in which they live, hang out, or gather together. As a category of analysis, home can be seen precisely as a joint exercise of attachment to and appropriation of places, potentially interweaving multiple scales (Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020). It highlights how people try to subject a particular place to a sense of security, familiarity, and control that should set it apart—​make it more special, one’s “own,” and potentially more exclusive than the surrounding environments (Douglas 1991). Home is therefore a matter of social practices that make it from the point of view of particular actors and are not necessarily restrained to the domestic domain (see Yeoh, this volume). But if the notion of home has a powerful impact on the collective imaginary, the same cannot be said for the derivative notion of homemaking. Once understood not as a gendered set of domestic practices, but as an umbrella term for all the ways in which people try to make themselves at home, this concept has certainly not “captured the imagination of social scientists” in a way comparable to superdiversity, particularly in Europe

Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space    263 (Foner et al. 2019, 1). However, homemaking should not be seen only as a matter of individual choices or constraints. It has also an aggregate and societal dimension, particularly whenever it unfolds in the public domain, which lies at the core of research on superdiversity. Talking about homemaking in the public space is not simply a way to acknowledge that a given population is more or less well-​settled in a certain area, which is thus (nonliteral) home to that group. It is, rather, a matter of exploring whether people feel at home there, are recognized as “belonging” or as a legitimate presence there and can make themselves substantively at home—​exert a sense of attachment and appropriation in some portion of, or an event in, the public space. This is critically affected by the predominant atmosphere in intergroup relations (Peterson 2017) and by the underlying structure of opportunities (Caponio et al. 2019). The question is how, if at all, does a sense of home emerge from the interplay between how people feel (together) in a certain social, natural, or built environment, what they do to that environment and what the environment “does” to them. Homemaking in public is by no means specific to immigrants or other minorities. It is as pervasive, though far more legitimate and less noticeable, in the ethnocultural mainstream. Precisely for this reason homemaking gets more intriguing and complex when it is enacted, or at least attempted, by minority members and their descendants (Blunt and Sheringham 2019). In practice, the ways of articulating and emplacing a sense of home by different groups or categories of users of the same public space are not necessarily in accord with each other or with those of their majority counterparts. This is enough to show the potential of a systematic exploration of the interplay between superdiversity, as a societal condition and a representation of it, and homemaking, as a set of practices whereby people feel at home by using certain urban infrastructures in a given time-​space. The notion of superdiversity itself is not self-​evident once it is taken as category of analysis rather than as a vague and evocative byword. Out of many different ways to understand it (Vertovec 2019), my approach points primarily to a descriptor of any local sociodemographic arrangement with no majority ethnic or sociodemographic group, numerically speaking (Crul 2016). This does not entail the absence or the reconfiguration of significant unbalances of power and opportunities between residents, whether in terms of legal status, length of stay, ethnic background, or social class—​most fundamentally, between “white” long-​settled residents and the rest (Foner et al. 2019; Alba and Duyvendak 2019). In more analytical terms, I stick to the use of superdiversity as a catchword for the “transformative diversification of diversity” (Vertovec 2007, 1025): an invitation to acknowledge the complex interaction between a number of axes of societal diversification within the same setting. In this optic, the local battlefield of who has a right, an opportunity, or an interest in making themselves at home cuts across several lines of differentiation between the mainstream and minorities in terms of immigrant background, religion, sexual orientation, legal status, and so forth. At the same time, dealing with superdiversity for research purposes, no less than for policy ones, may well require

264   Paolo Boccagni some parsimony—​the need and ability to prioritize some lines of diversification over others (Crul 2016; Berg et al. 2019), instead of surrendering to the perceived societal complexity “out there.” At a subjective level, furthermore, superdiversity is a conceptual toolkit to research the stretching of individual and group alignments beyond a “tick box” view of reality (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010)—​that is, beyond a neat compartmentalization of diversity in homogeneous and mutually exclusive categories. For sure, this is only a possible development, and it calls for empirical confirmation. That said, how does it affect views, feelings, and claims about home in the public?

Unpacking the “Public” as a Stage for Homemaking in Superdiverse Urban Space That the public space should be universally accessible, home to anyone and of no one in particular, is a common-​sense idea that obscures the stratified social patterns that tend to make public space highly differentiated, fragmented, and far from neutral. There is a mainstream subtext in the predominant and expected ways to stay in the public space and use it, which emerges only wherever the mainstream itself loses prevalence in terms of demographics and numbers—​that is, under conditions of superdiversity. Much of this subtext of “normality” is the cumulative outcome of everyday and elementary forms of domestication (Koch and Latham 2013) whereby some social actors and groups are used to seeing certain portions of public space as their place, where they have an obvious right to stay, belong, and be in control. Instances can be found on all scales, from a street corner to an entire city, and beyond, in ways that tend to go unnoticed as long as they involve ethnic and long-​resident majorities. In fact, the very meaning of public space is nothing obvious, as much literature has shown (Mitchell 1995; Lofland 1998; Bodnar 2015), and as the emergence of superdiversity further reveals (Vertovec 2015). For the purpose of this chapter, public space designates any place and setting that, at least in theory, is equally accessible for ordinary people’s transition, use, and consumption; more metaphorically, as an open stage where a variety of superficial encounters take place across and within groups, with some potential to turn into more meaningful ones (Valentine 2008; Koch and Latham 2013). Urban squares, streets, and parks, as well as transportation facilities or buildings associated with shopping or leisure are all cases in point. Across these settings, the boundaries of what is public are shifting over space and time, but also in the here-​and-​now. A particular public place or infrastructure may be simultaneously experienced as “public” and “parochial” (Lofland 1998) by different social actors and groups (Peterson 2017). Put otherwise, it may be home-​like, irrelevant, or utterly unhomely depending on its interlocutors, given the different configurations

Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space    265 of superdiversity they articulate; home-​like in some moments and unhomely in others, based precisely on the presence of some and the absence of others. Relative to the notion of domestication, homemaking emphasizes the emotional bases of the experience of place, but also the different meanings and understandings of home that inform it. Its empirical relevance, however, has not to do only with abstract emotions and imaginaries, but also with observable practices—​including the simple act of staying in a place—​and materialities, that is, infrastructures that afford an emplaced sense of home. As an category encompassing people’s various ways of approaching certain public settings as proxies of home, homemaking operates at several levels: 1. The translation and extension into the public of supposedly private practices, such as personal conversations (Kumar and Makarova 2008), but also the literal reproduction of domestic routines (eating, sleeping, washing, cultivating intimacy, etc.) outside a domestic setting. This is most visible in cities with large informal settlements and for those marginalized from formal housing (Mitchell 1995; Parsell, 2012); 2. The nourishment of a sense of being at home there-​and-​then, based on “positive” locally emplaced emotions like familiarity, security, and comfort. This is not infrequent as people get accustomed to public locations such as bars (e.g., Hall 2009), squares (Kuurne and Gómez 2019) or parks (Neal et al. 2015); 3. Particularly for international migrants, the reiteration of activities that made them feel at home in their countries of origin, produce positive resonances with their everyday lives prior to migration, and enable symbolic or instrumental connections with people living elsewhere (Mazumdar et al. 2000). Migrant collective practices in the sphere of religion, leisure, food, or consumption are exemplary of their possibility to reproduce certain patterns, possibly essentialized but meaningful, nonetheless, of their own lifestyles (Law 2001; Hondagneu-​Sotelo 2017; Miranda-​Nieto and Boccagni 2020). In doing so, migrants make the public sensorially, mnemonically, or emotionally home-​like for a while, only to leave it to slip back to its mainstream neutrality in the everyday. At the same time, the cumulative habituation of these practices may result in some claim of “ownership” or control over a public space as the home of certain people, prior to others. In all these respects, homemaking in the public space involves “empty” or “neutral” areas or infrastructures as much as semipublic settings such as shops, places of worship, libraries, community centers, and the like, whether under dedicated or mainstream arrangements. Importantly, minority homemaking in the public operates also as a reaction to substandard or severely inadequate housing conditions, as well as to marginalization or stigmatization by the mainstream. In a deeper and more existential sense, the need to attach a sense of home to a public space may reflect the failure of one’s domestic space to meet the normative ideal of home. Particularly for women who suffer domestic violence, or youth who struggle to negotiate a personal space of autonomy, certain public

266   Paolo Boccagni spaces or infrastructures can provide an ancillary sense of home, at least for a while. This is mediated by shared social practices along all the degrees of a continuum between mimicry and hypervisibility (Valentine 2008; Ahmet 2013; Back and Sinha 2016; Damery 2020). Summing up, minority homemaking in the public is generally a matter of asserting visibility and recognition but also more explicit forms of control over a space, starting from a marginal position. This tends to be done along lines of similarity and group homogeneity (whether this is based on a shared immigrant or ethnic background, religious belief, sexual orientation, etc.), rather than by acknowledging, let alone valorizing superdiversity. The latter is at best a backdrop that minorities themselves may well “naturalize” over time. I return to this important point below.

Approaching the Superdiverse Public Space as Home: Framing, Feeling, Claiming Under societal conditions of superdiversity, and to do justice to superdiversity as an optic, research on homemaking can be fruitfully conducted on three analytical levels (Boccagni and Duyvendak 2021). These are meant to allow ideal-​typical configurations of homemaking to emerge from, and be comparatively investigated across, superdiverse arrangements. Along a continuum of perceptions, emotions, and practices, research can be done simultaneously on the ways to frame, feel, and claim some portion of public space as home.

Framing Home in the Public The first level, that is, framing public space as home, speaks to the ascriptive view of home as origin—​where one comes from or, at least, where one has long been resident. Framing a national or local space as home comes simply from being or being considered native to it. This feeds into the long-​standing debate on autochthony, rootedness and attachment to the homeland or, anyway, to a bounded territorial scale, as the foundations of individual and group identity (Zenker 2011). This implicit and unreflexive understanding of the public space as home out of cumulative habituation is the least likely to be shared by international migrants, including long-​settled ones. As long as being born in a place is what makes a difference, autochthony is a powerful marker of who is expected to have a right to be at home in that place It is on this marker that the jargon of domopolitics builds, thereby making the presence of outsiders subordinate and contingent on the good will of the host and the “appropriate” behavior of the guest. Framing the public space as home along these lines, across the class spectrum, articulates both

Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space    267 an emotional attachment and an expectation of legitimate priority. It “not only means that the setting is familiar, safe and predictable but also that one feels in control: one belongs, and one believes (perhaps incorrectly) that one has the power to define who else belongs” (Alba and Duyvendak 2019, 110). There is certainly no paucity of critical literature on the essentialized foundations of place-​based identity politics, or on its exclusivist implications (e.g., Yuval-​Davis 2010; Drozdewski and Matusz 2021). What is interesting, however, is that sociocultural and demographic superdiversity inherently challenges this frame of public space as home. Although erstwhile majority populations may keep seeing themselves as the owners of the public space, their perception of it as an ethnically homogeneous “home” corresponds less and less to the social fabric around them. Societal conditions that academics might label superdiversity—​the everyday sensorial experience of “so many” nonnative faces, languages, and habits—​are often blamed by right-​wing populist actors as the culprit when local inhabitants no longer feel at home in their day-​to-​day life environments (Back and Sinha 2016; Hochschild 2016). As important, superdiversity may undermine the very notion (if not the self-​ conception) of “native.” Once generations of migrants have settled in certain neighborhoods of superdiverse cities such as Amsterdam, Brussels, or London, the question of who is considered native becomes contentious. It may be that the descendants of the migrants’ themselves have been living there the longest. This does not imply, however, that they are seen as the most native or that they see themselves as such. By all measures, their claims for belonging and recognition continue being contentious. Put differently, superdiversity in itself may make little difference to the preexisting power asymmetries between White/​native and other groups (Foner et al. 2019). Nor does it necessarily make intergroup relations less prone to exhibit conflicts and prejudices (Valentine 2008), or less exposed to the “paradoxical coexistence of racism and urban multiculture” (Back and Sinha 2016, 518). In short, the superdiversification of society, even only at a neighborhood scale, has a twofold implication for the framing of public space as home. First, it is no longer so obvious who the autochthons are and what claims they may raise; second, their habituation and ambition to frame the public space as home clashes with the fact that it is increasingly faceted and multivocal—​as such, hard to bring down to an exclusive and special place for someone to feel at home in. This also reveals the interplay with the emotional side of homemaking in the public.

Feeling at Home in the Public Feeling at home in a city, as a matter of “urban dwelling,” can be seen as a form of spatial attachment in its own right (Wilkins 2019). However, this feeling is not necessarily in synch with either a domestic or a national scale of belonging, particularly among immigrant newcomers (Blunt and Bonerjee 2013; Damery 2020). It is in the public space of a city, rather than in an entire country, that immigrants live, encounter majority

268   Paolo Boccagni populations, and negotiate mutual expectations, rights, and obligations. It is on a city level that the recent debate on integration has focused, particularly in Europe (Caponio et al. 2019). However, the argument presented here involves one step ahead into the local and the everyday—​how specific areas and settings allow some to feel at home there-​ and-​then (Kuurne and Gómez 2019) and how their sense of being at home is affected by superdiversity. One could well maintain that in superdiverse cities, “when no one is integrated, then non-​integration becomes the norm” (Damery 2020, 155). Put differently, the ingrained cultivation of a pragmatic acceptance of diversity may facilitate people’s feeling at home, regardless of their background. However, feeling at home, or not, in a superdiverse public space is revealing of a whole range of social questions. An example from the fieldwork of HOMInG (the Home-​Migration Nexus ERC project) on the experience of home in multiethnic neighborhoods can be of help here (Massa and Boccagni 2021). Among the project’s Somali informants in the superdiverse Stockholm district of Rinkeby the notion of home was frequently associated with that district, almost as much as with Somalia, albeit in a radically different sense (the latter being the ancestral and original home “given by God”; the former being an acceptable place to be at home in the here and now). In feeling at home in Rinkeby’s town square, streets, or parks, possibly more than in their own dwellings, Somali immigrants and their descendants attached plural meanings and functions to the neighborhood; it is an arena for everyday hanging out with people with a similar language, religious, and ethnic background; an infrastructure that provides easy access to “ethnic” and cheap shops, bars, and restaurants; an array of local institutions that are attended in common, such as schools, community centers, and places of worship; a hub in the transnational “migration industry” (e.g., remittance and phone agencies) that makes it possible for them to stay connected with kin in Somalia or elsewhere in the diaspora. The latter aspect, in particular, revealed the need for a multiscalar approach to the neighborhood (GlickSchiller and Caglar 2009), against the temptation to see it as an isolated and self-​ sufficient unit (Berg et al. 2019). In all these respects, as many of our respondents used to say, living in Rinkeby “feels like being in Somalia”—​that is, like being at home. However, this view of the neighborhood as home away from home(land) had to do with its being instrumental to the production of different forms of “Somaliness.” This feeling was not related to Rinkeby’s superdiversity, except on one major point: the possibility it afforded of seeing themselves and being seen by the others as not out of place since nobody was really in place. No majority group could claim to embody the mainstream, let alone autochthony, in a district where more than 50 percent of the population was not from the EU or Nordic countries. Again, this feeds into the critical role of perceived normality in minority groups’ ability to feel at home in a city or, at least, a neighborhood. For the local inhabitants, there is nothing “super” or “special” in what academics might call superdiversity, though. This is simply a “commonsense” experience that produces habituation but not necessarily support, whether in Rinkeby or in many other comparable local contexts (cf. Wessendorf 2014).

Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space    269 Furthermore, the sense of normality that emerged from our case study was contingent on staying in the neighborhood and also operated by opposition to a broader urbanscape perceived as distant and hostile. It was a normality that did not question either Rinkeby’s overexposure to poverty, unemployment, and crime or its construction as a dangerous and undesirable ghetto from mainstream Stockholmers. Recognition as ordinary inhabitants of the city, on equal footing with the others, is precisely what was missing for our research participants to feel at home out of the comfort zone of the district. As this example shows, people from ethnoracial or other stigmatized minorities may feel at home in a heterogeneous urban environment, in the sense of seeing themselves as “normal” or no more different than the others. This, however, does not necessarily protect them from the discrimination, let alone the long-​term inequalities, associated with both their minority status and their context of settlement. Generally speaking, superdiverse sociodemographic arrangements remain deeply stratified in terms of social class, rights, and opportunities associated with a given position. That diversity, “super” or not, is considered normal or even irrelevant does little to challenge the deep-​ rooted inequalities associated with it.

Claiming Home in the Public Yet another level of analysis involves the ways in which people may claim some superdiverse public space as home—​“theirs” more than of other inhabitants or users. These derive from extended habituation and possibly, for minority groups, from the lack of alternative settings for sociability, recognition, or even only basic protection. Claiming home in the public may result in place-​based mobilization, with stances ranging from visibility and recognition to appropriation and control. In this optic, even micro claims for being at home on a particular public turf have their own social and political significance. At the most basic level, minorities’ extended presence and gatherings in the urban “socioscape” already make a claim for visibility, recognition, and diversification. Across immigration countries, case studies abound of forms of homemaking in the public based on temporary occupation of certain portions of public space—​plazas (Law 2001), parks (Mitchell 1995), urban gardens (Hondagneu-​Sotelo 2017), streets (Botticello 2007), and so forth—​along lines of in-​group commonality, ethnic or otherwise. Place-​specific forms of more explicit political mobilization are also relevant here. These can articulate a whole spectrum of political agendas, relative to, for instance, legal status, housing, and access or use of some space of their own. The local mobilization of minority and twice-​stigmatized groups such as second-​generation immigrants, LGBTQ people, or religious minorities are exemplary in this respect (e.g., Becerra 2014; Damery 2020). The question is whether and how superdiversity, as a discursive and emotional repertoire and as an empirical reality, shapes these claims along lines other than collective categorization or group belonging. How far do forms of occupying public space cut across group alignments, unless in exceptional circumstances, such as mass protests?

270   Paolo Boccagni On the one hand, the claim for recognition of one’s difference and specificity—​as, say, a group of undocumented migrant youth—​is consistent with the argument that the increasing diversification of differences is something legitimate and worthy of recognition. “As long as we’re all diverse here,” the argument goes, “we can claim we all have a stake, in fact a right, to stay (possibly in some place of our own).” On the other hand, superdiversity as a discourse undermines all claims for home as an essentialized notion, including at a city or national level. It is, rather, an invitation to consider cross-​ cutting forms of mobilization in lieu of traditional group-​based ones. If people cultivate or are attributed different identities or alignments at the same time, they may have little reason to mobilize as full-​fledged members of one particular group. We could expect them, instead, to engage in shifting alliances across groups—​for instance, as members of discriminated-​against immigrant, sexual, or religious minorities (Gallegos 2019; Wimark 2019). Wherever people do mobilize along these lines, the stake of recognition involves less a group identity than an undifferentiated right to be accepted and included as different from the mainstream. However, superdiverse mobilization is likely more complex and selective than along the strong lines of traditional identity politics.

Back to the “Politics” of Home At all these levels, and most visibly at the last one, the political significance of homemaking calls for attention to the local structure of opportunities, as defined by public services and policies (including welfare, immigration and social cohesion ones), housing arrangements, and by the scope for inclusion of immigrant or other minorities. Moreover, the development and accessibility of local infrastructures has a critical role in the spatialization and reach of homemaking in the public sphere. This involves how different public areas facilitate or hinder the extended presence of a diverse arena of users—​what Koch and Latham (2013) call the “furnishings” of public space. This infrastructural aspect, which varies across neighborhoods and cities, is, at least in part, a matter of top-​down urban design. It does affect the possibility of feeling at home and making oneself at home, or not, in the public. At the same time, the assumption that feeling at home in public space should be a direct and desirable aim of public policy has gained some currency, particularly in Northern Europe, and yet has been widely criticized for a number of reasons (Duyvendak et al. 2016). All this being said, there is a potential in local policies to facilitate, in terms of community work and development, forms of togetherness in the public—​ indirectly contributing to make it home-​like—​that try precisely to meet the needs and interests of a superdiverse audience. Investments in semipublic spaces like community centers and parks, but also sport and recreational facilities, can pave the way toward a “superficial familiarity with diversity” out of people’s own participation, up to more “amicable encounters.” The key variable for success, Peterson (2017, 1077) suggests, is “not the degree of mixing.” It is rather “the extent to which people have something in common to bond over . . . a common goal of a higher emotional quality,” with a potential to cut

Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space    271 across categorical divides (Kuurne and Gómez 2019). As important is the time spent there—​hence the cultivation of routines of familiarity and personal acquaintances—​for people to develop nonexclusive and light forms of attachment to the public space. This prospect is particularly challenging and elusive wherever superdiversity is associated with transient and fragmented migration pathways, rather than with linear trajectories of long-​term settlement.

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, the ways in which immigrants and other minority groups try to make themselves at home in superdiverse urban environments still suffer from a deficit of systematic investigation. More in-​depth and comparative research is necessary on how a sense of home is negotiated in the public sphere across groups, rather than only within specific ethnically categorized collectivities. Exploring this in terms of framing, feeling, and claiming home helps to capture the situated interaction between cognition, emotions, and the practices of home, and the variation within and between groups. Both variations can be appreciated precisely in terms of superdiversity as an invitation to explore the significance of contrasting affiliations or markers of difference for people’s life opportunities, and for their ways of making sense of themselves and of their social positions. As a proper concept, superdiversity is arguably “still in its infancy” (Foner et al. 2019, 2). It is also not easy to operationalize and hence to be empirically captured in terms of its macro, meso, and micro determinants and then compared across groups, locations, and time periods. It has, however, a key merit in itself, which is possibly part of its success story: its “potential to widen possibilities for individuals with migrant backgrounds to be acknowledged as human beings with a plurality of affiliations” (Foner et al. 2019, 14). Again, which of these affiliations are or should be privileged relative to the others is a question for which there is no blueprint for the answers, yet it is a very critical question for both practical and epistemological purposes (Berg et al. 2019). All this being said, how does superdiversity affect people’s desire and need to make themselves at home within their social environments? As the available research suggests, stronger recognition and mainstreaming of superdiversity may facilitate minority people’s emplaced sense of home in the basic sense of feeling “normal,” that is, not stigmatized because of their difference. Everyday exposure to superdiverse environments can indeed lead to “greater recognition of diversity as normalcy” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 550), although it is not clear under which circumstances this is more likely the case. Yet more ambitious but equally fundamental dimensions of feeling at home, such as attachment, belonging, and control, are typically more difficult to cultivate outside one’s in-​group and comfort zone. Achieving them, for immigrant or other minorities, may demand a capability to revisit and make more flexible and inclusive their own views of home as an ascriptive, identity-​foundational notion.

272   Paolo Boccagni This requires, in turn, that people be in a position to cultivate a long-​term perspective of upward integration, whereby they can construct home as an achievement that lies ahead of them and is within their reach, rather than only a legacy or a burden from the past. Wherever such a perspective is unrealistic, and particularly in fragmented and transitory migration pathways, there is no reason to expect that everyday exposure to superdiversity makes people feel at home—​unless, at best, in the pragmatic terrain of learning civil inattention to multiple, growing, sometimes hard-​to-​grasp forms of difference around them.

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter has been done in the framework of HOMInG—​ERC StG 678456 (2016-​2022).

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Chapter 18

Superdiversi t y, You ng People, and Edu c at i on Elif Keskiner, Maurice Crul, Ismintha Waldring, Talitha Stam, and Frans Lelie

Introduction The term superdiversity, over the fifteen years it has been in use, has become widely used by researchers and policymakers. It usually describes both the increasing ethnic and religious diversity in society and the generational, educational, and socioeconomic diversity within ethnic groups. Although there is no clear description for when a diverse context becomes superdiverse, the term is often applied in situations where many ethnic groups coexist and no ethnic group holds a numerical majority (Crul 2016; Crul et al. 2013). Revisiting the “superdiversity,” concept, Fran Meissner and Steven Vertovec (2015) highlighted three interconnected aspects, the first of which is its descriptive feature: Super-​diversity is proposed as a “summary term” to encapsulate a range of such changing variables surrounding migration patterns—​ and, significantly, their interlinkages—​which amount to a recognition of complexities that supersede previous patterns and perceptions of migration-​driven diversity. (542)

In further clarifying superdiversity, Vertovec (2019), repeatedly underlined that superdiversity does not mean “more diversity”; instead, it refers to a multidimensional understanding of diversity that should not be limited to ethnic diversity. Superdiversity includes other forms and layers of migration-​related diversity, such as gender, age, migration generation, and socioeconomic status. By bringing in

276    Elif Keskiner et al. these other layers and contextual and institutional factors, the superdiversity concept helps us minimize the overemphasis on ethnicity. Further, it is worthwhile to assess the superdiversity concept in terms of theory building, and not only for descriptive purposes. So far, few people have asked the question: Under what conditions will a superdiverse context, be it a neighborhood or a school, produce a positive outcome or a negative outcome? Education is an especially interesting field for exploring this question. In terms of outcomes, we can think of different indicators. We will explore two possible avenues here through empirical studies done in the Netherlands. In our first empirical case we looked at vocational secondary schools in the Netherlands, where schools with superdiverse populations are often researched under the rubric of school segregation—​that is, by looking at the segregation of students with a migration background from those without a migration background and the impact on school results. Ethnic and racial diversity in so-​called segregated schools is often seen as the cause of school failure. Here, we ask whether using the superdiversity concept can help shift the negative perceptions about diverse schools and their pupils to an understanding and appreciation of complexity of backgrounds. This shifts the focus onto the institution and how it deals with superdiversity when explaining educational outcomes, and away from blaming the students and their backgrounds for the educational outcomes. In our second empirical case, we studied how superdiversity can influence the context in higher education. The topic of diversity is now on the agenda, especially in the applied science universities and in research universities in the larger cities, where, respectively, half and a third of students now have a migration background. Here, the question of diversity is more often posed in terms of the potential gains (often framed in terms of “ethnic” diversity) of bringing in different perspectives and knowledge and providing a richer, more innovative learning environment that will better prepare students for the diverse work environment of the future. We also find it crucial to broaden the perspective of diversity study by looking through the lens that considers people without a migration background next to people with a migration background. Most migration research has focused on migrants and their children, and, nowadays, even their grandchildren, as if people without a migration background are not part of the equation and do not influence the outcomes in a diverse context too. The topic of segregation proves relevant for making this point. School segregation is often described as coming about because children with a migrant background cluster together. The other, sometimes more important mechanism is that of parents of children without a migration background either avoiding or not choosing the schools heavily populated with children of migrants. We will explore what the concept of superdiversity has to offer in two educational contexts.

Superdiversity, Young People, and Education    277

Education and Superdiversity Education is a realm in which the social realities are inevitably mirrored. Superdiversity in the neighborhood resulting from the increased flows of migration into various metropolitan cities has mostly been reflected in the composition of the area schools, as well as in the education experience of the students, school staff, and parents. In her study of the superdiverse Hackney borough in London, Susanne Wessendorf (2014) describes schools as semipublic spaces where diversity has become “commonplace” (75). Hence, schools may (in certain instances) reflect the “superdiverse” neighborhood contexts in which they are embedded. What does superdiversity imply in the field of education? Diversity is more commonly discussed in education than superdiversity, and it usually refers to a “mixed school environment” in terms of social class, race, ethnicity, migration trajectory, migration generation, language background, ability, and so on (Merry 2020, 123). As mentioned, we should be cautious because not every diverse setting is necessarily superdiverse, but some educational settings can host and reflect the complexity of the urban contexts of superdiversity (Weiner 2016). Vertovec (2019) analyzed more than three hundred articles that used one of the seven different applications of superdiversity by discipline or field, and showed that the lens of superdiversity is seldom used in the field of education. If it is used, it is mostly to give background to a study or considered only from an ethnic diversity perspective, and not as “a multidimensional reconfiguration,” as Vertovec (2019) originally suggested. Ingrid Gogolin (2011) argues that migration and the superdiverse student population that results from it have been viewed as a transitory condition for schools rather than a permanent condition that must become a part of the discussion in education institutions (curriculum, teaching practice, vision, etc.). She argues that schools are in denial about increasingly mixed societies, and are therefore still very much operating under an assumption of “homogeneity” (Gogolin 2011). Yet schools are also places where the ideal of living together and respecting the “other” can be pursued, especially when educational policies and schools have this as a goal. Research on multicultural education identifies schools as sites to inculcate “cross-​cultural” competencies (Contini and Maturo 2010). Through education, students can learn to develop “a form of civility towards diversity” (Livingstone and Sefton-​Green 2016, 124). Diversity exposes students to different groups, which, in turn, is expected to help break down stigmas and prejudices (124). Interaction between different groups can also lead to a transfer of resources between students, such as flow of cultural capital or social capital (Keskiner and Crul 2017; Merry 2020). In their school ethnography in London, Livingstone and Sefton-​Green (2016) describe the secondary school they study as “super-​diverse,” reflecting its urban location. According to the authors, the school developed strategies to execute its vision for

278    Elif Keskiner et al. diversity; these included imposing different classroom seating arrangements to overcome groupings and trying to disconnect the students from the home environment as much as possible (by banning social media and mobile phones) to make the social inequalities between students less salient. The efficacy of these strategies remained questionable for Livingstone and Sefton-​Green, who observed that the teachers were not equipped to deal with ethnicity and race issues, for example, when “students manifested their ‘otherness’ through a challenge to teacher authority” (2016, 117). The authors also reckoned that the White middle-​class students were given “greater leeway” (124). Hence, even when a school has a clear vision and strategy for teaching “civility towards diversity,” it is not a given that it will be effective or that the school and school staff are equipped with the adequate tools to handle it. According to Merry (2020), whether exposure to diversity at school leads to breaking down of stigmas remains questionable. He argued that as long as the mechanisms of differentiation and tracking are in place, leading to the reproduction of social inequalities, school diversity can even reinforce stereotypes because students from privileged backgrounds will have more favorable treatment and educational outcomes, while those from disadvantaged backgrounds have worse outcomes. He argues that diversity cannot be a policy or a goal in its own right for achieving educational equality as long as the mechanisms (such as tracking, differentiation, etc.) of social inequality in schools are not targeted first.

The Concept of Superdiversity in the Educational Field in the Netherlands According to the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands, in January 1, 2020, as much as 24.2 percent of the Dutch population had a migration background.1 The percentages are much higher in the big cities (CBS, 2020). In the Netherland’s four largest cities, 51.8 percent of the population has a migration background. This situation clearly affects the schools in these cities. Some argue that it leads to multicultural schools (Dubbeld et al. 2019), others counter that it leads to “school segregation” (Inspection of Education 2018). As mentioned earlier, the term “school segregation” refers to an uneven distribution of pupils in terms of social-​class backgrounds and ethnic origins (Karsten et al. 2006). Because Dutch parents can choose their children’s primary school, school segregation leads to achievement inequalities between schools because higher educated parents are likely to cluster together in the same schools (Sykes and Kuyper 2013; Inspection of Education 2018). Studies on school segregation point to the disadvantages in education settings with high numbers of students from lower social classes and different ethnic and migration backgrounds (Karsten et al. 2006). These studies have focused on the lower success rates of such schools, which is often associated with (and in a way blamed on)

Superdiversity, Young People, and Education    279 parents’ lower education level or social class, poverty, lack of language skills, cultural and religious difference, or migration history. In other words, all the aspects that turn “diversity” into “superdiversity” are seen and represented as the building blocks of disadvantage, stigmatizing the schools and their pupils and reinforcing prejudice, as well as negative labeling. But the evidence does not always support the idea that school segregation causes educational inequality (Dronkers and Level 2007). On the contrary, there is evidence that when diversity is addressed and social inequalities are targeted, superdiverse educational environments could be beneficial for educational achievement (Merry 2020). School segregation has also led to another reality. In neighborhoods where the majority of residents have a migration background, schools often host a student body made up of more than 70 percent of students with a migration background. And, though it is possible to talk about complex migration-​related diversity in these schools, another term has also become popular in The Netherlands—​“zwarte school,” meaning “black school” (Paulle 2002; Vedder 2006). The term zwarte school was initially widely applied in official statistics and the public discourse, and was associated with low success rates (Jongejan and Thijs 2010), implying “bad school” (Boterman 2013). This labeling had its critics (Paulle 2002), and it has become less popular over the years. Despite the general public and governmental resistance to the usage of race concept, the use of the term “black schools” (Weiner 2016) is a good example of a process of racialization because it stereotypes students with a migration background and views them as a homogenous group, lumping them together regardless of migration histories, ethnicities, races, religious beliefs, language capabilities, social-​class formations, and gender and sexual orientations into a single category of “black” or “migration background.” Although the government authorities justified using label to identify schools needing more support and resources, how the term was used and the way it circulated only reinforced the disadvantages that most of these students suffer, both in and out of the school environment. Moreover, the term is often juxtaposed with the term “white schools,” which are also segregated due to their high numbers of students without a migration background, and which often have a good reputation (Vedder 2006). Although the term “black schools” is no longer used in official government documents, the perception that schools whose students have migration backgrounds are both homogenous and disadvantaged is still present (Weiner 2016). The question we would like to pose here is whether the concept of “superdiversity” can prove to be useful to redefine school populations and the complexity of backgrounds they contain? The term superdiversity is intended to emphasize the complexity of migration-​related diversity and to suggest a multidimensional reconfiguration of social categories (Vertovec 2019). This could be helpful in moving beyond the ethnic and racial lens that defines the student population and switching from a discourse of disadvantage to one that regards the complexity of backgrounds as an enrichment. Until now, the general trend has been to perceive and present super-​diverse school environments as problematic and in the case of failure, lack of success has been blamed on the migration and the class background of the students. Students’ lower educational outcomes have been

280    Elif Keskiner et al. seen as their ( background’s) fault and not so much the realm of school’s responsibility. Yet if we define school population not with “backwardness” but with “ superdiversity” then we can also focus on how schools deal with such superdiversity. Hence we shift the emphasis to the importance of the institutional context as defining school outcomes (i.e., producing social inequalities) and criticize the concepts (i.e., “black schools”) and the vision that describes and homogenizes schools with migration populations as monolithic entities.

Empirical Case Studies from the Netherlands Case Study 1:  Superdiversity in Vocational Educational Context The first case study is drawn from the large-​scale international mixed-​methods research project, “Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe,” that ran simultaneously in seven European countries from 2013 to 2018 (see Van Praag et al. 2018, 135–​148). Most of the data collection took place in and around educational institutions focused on the young people most at risk of school dropout, typically young men from a migrant background in lower educational levels (Cabus and De Witte 2016; Rumberger 1987). In the Dutch context, these institutions are predominantly lower-​secondary vocational schools (VBMO) and middle-​senior vocational schools (MBO) because dropout rates peak in the first year after the compulsory transition from a VMBO to a MBO (Elffers 2013). Of the 2,570 Dutch students who participated, 21 percent were first-​generation migrants and 56 percent were second-​generation migrants. In the Netherlands, much of the diversity research focuses on young people with migrant backgrounds, which means that attention is too often concentrated on the individual characteristics of these young people, and that scant attention is paid to structural conditions (De Witte et al. 2013). What does the superdiversity concept have to offer as a lens for studying this kind of educational setting? The superdiversity lens provides an opportunity to look at the diversity within a group of students with a migration background. In our group of migrant students, we had students from different migration generations, who are usually lumped together. Some of the students’ (some of whom were refugees or migrants), lack of competency in the Dutch language was the main reason they had been put on low-​level vocational tracks. Other students with a migration background were third-​ generation migrants with one or two second-​generation parents who had studied in the Netherlands, earning middle-​or higher-​level diplomas, and were capable of helping their children with school matters and talking to teachers. Other children were second generation (born in the Netherlands), but they had low-​educated first-​generation

Superdiversity, Young People, and Education    281 parents who did not speak Dutch. The reasons these groups are in the lowest tracks of the educational system is very different. Some of those with Dutch-​language problems did not necessarily belong on these tracks intellectually. Others had motivational or behavioral problems, which, because their parents were unable to support them or talk to their teachers, resulted in poor educational results. Still others were placed on these tracks because of low cognitive abilities. It is only by looking at these within-​group differences (unpacking the different layers of diversity) that we can, not only understand the true causes of their disadvantages, but can also start to understand what they need to be more successful in school. The “black school” concept puts all emphasis on the container notion of being a migrant or of being of migrant descent. But when we take other layers of diversity into account, the label obscures more than it helps us understand the students’ situations. This is even more the case if we take into account the students without migration background. Talitha Stam (2018) conducted an ethnographic study of the experiences of “white” Dutch students as one of many minority groups in these schools. Instead of looking at these segregated schools through the migrant lens, she looked at the dynamics between students and between students and teachers through the lens of the non-​migration-​ background students (Stam 2020). In doing so, she made the invisible group—​“white students” without a migration background—​visible. As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, because they are a numerical minority group in these school settings, they have been largely ignored in studies of these school contexts. By labeling these schools as in “black schools” or “migrant schools,” the students without a migration background become invisible and forgotten. Their presence in these schools is, again, the result of another layer of diversity. Many of them come from incomplete families that have lived in poverty for generations. Often, their parents and their parents’ parents before them, went to the same vocational school and dropped out early. Not growing up with the Dutch language or their parents’ unfamiliarity with the Dutch educational system is a problem. Their problems are very different from those of the migrant students we have just described. But they also bring their particular problems into the school environment, influencing the school climate. Stam’s (2020) study shows that in this particular superdiverse school context, where students without a migration background are predominantly coming from a working class background, the usual divide we often find in the literature—​that is, the perception that migrant families have low educational resources and ambitions, whereas nonimmigrant families have the resources to succeed in school—​is reversed. In many migrant families, the educational ambitions are higher than they are in many of the nonmigrant families, and the stability of many migrant families provides a much better environment than some of the unstable family situations of the nonmigrant pupils. As with diversity within the migrant group, diversity within the nonmigrant group is often forgotten or gets lost in averages at the group level. Stam’s (2018) study also shows that the superdiverse context plays an important role for pupils without a migration background who are trying to find a place and identity in these vocational schools where they are a small numerical minority of students. We

282    Elif Keskiner et al. argue that for some of them the awareness of their whiteness is for the first time activated by the superdiverse school setting; others had already been exposed to diversity earlier in their school careers (see also Stam 2020). This highlights, among other things, that superdiversity also plays an important role for people without migrations backgrounds and should not be underestimated. We therefore believe that this case example of the experiences of “white” Dutch students in superdiverse senior vocational school classes could enrich the descriptive part of the concept of superdiversity in educational settings in the Netherlands and beyond.

Case Study 2:  Superdiversity in the Higher Educational Context The second case study is based on a 2019 online survey that was sent to around 26,000 students at a research university located in a Dutch majority-​minority city. The survey focused on students’ feelings of belonging at the university; it was initiated by the university’s diversity office to explore how students experience the university’s social climate, and, in turn, how the social climate influences students’ well-​being and academic performance and study progress. The research university studied has one the most ethnically diverse student populations of all the universities in the Netherlands. In recent years, the university’s pride in this accomplishment has been evident in various initiatives it has taken to support its diverse student body. We see it, for example, in the university’s investment in a diversity office, creation of an educational model for the mixed classroom, and development of a diversity policy, but also in the way it promotes itself to potential new students. Folders, leaflets, posters, and the website highlight religious, ethnic, and racial diversity by featuring, for example, female students wearing veils and students of color. It could be said that the university uses the ethnic diversity as a marketing tool, an approach that has drawn criticism from, for example, Sara Ahmed (2007, 2012), and has also been criticized by one of the students from the university: The [name of university] visual material seems to place a strong emphasis on diversity; The [name of university] should use this visual material to show what it actually looks like, not how it wants to come across to the outside world.

Yet, the university seems to be an attractive option for both students with a migration background so-​called first-​comer students.2 Student diversity is, of course, not limited to the above-​mentioned identity markers. Other identity aspects, some more and some less visible, are also present. It is this broad range of student diversity that forms the backdrop of this case study. How can superdiversity’s extended focus, which highlights “the need for policymakers and public service practitioners to recognize new conditions created by the concurrent characteristics of global migration and population change” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 543),

Superdiversity, Young People, and Education    283 help to explain how students with and without migration backgrounds, experience this diversity, and the extent to which they find that there is room for various minority identities. We argue that these new conditions not only affect countries, cities, and neighborhoods, but seep through institutions, such as universities, as well. One of the main findings of this case study was that students feel a strong sense of belonging to this university. Yet, for certain groups of students’ the feeling of belonging can exist alongside feelings of exclusion when they experience discrimination by fellow students and sometimes by staff. These feelings of exclusion and discrimination affect students’ well-​being and, to some extent, their study progress. What a superdiversity lens shows is how varied the reasons students give for these experiences are. This variety includes, for instance, not only the ethnic, racial, or religious prejudice experienced by students with a migration background, but also stereotypes (sometimes even used as examples in classroom situations by teaching staff) based on sexual orientation and gender identity. For international students, feelings of exclusion and discrimination often stem from their inability to understand and speak the national language. Students who have a disability report that a lack of facilities and of understanding from their fellow students prevents them from fully participating in the learning community. Another important result from the survey was that a group of students claimed a minority identity based on their (populist) right-​wing political convictions, which they believed were not in line with those of the majority of their fellow students or their professors. These students had no migration background, were often male and from middle-​class backgrounds and felt that they could not be who they wanted to be at the university because their type of diversity (having a minority political orientation) was not part of the diversity rhetoric. In line with the first case study, these students without a migration background felt invisible in the university’s diversity discourse and policymaking, but on top of that, they experienced exclusion and harsh judgments based on one of their identity markers: their political persuasion. In the words of one such student: I am a Western heterosexual man who tends towards the right on matters of economics. I am often dismissed as racist, capitalist, or sexist without any justification just because I am male, Western, white and heterosexual. No arguments are put forward, just that I am privileged.

It is relevant that the survey took place around the time an up-​and-​coming Dutch populist politician was calling on higher-​education students to report their teachers if they felt they were being “indoctrinated” with left-​wing ideas (such as appreciation of diversity). This might have had an effect on how this group of students answered the survey question, since this political diversity had not been included in the answer categories; it was added by students in the available open answer space. Looking at these students with a superdiversity lens reveals the importance of distinguishing between students with different personal characteristics to understand how they are the same or different on whatever aspect we are interested in. In this second case

284    Elif Keskiner et al. study, to understand belonging, or exclusion and discrimination, for that matter, we need to look at these topics through the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, or any other—​not always obvious—​diversity lens, such as political beliefs. And even if all these characteristics influence students’ sense of belonging (either positively or negatively) to a similar extent, the reasons behind feelings of belonging (or lack thereof) can be very different. Affecting feelings of belonging of students thus will require different types of investments by the institution for different categories of students.

Conclusion Superdiversity is hardly used as a lens in the field of education. When it is applied, it usually refers to “a lot of ethnic” diversity in the schools, lumping students with various migration, ethnic, racial, gender, and social class characteristics together in one uniform category. Such views risk becoming building blocks of disadvantage, stigmatizing both the schools and their pupils and subjecting pupils to prejudice and negative labeling, as with the “black schools” label in the Netherlands. Dropping the ethnic lens and applying a multidimensional description of superdiversity could help to switch from a discourse of disadvantage to one of seeing the complexity of backgrounds as an enrichment. This way we can shift the emphasis to the role and the ability of the institutional contexts (i.e., schools) in dealing with a superdiversity of backgrounds of their students. Our case studies showed that not only students with a migration background but also students without a migration background are a part of the superdiversity context. In that sense, using the superdiversity lens can help to reveal the limitations of a vision that describes and homogenizes schools with migration populations as monolithic entities.

Notes 1. “Migration background” is defined as having at least one parent who was born outside the Netherlands. 2. “First-​comer students” are the first in their families to attend a school of higher education, because their parents did not attend either an applied or a research university.

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Chapter 19

Discreet Diversi fi c at i on i n L atin Ame ri c a Raúl Acosta

Introduction For various reasons, Latin America does not host the high levels of migration-​driven sociocultural diversification seen in the economic hubs of North America, Europe, and, increasingly, Asia and the Middle East. A complex picture of sociocultural diversification is nevertheless emerging, whose indicators partly comply with the criteria originally laid out regarding superdiversity (Vertovec 2007, 1025), albeit in reduced concentrations (Acosta García and Martínez Ortiz 2015; Martínez Ortiz and Acosta García 2016). I argue that the type of diversification seen in Latin America can best be described as “discreet,” partly because it does not match the scale and density of those of global alpha cities (Atkinson 2020), but, crucially, also because there is resistance to acknowledging the process of diversification itself, among both its own actors and government officials. This reluctance is historically linked to two key concepts in the region’s intellectual history, through which states have sought to manage their populations’ identities: mestizaje, or the mixing of European and indigenous American heritages, and indigenismo, or the highlighting of indigenous communities as symbols of cultural ancestry. Both of these notions have bolstered power structures that were built on colonial hierarchies along ideas of ethnicity and race (Loveman 2014). The result is a system where outsiders join a particular rank in the pecking order, partly because of their own characteristics but also partly because of their proclivities to interact with the locals. Such preferences can be formed through sympathies, empathies, and antipathies. A common outcome is that once relations are established, they remain enclosed, in a pattern I name here as “bubble interaction.” Notwithstanding, studies using a superdiversity approach may yield interesting results owing to the increasingly complex picture of migration in the region. Research on superdiversity has been useful in examining novel milieus of heightened interactions among people from different origins and contexts. This has allowed

288   Raúl Acosta policymakers to address resulting cultural heterogeneities (Scholten, this volume) and, for example, apply such lessons to healthcare (Phillimore, Bradby, and Brand 2019) or urban planning (Pemberton, this volume). But what of regions where there is no such intensity of interactions? In terms of percentage of population, migration into Latin American countries has remained low at 1.8 percent (International Migration Organization 2019, 24). Nevertheless, as elsewhere in the world, new migration flows are bringing small groups of migrants from ever more places to the region (Cabieses et al. 2013). Although migration density is nowhere near that of economic hubs in Europe and North America, diversification is taking place. For this reason, an approach using tools developed around the concept of superdiversity may yield valuable results. For research to examine the implications of diversification in the region, there is a need to understand its discreet character. The low concentration of migrants in the region and the frequent instances of discrimination and racism against them (Abreu and Batmanghlich 2013) may be behind their apparent desire to blend in or at least to not call attention to their foreignness. State governments also often make statements demanding rights for their citizens abroad, but fail to ensure protections for foreigners in their own countries (Hershberg and Ewig 2010). This combination ensures that any form of diversification is not openly acknowledged, for fear of negative responses. This cultural and political reluctance to accept diversity has been shaped by the long shadows of mestizaje (Miller 2009) and indigenismo (Bueno 2015) in the region. This is not meant to imply that all people consider themselves either as mestizos or indigenous, but to argue that the political significance and consequences of both concepts persist to this day (Wade 2018). Both concepts were behind mayor policy bundles that influenced the practices and ideas about identity of large swaths of populations. They also gained symbolic significance in portrayals in films, novels, and other cultural products. At heart, both seek to solidify national identities, not with the idea of a single ethnic identity, as occurred elsewhere (Connor 2015), but as units constituted by a majority of “mixed peoples” as well as several ethnic groups (González Casanova, Roitman Rosenmann, and Albó 1996; García 2005). While some Latin American countries concentrated more ethnic diversity than others, the effort to contain the political aspirations of indigenous communities, Afro-​descendants, and other ethnic groups by subsuming them into a national project was similar throughout the region. The combination of mestizaje and indigenismo thus created a habitus of national imagined communities in everyday performances (Anderson 2006). These performances usually consist of reifying national symbols in everyday practices, such as eating traditional street food, drinking local beverages, taking part in local communal sports, practicing vernacular dances, or carrying out other forms of entertainment. This habitus has historically concealed various migration waves into Latin America, which has prompted scholars to focus on individual routes as unique (e.g., those of the Japanese in Brazil, the Lebanese in Mexico, or Germans in Argentina). More recently, however, as the number of countries of origin has increased, and the numbers of migrants from each point of origin has decreased, it has served to hide the resulting diversification of this confluence. In practice, this habitus means that new arrivals in the region are

Discreet Diversification in Latin America    289 often granted a type of honorary membership to the country they find themselves in (regardless of their legal migration status) if they perform certain traits of national identity. When outsiders know and practice the local traditions, appreciate vernacular cuisine, or use quotidian expressions, they reduce tensions and the locals’ distrust. These are but small elements within constellations of conviviality that rely on what I call sympathies, empathies, and antipathies, which, in turn, determine how close or frequent their social contacts may be, or even if there is any contact. It may be that outsiders seek out locals who share their religion or an interest or are themselves indigenous (Farahmand and Rouiller 2016; Pereiro 2016). As people seek certain activities, events, places, they enact their own preferences, which define what they seek in others. I refer to the resulting interactions as “bubbles” because they remain within spheres of practice and place. To develop my arguments, I divide the chapter into four sections. The first describes the idea and significance of “discreet” diversification, with an exploration of its history and development. The second part explores what I refer as conviviality that is driven by sympathies, empathies, and antipathies. The third is a clarification of what I mean by “bubble interactions.” The fourth and final part is a closing remark about the potential for superdiversity studies in Latin America. Specifically, I argue that understanding the implications of the type of discreet diversification that takes place in Latin America will require more in-​depth analyses. It is neither the same as in places where interactions are more intense and denser, nor does it follow old patterns of migration and assimilation based on ethnic groups.

Keeping Diversification Out of Sight The propensity to be circumspect about sociocultural diversity in Latin America has deep historical roots. This is because the symbolic significance of diversification goes to the heart of what has been constructed over the last two hundred years as a fundamental aspect of collective life: national identity. After having inaugurated Europe’s colonial expansion (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983), a large proportion of the region was also the first to gain independence from the Spanish Crown, which makes it the area with the longest postcolonial history in the world (Bortoluci and Jansen 2013). This independence was won at a time when the modern bureaucratic state was emerging as the key political unit that would be adopted around the world. But while most nascent modern states were building their histories through ethnonational narratives, the newly independent Latin American countries struggled to define themselves. It was only at the start of the twentieth century that the development of the notion of mestizaje provided a master narrative for the subcontinent, emphasizing the mixed character of its populations (Miller 2009). Around the same time, indigenismo was also adopted by governments using their indigenous roots as symbols of long histories while also wishing to claim that they were making efforts to promote the well-​being of their surviving indigenous peoples (Bueno 2015).

290   Raúl Acosta Each country in the region crafted a narrative that appeared to include all of its citizens, while allowing stark inequalities to continue and develop (Paixão and Rossetto 2020). Evoking mestizaje, for example, government authorities claimed colorblindness even as they enabled blatant “pigmentocracies” (Telles 2014). Indigenismo, on the other hand, was used as a public relations strategy by countries with large indigenous populations while allowing their ongoing exploitation or sidelining (Dawson 1998). The rise of identity politics in the 1970s brought renewed attention to the plights of indigenous communities. Some of these groups joined left-​wing guerrilla efforts responding with violence to the injustices they faced and also to make new demands for reparations and reforms (Thorp, Caumartin, and Gray-​Molina 2006). In 1992, thousands of mostly indigenous people throughout the subcontinent commemorated the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas by marching to denounce pervasive inequalities, exploitation, and injustice toward indigenous peoples (Whitten and Hill 1996). In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) rose in arms in Mexico and linked the plight of indigenous communities with the fight against neoliberalism (Máiz 2010). Some groups, especially in Brazil, linked their ethnic identities with environmental protection agendas (Albro 2018, Acosta 2020a). These developments, combined with successive waves of progressive governments in the region, have led to a reappreciation of ethnic groups, especially those of indigenous (Canessa 2006) or slave-​descendent origins (Leite 1999). These groupings have therefore been absorbed into national political corporatist networks (Chartock 2013; Peralta, Ortiz, and Arboleda 2008), sometimes perpetuating existing patron-​client relations (Van Cott 2000). The implication of these political configurations was a juggling act in which states maintained the mestizaje narrative while negotiating various policies for separate identity-​based groupings. In this context, multiculturalism was interpreted in Latin America as a formula to legitimate the recognition of indigenous and slave-​ descendent communities (Aguilar Rivera 2013), but the concept quickly fell out of favor (Lehmann 2016;Hale 2005; Hooker 2005). The regional connotation of multiculturalism was therefore to stress the coexistence of people from numerous different culturally unique groups (though some were related to each other). For many, this meant the recognition of each community, which entailed certain rights (Hale 2002). This, in turn, led to a search for plurinational states based on the argument that each community was a nation in itself (Schilling-​Vacaflor, Kuppe, and Nolte 2012). In practice, however, what remained was an emphasis on performed differences within established understandings of long-​term groupings in the region. In this picture, diversification as a process in which newcomers arrive with their own cultural baggage and intermingle with locals was not a political priority. Or a scholarly one. Diversity is recurrently understood in terms of the different indigenous groups in the region (López 2006). If diversification means increased interactions of people from different sociocultural backgrounds and origins, to those advocating for the rights of specific groups, diversification as a process in which identities may be intermingled poses a threat to the existing political arrangements, however flawed or ineffective they may be. The interest

Discreet Diversification in Latin America    291 in the migration flows of small groups from more places of origin also challenges the prevailing constellations of ethnically recognized categories. All of these issues translate into an unspoken agreement to maintain diversification as a discreet phenomenon, not openly acknowledged. Nevertheless, newcomers keep arriving (Pellegrino 2000). The stark hierarchical social structures along class and racial lines absorbed the incoming migrants with differentiated treatment. For the most appreciated individuals or groups, there is little bureaucratic and everyday friction, regardless of their legal status or professional positions (Rainer 2019; Hayes 2015a, 2015b). For the least appreciated, there is violence from state and non-​state actors (Speed 2016; Infante et al. 2012; Swanson and Torres 2016). In between are various degrees of friction, from constant police harassment to discrimination. Outsiders thus join a hierarchical structure that is reproduced by established interests, making their outsider status less relevant than their place in that structure. The rank that outsiders join, however, depends not only on their own characteristics (i.e., phenotype, class) but also on their preferences, whether ideological or affective, professional or personal. This is where the sympathies, empathies, and antipathies carry particular weight.

Conviviality Driven by Sympathies, Empathies, and Antipathies People migrate to Latin American countries for a variety of reasons: some purposely (Benson 2015), others reluctantly (Sznajder and Roniger 2007) or haphazardly (Massey and Riosmena 2010; Sørensen 2015). Contacts with locals may be established in advance of the move or happen once migrants arrive. Once in the country, people can either choose whom they relate to (van Noorloos and Steel 2016) or face the community that has received them (Chan, Ramírez, and Stefoni 2019). Although each situation is unique, all cases may have personal pull or push factors that determine the interactions with locals or other migrants. The results are social networks that, compared to those in superdiverse hubs (Meissner 2020), may appear particularly fragmented because they are situated in hierarchically fragmented sociocultural and urban contexts. Relations are to a great extent defined by sympathies, empathies, and antipathies. In what follows, I expand on each of these concepts.

Sympathies Positive perceptions of others provide a solid basis for valued relations. These may extend to friendship and care (Amrith 2018; Kathiravelu and Bunnell 2018). In contexts of diversification, sympathies are a type of visceral solidarity. While it is natural for people

292   Raúl Acosta to feel the most at ease among those with whom they share the most (perhaps a place of origin, but also experiences of class, ethnicity, religion, or others), it is also usual for some to establish relations with others because of one or several aspects in common. In this sense, there is a type of cultural familiarity among numerous populations of Latin America due to migration histories and colonial pasts (Monsiváis 2000). Other forms of sympathy are somewhat reluctant, like those of Latin American deportees from the United States with most Americans with whom they share not only a language but also many popular culture references while knowing they cannot live in the country where they feel more rooted (Da Cruz 2018; J. Anderson 2015); or of Central or South Americans with Mexicans, because staying in Mexico was only an option after they could not reach the United States (Basok et al. 2016). Europeans who have chosen to make Mexico their home typically relate mostly to White middle-​class Mexicans. Nevertheless, individuals have different motivations for establishing bonds, spending time, or carrying out tasks with others, which is a first step to building common ground.

Empathies While sympathy and empathy are closely related, empathies entail a willingness to understand what the other goes through. In Latin America’s hierarchical societies, empathic propensities are usually linked to political affinities. Some migrants immediately seek causes they feel identified with and join local struggles; these might include issues of women’s rights (Lawson 1998), queer rights (Massey, Fischer, and Capoferro 2006), or indigenous rights (Massey, Fischer, and Capoferro 2006). This style of relation therefore forms perhaps a more personal bond between people. But because it is purposely exploratory of what another goes through or has gone through, it is a different kind of investment from sympathy. Local histories of political struggle, revolution, and other collective mobilizations are easily identifiable references for foreigners. These may include the Che Guevara, the Zapatistas or EZLN (Khasnabish 2008), or protest singers from around the region, sometimes leading to political tourism (Moynagh 2008).

Antipathies In the highly stratified societies of Latin America, it is common for people to endure relations even when there are open hostilities, such as bullying (Ramos-​Jiménez et al. 2017). On the spectrum of antipathies found in social interactions in contexts of diversification, at one end is the disregarding of others, and at the other, open violence against others. The reasons behind antipathies may be skin color (Canache et al. 2014), class (Blofield 2012), or resentment over perceived injustices, for example, gentrification (Betancur 2014). Open or concealed disagreements may lead groups to steer clear of each other or to recurrent conflicts within or between groups. Decisions to keep others apart often have to do with a set of references about differentiation or distinction

Discreet Diversification in Latin America    293 (Bourdieu 1984), which are reflected in the urban landscapes of Latin America (Low 2001). It is also common for some groups who share a migration background to remain together in a community that perpetuates bonds through intermarriage and friendship (Hu-​DeHart 2013). However, these groupings and their members can also maintain long-​term antagonism between each other. Each of these three attitudes shapes a series of encounters that configure urban sociocultural landscapes among migrants. Routine encounters, in public or private spaces, may become opportunities for socialization and professional networking, performances of mutual disregard, or situations feeding further enmities. In Latin American cities, where inequalities are built into the existing urban (dis)order (Duhau and Giglia 2008), interactions among migrants add to the sense of fragmentation. This is in great part due to the effect of bubble interactions.

Self-​R eferential Interactions Once sympathies, empathies, and antipathies have shaped personal sociability preferences, it is common for groupings to emerge that become self-​enclosed. This is especially acute in highly stratified societies like those in Latin America (Greene 2007). I name these “bubble interactions” because they remain enclosed, isolated from external influences. This term, of course, does not mean that group members never talk to anyone else; rather, it refers to the symbolic weight of what constitutes a self-​referential space. The figure of the bubble represents a form of geometric vitalism (Sloterdijk 2011, 11), a symbolic sphere where certain referents are shared. These may be familiar, cultural, political, class-​based, or otherwise. Or they may be defined by common goals and actions. This bubble arrangement is similar to that which has been identified as “rooms without walls” (Vertovec 2015, 193–​223), a concept that captured the way groups of immigrants in Singapore interacted in busy public spaces—​by maintaining eye contact, striking up conversations with each other, and a displaying sense of cohesiveness as if they were in a private space. The peculiarity of their interaction is that it took place in open space. Bubble interactions work similarly, not as a scene in public spaces (Vertovec 2015, 193), but rather as an ongoing practice of using symbolic affinities to establish bonds between individuals. While “rooms without walls” focused on the spatiality of relations, “bubble interactions” refer to the permanence or reliance of weak ties (Granovetter 1973). Superdiversity studies attempt to go beyond a focus on single-​issue interaction in contexts of migration-​led diversification. Whenever specific ethnic, religious, or national groupings are studied, they are usually examined in increasingly diverse contexts. Such has been the case with Latin Americans in London (McIlwaine 2011; Berg 2019), Roma minorities (Tremlett 2014), and other groupings. What is of most interest, therefore, is not the set of self-​referential modes of communication and exchange within these groupings, but what they come to signify in wider processes where other cultural frameworks or references exist.

294   Raúl Acosta Part of the resistance to thinking about diversification in Latin America is the insistence of a taxonomical conception of multiculturalism. Indigenous groups are classified and categorized according to language, customs, sometimes territory, or heritage. This classificatory system does not only refer to a multiplicity of groups; it also has political and policy implications. On one of my field research trips in 2019, I visited a local museum of indigenous cultures in Mexico City. One of the introductory placards referred to Mexico as a “megadiverse” country, and listed the numerous indigenous groups recognized by the government. This concept of “megadiversity” was used in 1998 to identify countries with a high density of biodiversity and traditional knowledge (Mittermeier et al. 1997). Specifically, it was used by the nongovernmental organization Conservation International to bring about what is known as the Cancún Declaration of Like-​Minded Megadiverse Countries, and agreement between twenty countries for consultation and cooperation for the preservation and sustainable use of biological diversity (Brehm et al. 2008). The concept has been apparently adopted by the Mexico’s ministry of indigenous affairs to refer to the variety of indigenous groups in the country. This attitude thus demonstrates the fact that instead of thinking about the ecology of sociocultural diversification, the interest is in the classification of the different groups that come together. The reason behind such taxonomic propensity lies in the political history of the region. Because specific group identities were politically useful in corporatist and clientelist networks, their recognition and reification was perpetuated. Although these corporatist and clientelist structures have been gradually dismantled, their prevalence during the last hundred years (at least) means that they continue to influence the attitudes and links that shape social groupings (Schrover, this volume). Because there are advantages in performing certain identities, people do so. In recent times, for example, as scholars have explored the histories and situations of Afro-​descendants in Latin America (Ochoa 1997), some communities have chosen to perform these identities more forthrightly than they used to (Perulero 2019). It is an invention of tradition at the group level, and it has led, in turn, to new demands for inclusion in development programs and attention by governments in the region (Reiter and Simmons 2012). In reality, however, people mingle outside the groups identified in these taxonomies, including with new or recent arrivals to Latin America. But these relations tend to be bubble interactions, where the strength of attachments does not lie in identity-​based indicators, but in other issues or practices, such as ideology, religion, activism, or art. The irony of these bubble interactions is that they usually ignore or play down the diversity that gives them shape. This constitutes a type of methodological nationalism in group formation. Outsiders are distrusted unless they show allegiance to local symbolism and traditions. But diversification still takes place, albeit beneath such surface of allegiance. The repercussions of these discreet forms of diversification, therefore, need to be studied in more detail. Among urban activists, I have realized that diversification has been key for their efforts to explore new sensibilities about urban experiences (Acosta Garcia 2019), as well as in reinforcing existing hierarchies and inequalities

Discreet Diversification in Latin America    295 (Acosta 2020b). I have focused on only one arena of interaction: urban activism. There is the potential to explore many other areas where people intermingle.

Conclusion The use of superdiversity as a lens to study sociocultural diversification in Latin America faces an uphill battle. And yet there is a potential for understanding the unique diversification processes in contexts of deep-​seated mestizaje and indigenismo policies. While it is tempting to draw from studies originating in other contexts to find key concepts for understanding diversification, it would surely be worth the effort to explore repercussions of these vernacular forms of diversification in greater depth. The fact that the density and percentage of such interactions are considerably less significant regarding the overall population of Latin American countries, may actually help researchers focus on specific effects of sociocultural diversification. A better understanding of the discreet diversification Latin America is experiencing may provide a valuable comparison with areas of high-​intensity superdiversity. It may also help convince regional policymakers of societal changes that may be bubbling below the surface.

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Chapter 20

Supe rdiversit y i n H i g h ly Regu l ated Gl oba l C i t i e s Laavanya Kathiravelu

Introduction Intra-​Asian migration accounts for one of the biggest flows of people in the world, affecting almost 30 percent of the world’s migrants. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states in West Asia account for the largest migration flows in that region.1 Most of these flows are characterized as temporary and circular, and they involve sojourning populations rather than permanent forms of settlement. This is in contrast to the majority focus of studies in the migration literature, which have tried to understand movement, integration, and settlement by assuming a linear trajectory that results in an endpoint of permanent settlement. Much of this literature also takes race or ethnicity as the main axis of cultural difference and the primary impediment to successful immersion in a new nation (Wimmer 2015). In the anglophone literature, this field of research has also looked primarily at North American and European contexts. This chapter examines superdiversity as a frame that challenges these taken-​for-​granted assumptions. It argues that superdiversity is particularly suited for interrogations of shifting migration trends, such as different temporal waves and skill strata among migrants from the same sending country. In arguing for the need for analytical perspectives that keep up with changing social realities, the chapter grounds itself in diverse city-​spaces in Asia, specifically, Singapore and Dubai—​two dynamic centers of contemporary migration in Asia (defined broadly, and in accordance with the United Nations’ classifications that see the Persian Gulf as part of West Asia). Superdiversity is understood as an analytical perspective prompted by an empirical phenomenon that is primarily migration-​led and fueled by related developments, such as increasing interethnic marriage and variable immigration categories, and the complex societal changes that result. This chapter examines the conceptual applicability and productivity of superdiversity to highlight particular configurations of difference within

302   Laavanya Kathiravelu societies in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. Instead of seeing these as unique spaces of migration-​led diversity, the chapter conceives the forms of mobility taking place in them as unexceptional; it argues that they indicate increasingly dominant types of movement and migration regulation that are becoming the global standard, and that are adopted to various degrees by other states. In looking at concentrated examples of highly diverse societies outside the traditional centers of intellectual knowledge production and theory building, the chapter contributes to wider efforts to decenter epistemic norms within the study of superdiversity. The chapter proceeds as follows: The superdiversity literature is reviewed with a focus on the uneven international spread of the paradigm as well as the main critiques that point to the lack of discussion of notions of power within current conceptualizations. Other comparable paradigms which seek to understand diversity are then reviewed in relation to their suitability for understanding contemporary migration. A broad comparative discussion of “Western” and “non-​ Western” cities is undertaken before focusing in on the case studies of Singapore and Dubai in assessing the analytical productivity of superdiversity as a frame that provides us useful perspectives to understand contemporary social trends and complex realities. The chapter concludes with some key observations about how the superdiversity paradigm could be expanded in order to better evaluate the forms that migration-​led diversity takes in highly globalized and highly regulated urban migration contexts such as Singapore and Dubai.

Superdiversity and Related Analytical Paradigms The notion of superdiversity was in large part a response in studies of migration to move beyond a focus on ethnicity alone, and to instead understand the impact of many smaller groups of migrants on the urban landscape. From this initial prompt, notions of superdiversity have evolved to indicate multidimensional reconfigurations of social forms, complications in the classifications of previously taken-​for-​granted communities, and the concomitant complexity of understanding interactions within such a milieu. Most research on superdiversity draws from empirical contexts in North America and Western Europe, understandably so since the origins of the term can be traced to Vertovec’s (2006) response to the changing nature of diversity in the United Kingdom. Since its initial conceptualization, the term superdiversity has been used in various national contexts, including in Germany, Australia (Wise and Velayutham 2009), New Zealand (Spoonley and Butcher 2009), and the United States, among others (Vertovec 2019). South Africa (Vertovec 2015), Zimbabwe, Malaysia (Chan 2020), Singapore (Kathiravelu 2015a) and Indonesia (Goebel 2015) are some of the “non-​Western” spaces where superdiversity has also been used as frame to understand contemporary

Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities    303 migration patterns and the varied changes that these mobilities have wrought in each national or transnational context. However, hubs of intra-​Asian mobility, and particularly cities within the Persian Gulf, are still underrepresented within this genre. When the term superdiversity is invoked, it is often merely as a backdrop to a study or to describe local conditions of intermingling rather than to indicate or interrogate how these result in new and complex social configurations. Implications of superdiversity for policy initiatives and notions of integration, belonging, and assimilation are also underexamined in non-​Western contexts. One of the key critiques of superdiversity has been its lack of engagement with the politics of power, particularly in the realm of the everyday and through examinations of “fleeting” encounters (Aptekar 2019). Here, it is suggested that the attention of the superdiversity framework on newer trends of migration-​ led diversity potentially understates the relevance of older hierarchies that still characterize social relations in urban spaces. Although superdiversity speaks to realities of increasingly complex migrations and resultant variegated social divisions, reassessments have called for a focus on the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which differences matter and the methods and means through which they are made to matter (Back and Sinha 2016; Hall 2017). Particularly in settler-​colonial national contexts, such as Australia, or in the United States, with a history of slavery, contemporary configurations of superdiversity have been seen as inadequate in mooring contemporary hierarchies to older racialized forms of discrimination and racism. In taking this critique into account, the analytical productivity of superdiversity should be seen as pointing to understudied and overlooked aspects of migrant-​led diversity rather than as an analytic of power relations or inequality, which, other approaches focused centrally on structural discrimination, racism or privilege are designed to tackle head-​on. The superdiversity paradigm alerts us to the variegated and emergent forms that shifting configurations of power result in, rather than providing a theoretical basis for them. The analytical purchase of the notion is then in providing a lens that makes us aware of how significantly contemporary migration has altered social realities for so many individuals, communities, and cities, but simultaneously, also maintained older hierarchies, exacerbated inequalities and heightened awareness of difference (Cf. Spoonley 2014).

Other Paradigms and Perspectives As others have pointed out, the parallels between superdiversity and intersectionality as perspectives that examine overlapping axes of difference are impossible not to acknowledge (Vertovec 2019). The latter, however, was explicitly developed to interrogate hierarchies of power that arise out of different demographic, political, and historical conditions. Intersectional theories are also concerned with race, gender, and class as predominant social divisions (Meissner 2015). They are less focused on categories that are often more salient with migrant populations such as immigration status, migration channel, length of stay, nationality, and skill level. One of the key issues with

304   Laavanya Kathiravelu intersectional frameworks is that they are less able to recognize the diversity within categories of race or class. Within complex migrant-​receiving environments, this lower-​ level boundary-​making often has important implications for (urban) inclusion and exclusion, as the examples cited later show. Intersectionality’s focus on intersections between large demographic variables rather than within them also implies more fixity rather than an acknowledgment of the dynamic nature of contemporary mobility. Notions of immigrant integration that have been a central concern in migration studies are primarily from a perspective of assuming that migration is one way and leads to permanent settlement. It assumes an endpoint of integration, while critiques point out that integration almost always partial and ongoing, even decades after immigrant communities are established within an adopted context (Meissner and Heil 2020). The concerns of an integration paradigm do not consider the circular or “stepped” (Paul and Yeoh 2020) nature of migration in many “Global South” locations, reflecting a perspective that temporary migrants’ issues of belonging, social inclusion, and cultural integration are not as significant as those of more permanent immigrant groups. It thus leaves out a disproportionately large “permanently temporary” proportion of many diverse cities, including low-​wage workers without access to permanent residency, irregular migrants, and middle-​class expatriates who choose to retain the citizenship of their country of origin. Superdiversity, in contrast, allows for understandings of differential modes of inclusion even within immigrant populations with varied legal and immigration status.

Comparing Superdiversity the “West” and “Non-​West” Although the scope of this chapter does not allow for a fuller development of this broad (and perhaps overgeneralized) comparison, I point out two key differences that have implications for understanding the significance of boundaries and categories between migration in the traditional examined centers of Europe and North America, and key examples of the “non-​West”; globalized cities in Asia with high migrant dependencies. One of the best-​known applications of the frame of superdiversity is in Wessendorf ’s work on inner city London suburbs (2014b). Here, difference is normalized when classifications based on nationality, ethnicity and language no longer hold the potential to order and characterize difference in easily identifiable ways (Wessendorf 2014a). Cultural diversity as “commonplace” however, also needs to be contextualized. The suburban superdiversity that Wessendorf or Aptekar (2015) describe in London and New York are in large part a result of organic processes of mobility and residential enclaving as well as desegregation. Although Singapore and Dubai have long been acknowledged to be global cities that host superdiverse populations, the ways in which diversity is geographically dispersed,

Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities    305 as well as how it is bureaucratically and politically managed reveals stark differences when compared to spaces such as New York and London. These variations, I suggest, have implications for the ways in which superdiversity acts as an analytical tool. As the following sections show, residential and neighborhood level racial integration is highly planned in Singapore. In Dubai, communities demarcated by nationality have their own schools, social clubs, and places of worship. At the spatial level of analysis, in particular, analyses of superdiversity must look beyond these structural practices of boundary-​ making and understand how these impact and shape more organic forms of interaction that take place in corporate offices, shopping malls, parks, and other spaces of interaction that are less mediated by state instituted governance practices. The historical specificities of being former colonies, as opposed to centers of colonial power and domination, also warrant different starting points when understanding hierarchies of race and legacies of diversity management. For instance, although the whiteness still holds privilege in cities like Singapore and Dubai, the cultural, political, and economic dominance of the majority Chinese population in Singapore means that the assumed dominance of whiteness is in many ways contested. Likewise, the local Emiratis form the undisputed elite in Dubai, despite their numerical insignificance. Interestingly, the notion of the Emirati privilege also incorporates descendants of former African slaves, now considered completely assimilated into the regional Arab Muslim identity (Hopper 2014). The superdiversity frame must take into account local inflections of such ethnic structures of power and subordination, that do not conform to the ways historically racialized privilege works in much of the “West.”

Case Study Singapore: Multiracialism and Co-​ethnic Immigration Singapore, a tiny island in Southeast Asia, is a self-​defined multiracial city-​state, with an ethnic of majority “Chinese” (74 percent), and minority “Indian” (9 percent) and “Malay” (13 percent) population. Ethnic communities that don’t fit into these three reductive categories are classified into one undifferentiated label as “Other” (3 percent). “Race,” an official category listed on identity documents in Singapore, is allocated and defined by the state, rather than wholly self-​nominated. These racial categorizations do not just function as census categories but have wide-​ranging and highly significant social, political, and economic outcomes. Social welfare, housing, and education policies are drawn up along these prescribed lines of race or ethnic group—​where citizens and permanent residents are classified as Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other (CMIO). In the last two decades, the majority of new immigrants to Singapore have come from other regions in Asia—​namely, India and China—​paralleling older migration trajectories to the island. Officially, Singapore’s ethnic composition has remained largely unchanged despite large immigration and naturalization over the past two-​and-​a-​half

306   Laavanya Kathiravelu decades, amounting to an increase in population of one and a half million.2 In attracting migrants that share ethnoracial identities with local-​born citizens, Singapore’s immigration policies were conceived with the understanding that common linguistic, religious and cultural affiliations would ensure easy and less disruptive incorporation of a foreign population. This, however, has not been the case. There has instead been a backlash resulting in public protests, unprecedented electoral shifts and a resultant change in government policy, slowing down the rate of migration and immigrant naturalization. This has resulted in the emergence of a two-​tiered citizenship in terms of boundary-​making practices in the quotidian realm. This has meant the solidification of a formerly racially fragmented Singaporean national identity, that is now largely defined against a migrant and newly immigrant Other. This indicates the partial success of post-​ independence nation-​building project that sought to create a coherent Singaporean identity. Simultaneously, the emergence of everyday nationalisms that are opposed to statist articulations mark the failure of the race-​based model of the multiracial nation that the post-​colonial state has adopted and propagated. Intra-​ethnic tensions have emerged as one of the most vehement and vitriolic ways in which anti-​immigrant tension is expressed. This is evident, for example, in acts of distancing and differentiating that Singaporean Chinese engage in, in relation to new Chinese migrants from the PRC (People’s Republic of China; Yeoh and Lin 2013; Liu 2014). Similar patterns of intra-​ethnic animosity are apparent within the Indian community, where new immigrants are largely Hindi speaking and highly educated North Indians, as oppose to an older citizen population composed primarily of Tamil-​ speaking Southerners with less-​privileged class backgrounds (Kathiravelu 2020). These distancing discourses revolve around ideas of civilizational superiority and structural disadvantage, indicating that socioeconomic class, educational level, length of stay, and perceived cultural difference can prove strong barriers to integration, even with shared ethnic heritage, religious practices, and phenotypical similarities that often make it impossible to easily distinguish local-​born from newly incorporated citizens. The literature on migration and superdiversity has been enriched by recent discussions of intra-​ethnic tensions between old and new migrants from the same sending society (see, e.g., Yanasmayan 2016). The findings of research in Singapore echo much of what is highlighted in the literature—​that new migrants with a shared country of origin or ethnicity do not necessarily integrate into older existing communities. However, research in Singapore also departs from this strand of comparing “old” and “new” communities in that it does not compare two immigrant groups or different waves of migrants but citizens, with new immigrants who are co-​ethnics (Ho and Kathiravelu 2021). While we could see this as different waves of the same diaspora, both groups have very different extents of attachment to their (imagined) homelands, and varied modes of allegiance to the Singaporean nation-​state. This divergence is key in complicating race-​ based notions of immigrant integration. Here, adopting a superdiversity lens that does not just understand diversity as “more ethnicity” is productive in interrogating intra-​ ethnic differences and implications for national identity, affective notions of belonging and xenophobia.

Superdiversity in Highly Regulated Global Cities    307 Covid-​19 has exposed further complications between migrants and locals. White,

South Asian and Chinese middle-​class expatriates faced increased surveillance and xenophobia from citizens and state authorities for flouting safe distancing restrictions. On the other hand, mental health concerns for quarantined low-​wage migrants from India and Bangladesh have pervaded public discourse in the city-​state. With the spread of the coronavirus predominantly in migrant worker dormitories, there were huge outpourings of support (in material and affective terms) for low-​wage migrants in appreciation of their efforts in building and maintaining the country’s infrastructure. Their importance as “essential workers” also became far more apparent under locked-​down conditions. This group, who were previously seen as disposable and temporary, have, through their inclusion into public health initiatives, become part of polity in terms of being given access to free healthcare and quarantine facilities. Changing attitudes toward migrant welfare can be seen as part of new “territories of care” (Simone, this volume) that are emerging within superdiverse spaces as a result of shifting priorities for nations that are hyperconnected, reliant on migrant labor, and therefore more vulnerable to pandemic spreads. Within these regimes, citizenship and immigration status no longer function as accurate indicators of social (and political) inclusion.

Case Study Dubai: Citizen against the Foreign Other Dubai, an emirate in the Persian Gulf3 and part of the federated United Arab Emirates (UAE) has a resident population that is 91 percent foreign,4 perhaps the largest immigrant to local ratio in the world. Immigrant communities highly diverse not just in terms of nationality, but also socio-​economic status, length of stay and skill levels. A traditional rentier state, Dubai’s inflexible immigration regime limits citizenship through patrilineal descent.5 Emirati citizenship is synonymous with being ethnically Arab and Muslim. Emirati nationals are almost always employed by the state or own businesses employing foreigners, creating a two-​tier labor force that corresponds with the citizen/​ foreigner6 divide. Despite the lack of access to citizenship, many, spend their entire adult lives working and raising families in the UAE.7 Despite being born and having lived in Dubai all their lives, even second-​generation migrants have no access to formal citizenship, and require work or education visas after they turn 18 to legally remain in the state. Prior to adulthood, children are official dependents of their parents. Many choose to remain in the emirate as adults, building families and careers. The connection to home countries for these permanently temporary migrants is highly formal and functional. Ethnicized divides between citizen Arab and noncitizen foreigner are starkly evident in every aspect of life in Dubai and the wider Arab Gulf. Children of expatriates typically attend private schools, following the curriculum of their home countries, and do not

308   Laavanya Kathiravelu master Arabic, the national language of the Emirates to any level of spoken or written fluency, despite compulsory classes from grades 1 to 10. In addition to this linguistic divide, there is also an acknowledgment of very different life trajectories, even among the middle class. Emirati students, some of whom may also attend private schools, are assumed to have ready-​made jobs waiting for them, either in a high paying civil service position, or in taking over a family business that employs foreigners. Noncitizens are not allowed to wholly own businesses, except within specially demarcated Free Trade Zones. Their visas are dependent on their having a local Emirati “sponsor” or kafeel who then has the authority to revoke the visa, making it impossible for the noncitizen to stay. Notions of who can belong and who cannot, however, are now shifting with the new categories of Golden Visa and retirement visas, that enable nonlocals to stay even when they are nonproductive workers. This is still largely dependent on skill level and economic investment in the Emirate,8 but it indicates a regional shift that attempts to acknowledge the need for more variegated modes of affiliation to the Gulf state. Here categories of race or ethnicity alone are inadequate in representing the intersections of skill level, nationality, length of stay, immigration status, and gender that shape access to benefits and mediate levels of precarity. A recurrent trope in the literature on the Gulf positions the migrant as Other against an ethnocratic configuration of state and citizenry (Longva 2005; Dresch 2006). In these analyses, the diversity of the migrant experience is left out, and the focus is typically on low-​wage migrants who face limits on family reunification and length of stay. Low wage workers, migrating in circular ways, can be seen as far more transnational than middle-​ class migrants, tied to their home countries in terms of the economic link of remittances, as well as emotionally, through family ties (Kathiravelu 2015b). The middle-​class migrant, with far more tenuous ties to the home country, inhabits a more stable position of the permanent stranger inside the nation. Most analyses of the emirate, however, do not deal with issues of belonging or long-​term affiliation of the migrant population, as migrants are seen to be in an unchanging and liminal subject position, having no access to formal citizenship (Sater 2014). Vora’s work (2013) stands as exception, showing that foreign business elites become quasi-​citizens in the sense of having equal access to neoliberal gains within the economy but who do not contest or question the hierarchy of citizenship within these parameters. Many middle-​class, long-​term migrants also challenge the foreigner-​citizen opposition through everyday constructions of belonging and nationalism that reinterpret existing exclusionary configurations. For European-​ born Muslim North Africans, for example, a space like Dubai offers a sense of possibility, where they are not discriminated against on ethnic or religious lines, and where their continental credentials bestow a status that allows for social mobility. Flipping the assumptions in mainstream migration studies, Dubai is the ideal imagined destination, and Europe becomes the site of departure (Alloul 2020). Adopting the frame of superdiversity allows us to understand the complexities of such shifting notions of belonging and understands how ethnoracial identity takes on vastly different meanings in different migrant contexts, where certain forms of “diversity” (such as skill level) are valued over others (such as ethnicity).

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Conclusions: Expanding Superdiversity as a Frame As this chapter has demonstrated with two case studies, complex intersections of cultural capital, skill level, length of stay, class, nationality, and immigration status (among other variables), characterize the formation of new dynamic hierarchies in superdiverse urban migration hubs in the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia. Immigration or citizenship status, “race,” color, or cultural markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and place of birth alone cannot accurately depict who belongs and who doesn’t within such spaces. The cases of Singapore and Dubai demonstrate that when using immigrant integration as a policy and frame of analysis it is necessary to be cognizant of the need to move away from “race” as the starting point of understanding differences under migrant-​ led diversity. Concepts such as “immigrant integration” are limited in understanding how belonging and affiliation work in societies such as Singapore and Dubai, where formal legal citizenship or permanent residency (or the lack thereof) do not necessarily result in civic and social inclusion or exclusion. Expanding the frame, length of stay, level of skill, and ancestral affiliations or racial capital would make it possible to more explicitly foreground these elements as important components of the complexity that superdiversity signals. In this way, this chapter joins the calls for a “methodological reassessment” (Vertovec 2019) of studies of migration in global city hubs outside the “West.” Superdiversity here provides a useful framework for comparative analysis of politically and culturally different city-​states, but with migration regimes whose modes of regulation share key similarities. This framing allows for an understanding of how local governance models and conditions shape the circumstances of diversification and generate divergent outcomes for different groups of citizen and (im)migrant populations (cf. Grillo, in this volume ). Shifting the focus from the traditional axes of difference such as race, temporal factors like length of stay, and cultural capital signaled through possessing local knowledge become better indicators of belonging and “integration” where there are layered historical and familial connections between the sending and receiving contexts. These conditions are increasingly important, particularly in situations where formal and informal affiliation is increasingly stratified and graduated. Superdiversity gives us a lens that allows us to look beyond the traditional focus on ethnic and racialized difference and opens up possibilities of understanding a large majority of the globally mobile who are not considered full citizens or wholly outsiders. Although adopting a superdiversity perspective highlights that the nature of stratification depends on context, it also reinforces established understandings that demonstrate the precarity of working-​class migrants in terms of rights and welfare provision, especially in global cities (Sassen 1996). In both Singapore and Dubai, although low-​wage migrants are increasingly seen as integral to national

310   Laavanya Kathiravelu development, and standards of welfare and treatment are improving, they are still highly precarious in terms of accessing residency rights. Their lack of cultural and economic capital still limits their social inclusion, indicating the importance of acknowledging enduring structures of violence, dominance, and subordination, even in superdiverse spaces. The framework of superdiversity allows us to see how multiple and varied forms of migration-​led diversity entail different forms of inclusion and exclusion, depending on temporal, geographical, and structural scales. Although superdiversity is not a theoretical framework aimed at interrogating inequalities or xenophobia, as a lens it has the potential to expose latent hierarchies and subjugation given the attention it directs to dynamic processes of boundary-​making in migration settings that look beyond existing framings. With the current coronavirus pandemic accelerating the trend of states looking inward and pulling back from being hospitable to migrants, it is especially important to understand differences beyond easy racialization and stereotypes that reify and reinforce political polarizations. Global migration flows outside the “West,” in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf would benefit immensely from such a reframing.

Notes 1. United Nations. 2017. “International migrant stock: The 2017 revision.” Accessed 14 February 2022. https://​www.un.org/​en/​deve​lopm​ent/​desa/​pop​ulat​ion/​migrat​ion/​data /​est​imat​es2/​esti​mate​s17.asp. 2. Singapore has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world (1.2 births per woman). Within this context, the government has presented immigration as a way to forestall falling population rates, as well as ensure continued economic growth. 3. Here I use “Persian Gulf ” and “Arab Gulf ” interchangeably, though acknowledging the politically contested nature of both terms. 4. Dubai Statistics Center. 2020. “Number of Population Estimated by Nationality-​Emirate of Dubai (2020 -​2018).” Accessed 3 February 2022. https://​www.dsc.gov.ae/​Rep​ort/​DSC​_​SYB​ _​202​0_​01​_​03.pdf. 5. To establish citizenship through the mothers’ bloodline, it is necessary to seek special permission from the state. 6. “Foreigner” rather than “migrant” is the term used in much of academic as well as everyday discourse in the Gulf. Here I employ them interchangeably. This terminology in itself is indicative of the ways in which non-​Emiratis, while seen as culturally foreign, are not necessarily seen as outside the nation-​state, as the term “migrant” implies. 7. The natural increase of the population of Dubai through noncitizen births far outstrips that of the Emiratis, indicating that existing migrants are choosing to build lives in the emirate. 8. Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority. 2021. “Golden visa -​Long-​ term residence visas in the UAE.” Accessed 14 February 2022. https://afz.ae/en/golden-visa.

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References Alloul, J. 2020. “Leaving Europe, Aspiring Access: Racial Capital and Its Spatial Discontents among the Euro-​Maghrebi Minority.” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 18 (3): 313–​325. Aptekar, S. 2015. “Visions of Public Space: Reproducing and Resisting Social Hierarchies in a Community Garden.” Sociological Forum 30 (1): 209–​227. Aptekar, S. 2019. “Super-​ Diversity as a Methodological Lens: Re-​ centering Power and Inequality.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 53–​70. Back, L. and S. Sinha. 2016. “Multicultural Conviviality in the Midst of Racism’s Ruins.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 37 (5): 517–​532. Chan, R. S. K. 2020. “Aesthetics of Super-​Diversity: The Cantonese Ancestral Clan Building as a Social Integration Platform.” Finisterra 55 (113): 45–​62. Dresch, P. 2006. “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society.” In Globalization and the Gulf, edited by J. W. Fox, N. Mourtada-​Sabah, and M. al-​Mutawa, 200–​222. New York: Routledge. Goebel, Zane. 2015. Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Suzanne M. 2017. “Mooring ‘Super-​Diversity’ to a Brutal Migration Milieu.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (9): 1562–​1573. Ho, Elaine Lynn-​Ee, and Laavanya Kathiravelu. 2021. “More Than Race: A Comparative Analysis of “New” Indian and Chinese Migration in Singapore.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1–​20. doi: 10.1080/​01419870.2021.1924391. Hopper, M. S. 2014. “The African Presence in Eastern Arabia.” In The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, edited by L. G. Potter, 327–​382. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kathiravelu, Laavanya. 2015a. “Encounter, Transport and Transitory Spaces.” In Diversities Old and New: Migration and Socio-​Spatial Patterns in New York, Singapore and Johannesburg, edited by Steven Vertovec, 120–​134. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kathiravelu, Laavanya. 2015b. “The Other NRIs: The Case of Low-​Wage Indian Migrants in the Gulf.” In Indian and Chinese Immigrant Communities: A Comparative Approach, edited by J. Battacharya and C. Thadani, 257–​280. London: Anthem Press. Kathiravelu, Laavanya. 2020. “‘What Kind of Indian Are You?’ Frictions and Fractures between Singaporean Indians and Foreign-​Born NRIs.” In Navigating Differences: Integration in Singapore, edited by T. Chong, 110–​125. Singapore: ISEAS Press. Liu, H. 2014. “Beyond Co-​ethnicity: The Politics of Differentiating and Integrating New Immigrants in Singapore.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (7): 1225–​1238. Longva, A. N. 2005. “Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens, Expatriates and the Socio-​political System in Kuwait.” In Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, edited by P. Dresch and J. Piscatori, 114–​135. London: I.B. Tauris. Meissner, Fran. 2015. “Migration in Migration-​ Related Diversity? The Nexus between Superdiversity and Migration Studies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 556–​567. https://​doi .org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2015.970​209. Meissner, Fran, and Tilmann Heil. 2020. “Deromanticising Integration: On the Importance of Convivial Disintegration.” Migration Studies 9 (3): 740–​ 758. https://​doi.org/​10.1093 /​migrat​ion/​mnz​056.

312   Laavanya Kathiravelu Paul, A. M., and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2020. “Studying Multinational Migrations, Speaking Back to Migration Theory.” Global Networks 21 (1): 3–​17. Sassen, S. 1996. “Identity in the Global City: Economic and Cultural Encasements.” In The Geography of Identity, edited by P. Yaeger, 131–​151. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sater, J. 2014. “Citizenship and Migration in Arab Gulf Monarchies.” Citizenship Studies 18 (3–​4): 292–​302. Spoonley, Paul. 2014. “Superdiversity, Social Cohesion, and Economic Benefits.” IZA World of Labor 46: 1–​10. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.15185/​iza​wol.46. Spoonley, Paul, and Andrew Butcher. 2009. “Reporting Superdiversity. The Mass Media and Immigration in New Zealand.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 30 (4): 355–​372. https://​doi .org/​10.1080/​072568​6090​3213​638. Vertovec, Steven. 2006. “The Emergence of Super-​Diversity in Britain.” Working Paper No. 25. COMPAS Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, 1–​42. Vertovec, Steven, ed. 2015. Diversities Old and New: Migration and Socio-​spatial Patterns in New York, Singapore and Johannesburg. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vertovec, Stevem. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139. Vora, N. 2013. Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014a. “ ‘Being Open but Sometimes Closed’: Conviviality in a Super-​ Diverse London Neighbourhood.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (4): 392–​405. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014b. Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Super-​Diverse Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wimmer, A. 2015. “Race-​centrism: A Critique and a Research Agenda.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (13): 2186–​2205. Wise, Amanda, and S. Velayutham. 2009. “Introduction: Multiculturalism and Everyday Life.” In Everyday Multiculturalism, edited by Amanda Wise and S. Velayutham, 1–​20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yanasmayan, Z. 2016. “Does Education ‘Trump’ Nationality? Boundary-​Drawing Practices among Highly Educated Migrants from Turkey.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (11): 2041–​2059. Yeoh, B., and W. Lin. 2013. “Chinese Migration to Singapore: Discourses and Discontents in a Globalizing Nation-​State.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 22 (1): 31–​54.

Chapter 21

T ransnationa l i sm, E l ite Migrants , a nd the Spatia l i t y of Su perdive rsi t y Sakura Yamamura

Introduction The spatiality of superdiversity is still a nascent area of study within superdiversity research. Yet the interrelations between the global phenomenon of migration-​led diversity in society and the spatial expression of superdiversity at the local level, particularly in the urban spatial context, have been hinted at. Indeed, the seminal work on superdiversity based on observations in London (Vertovec 2007), and subsequent works have also pointed at the crucial urban lens of analyzing superdiversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Berg and Sigona 2013). Empirical research further breaks down this urban perspective to the smaller-​scale neighborhood level, including analyses of superdiverse streets as a transethnographical approach (Hall 2015), encounters and conviviality in superdiverse neighborhoods (Gidley 2013; Wessendorf 2014), and sociolinguistic assessments of linguistic landscapes (Blommaert 2013). What has been called out to be important, yet not been integrated well is in fact how these spatial expressions of diversities on the local level are embedded in the discourses on urbanizations on the global level, which means the scalar contextualization of spatial superdiversity.

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Connecting Superdiversity to the Transnational Migration-​ and-​C ity Nexus As GlickSchiller and Çağlar (2011) pointed out more than a decade ago, urban and migration studies, particularly in the context of transnationalism, have focused on the migrants who are in the cities and the migration to cities, and has neglected the nexus of “migration and cities.” Research on transnationalism has been studied extensively, first with Latin American transmigrants in the United States (cf. Levitt 2001; Smith and Guarnizo 1998), followed by research on transnational communities in Europe and in the Asian context (e.g., Faist 2000; Yeoh et al. 2000). In fact, the “transnational turn” in migration research (King 2012), which was introduced by GlickSchiller et al. in their seminal work in 1992, resulted in a burgeoning of literature on transnational migration (Vertovec 2009; Kivisto 2001; Pries 2013). However, what needs to be focused here once again is the migration-​city nexus in these literatures. Developing from Smith’s (2001) idea of transnational urbanism, several researchers had analyzed the specific context of migration in the urban, with particularly Yeoh and other authors bridging the gap on the nexus of global or globalizing cities and transnational migration (Yeoh et al. 2000; Yeoh and Chang 2001). Yet, as GlickSchiller and Çağlar (2011) noted, conceptual debates on the connection between cities and migration remained underexplored. This is exactly what the concept of superdiversity might be able to bring to this fundamental question. The term superdiversity describes the multifactorial diversity of diversity in society, thus the migration-​led diversity in society in different areas of the world (Vertovec, 2007; 2019). Indeed, the diversification of migrants is occurring not only regarding the ethnic and national origins, or further individual sociocultural and socioeconomic characteristics. The diversification also covers aspects of migration channels, legal statuses as part of migration policy contexts or migration networks through and by which individuals migrate. Superdiversity from the migration context can be understood to encompass the different forms and types of transnational migration. In fact, the existence and proliferation of different transnational migrant groups contribute clearly to the superdiversity in specific cities. The superdiversity perspective would then not only be to call out the ethnic groupings of transnational migration, but also to point at the mingling of different transnational communities with each other, and the diversification of the transnational communities. The localization of such increase in diversities of sociocultural interactions and social practices of transnationalism especially in specific urban spaces around the globe could then be understood as the sociospatial expression of superdiversity. With the spatial perspective to superdiversity, the concept of superdiversity would be integrated more into the transnationalism research and its quest on the nexus of “migration and cities.”

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Bringing Interscalarity into the Spatial Superdiversity Superdiversity research has so far focused on the empirical study and description of superdiversity in space. Empirical research shows how beyond the statistical analysis of migration data, society is diversifying in its urban contexts. Notable areas of research are the linguistic landscapes and the aforementioned anthropological approaches of transethnography, with results showing how diversities in their different linguistic, ethnic, or even religious dimensions become visible in urban space (Hall 2015; Blommaert and Rampton 2016; Blommaert 2013; Burchardt and Becci 2016). These changes in the urban landscape have also been surveyed from an entrepreneurial perspective, where not only issues of ethnicity or language but also a diversification of ethnic minority and migrant entrepreneurship in terms of business types and business strategies were pointed out (Yamamura and Lassalle, 2020). Such empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that superdiversity is not found everywhere in cities on the globe, and even within specific superdiverse cities, the characteristics of superdiversity is limited to smaller scale areas within such city. This brings us to the question of the actual context of the spatiality of superdiversity in urban spaces. Though superdiversity obviously occurs in large metropolitan cities, where different groups of migrants come together and there is increased mixing or conviviality among groups, as Vertovec’s original case and succeeding research projects have shown (Vertovec 2015; Wessendorf and Phillimore 2019), a clearer conceptualization of the interscalar connection between the local urban transformation and the global phenomenon of migration-​led diversity in society has only received little attention with regards to the spatiality of superdiversity. When urban settings are considered in urban superdiversity, they are viewed as social spaces in which conviviality and encounters are emplaced (Wessendorf 2014; Berg et al. 2016). As Hall and Savage (2016) point out, the urban theories at the global scale, which discuss issues of global planetary urbanization (Brenner 2018) or the interconnectedness in the global cities network (Taylor and Derudder 2004; Taylor et al 2012), tend to have a stronger economic and economic geographical perspective. In fact, the debates on space-​making or global-​city-​making remain on the global level of either global players or further economic actors or even at the local level focus on the spatiality of corporate and real estate geographies, neglecting somewhat the human dimensions of these global urban contexts. At the same time, extensive research on superdiversity has been conducted on the urban level. Yet research on the spatial extent from a sociospatial perspective that cover the actual local social-​ spatial practices and patterns of migrants and local populations that contribute to the (super)diversified spaces, and further connect to the global scale, remain scarce. One theoretical approach where there is a connection between the global context and local spaces—​thus, an interscalarity in the study of the spatiality of superdiversity—​might

316   Sakura Yamamura be to combine global city theory with transnational migration research (Yamamura, forthcoming).

Global Cities as a Prime Example of Interscalar Embeddedness of Spatial Superdiversity Migration was regarded as an inherent part of the globalization process and thus the creation of global cities from the outset in the world city theory (cf. Sanderson et al. 2015). Friedmann and Wolff hinted at the importance of labor migration in shaping or characterizing world cities based on their physical, economic, and social dimensions (Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1986). What is most interesting and relevant to the study of the spatiality of superdiversity in contemporary societies is what the authors referred to as the dual structure of these cities, that is, consisting of “transnational elites” and the “permanent underclass” (Friedmann and Wolff 1982, 322). Sassen (1991, revised 2001) in her seminal work on global cities goes more into the detail on the issue of social polarization and its dual migration. However, though this nexus between migration and cities was fundamental to the formulation of world cities theory and is crucial for the actual city formation as recent studies on urban diversity show, research has long neglected this perspective. On the global-​cities side, the discourse has remained primarily on the economic geographical context of corporate geographies and the interconnectivity of cities, increasingly focusing on the quantification of the cities in the global network (cf. Carroll 2007; Beaverstock et al. 1999; Taylor et al. 2012; Derudder et al. 2010). On the side of migration-​oriented research on global cities, an economic geographical perspective also dominates the discourse. Transnational professionals are researched predominantly regarding the business contexts of their mobility and their roles as economic actors and/​or as part of business networks (Carroll and Fennema 2002; Morgan 2001; Beaverstock 2004), but not in their roles as migrants in the urban context, let alone in their role in shaping the spatiality of cities. Hoyler et al.’s (2018) edited volume on global city makers approaches the question of city-​making and its connection to corporate professionals, bringing a novel spatial perspective to transnational professionals, yet here, too, they are discussed in their role as economic actors. Yamamura (2018) makes an exception in the approach to global city-​making by applying a migration lens to global city spaces and discussing transnational spaces of financial professionals as migrant individuals too. This chapter takes this Yamamura’s approach further, not only discussing the locations and characteristics but also the sociospatial patterns and practices of the transnational professionals, that is, the transnational elites from above, into account, but also integrates the “other side” of transnational migration from below into the global city context. The global city theory originally set out by Friedmann but also Sassen can bring

Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and Spatiality    317 fruitful discourses on the actual spatiality of superdiversity. It can bring together not only the transnationalism from above and below from the conceptual side, but also the different literature strands discussing the planetary urbanization on the one, and the transnational urbanism on the other. In fact, this theoretical approach can also bridge the gap between urban studies research on the elite in cities, including such issues as transnational gentrification and the increasing seclusion of the upper-​class in gated communities or citadels, and the urban poor, or the urban underclass, that is being marginalized in these cities. Diversification is also occurring in-​between these socioeconomic extremes, as seen in the category of middling migration (migrant middle classes), but what makes the spatiality of superdiversity in its global-​local interscalarity unique is the dichotomy of the otherwise unconnected issues of transnational migration from above and below. To better contextualize the production of such superdiversified spaces, we need to consider the multiscalar embeddedness of the process. Different actors at different levels are involved in space-​making and space-​shaping, whereas the “making” conceptually refers to processes that contribute to the overall conditions in which superdiversity occurs. This reflects the discourses on the economic geographical side of global city making, in particular (Hoyler et al. 2018). Indeed, space-​making processes are not only economic phenomena, nor can they be decontextualized from the societal changes taking place globally in the age of mobility and digitalization (Yamamura, forthcoming) or from migration policies that allow or disallow the international migration of different groups. The “shaping” of superdiversified spaces is concerned more with the actual direct involvement and practical implications of shaping the urban spaces through the practical and spatialized actions and interactions of different actors (as is also discussed in the literature on superdiversity and conviviality, such as Wessendorf 2016; Padilla et al. 2015).

The Spatiality of Superdiversity: Sociospatial Diversifications From Above A well-​researched and widely known urban phenomenon is the formation of upper-​ class areas, either as secluded gated communities (Blakely and Snyder 1997) or in more open, but architecturally distinct “citadels” (Marcuse 1997). These patterns can also be observed among the population of upper-​class migrants, as in case of transnational financial professionals (Yamamura 2018). These areas of transnational professionals are similar to those of the corresponding local upper class. In case of global cities, they can also extend to adjacent districts, where new areas are being developed, for example, as part of redevelopment of waterfront areas or other redevelopment projects. Such

318   Sakura Yamamura areas are, as in other cities, often close to embassies and consulates, but also to cultural institutions and leisure clubs. Another prominent feature is their proximity to international schools or, at least, to the infrastructure, such as private bus routes, that facilitates access to these institutions. The main sociospatial patterns that constitute these spaces are the locations where transnational migrants from above—​ that is, corporate elites and their dependent families—​interact and socialize. The presence of (usually) English-​language shopfront signs or restaurant menus and multilingual services is characteristic of these spaces. For everyday practices, shops in these areas, in particular grocery stores or, more commonly, larger supermarkets, provide English labels to sold products and a variety of imported products at higher prices than the local food stores charge. These practices help residents maintain their nonlocal lifestyle. Scholars have recently analyzed such phenomenon in the context of “transnational gentrification” (Hayes and Zaban 2020). Leisure clubs associated with the consulates or corporations are also locations where such transnational sociospatial practices occur. Thus, the urban landscape is linguistically, and also by virtue of the people interacting in it, an expression of the sociospatial superdiversity in these cities. These are the places where a diversified group of transnational migrants from above meet and interact, thus share their sociospatial everyday practices. An interesting aspect of the transnationality of this sociospatial diversification is that the corporate elite or “transnational capitalist class,” to use the terms of Sklair (2000), goes beyond the ethnocentric groupist constellation of otherwise well-​documented transnational migration. The transnational class is predominantly unified in an affiliation to a specific industry or corporate society (or both) and functions beyond ethnic, religious, or national affiliations. This is another specific aspect of superdiversification at the level of transnationalism from above. Indeed, corporate affiliation and the accompanying privilege of the corporate elite in accessing migration schemes and legal statuses is an important aspect of the class-​based transnational migration patterns. In global cities such as Tokyo (Yamamura 2018, forthcoming) we can observe another group of transnational corporate elite that contributes to another pattern of superdiversity in social spaces. Called Pro-​Tokyoites or Pro-​Global-​Cityites, these transnational migrants venture out of the areas and appear to cocoon or ghettoize (gaijin ghetto) from the local population. In fact, these Pro-​Global-​Cityites appear to keep their more localizing sociospatial behavioral patterns also beyond one city. They embrace the pro-​local-​pattern as a lifestyle also in other cities to which they are dispatched. They contribute to the interaction and mingling with local populations and more local spaces of interactions. This group of transnational corporate migrants actively pursues a connection to local society and culture, sending their children to local arts classes or venturing themselves into areas recommended not by their migrant peers but by local peers. It is important to note that these sociospatial activities are still within the realm of their local “peers.” This means that these spaces correspond those of the local upper class and are not shared with lower-​class locals or other migrants. Based on these two ideal-​typical sociospatial patterns, it can be summarized that the sociospatial superdiversification is a distinct dichotomy between a homogenization

Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and Spatiality    319 of elite spaces that have been also discussed as becoming universal nonplaces (Augé 1995), and a Pro-​Global-​Cityite transnationalized space in each of the global cities, characterized by a more “local flavored” area connected to the global culture. With the diversification of transnational professionals’ groups and the increased awareness and interest in local culture of these multiple migrants, and even more so with their children’s generation (as with the phenomenon of so-​called third culture kids), a multilayered superdiversification is occurring in these cities. Regarding the multiscalar embeddedness of these processes of urban superdiversity, different aspects play into the context. On the global level, as is much discussed in global city research, the global economy and economic policy structure define which cities become global cities and how connected they are to each other (Brenner 1998; Sassen 2002; Taylor et al. 2002). Part of these global structures are also corporate strategies by which transnational professionals are dispatched from one location to another. These global mobility patterns go hand in hand with policies at the national levels, predominantly national migration policies, which enable or even actively promote the migration of highly skilled migrants to specific countries (particularly, those designed to attract and retain migration to the destination countries). Further, at the regional level, specific regional policies might also be aimed at bringing in specific groups of people but also to support specific activities. For example, regional policies could support migrants’ entrepreneurial economic endeavors or, on the social side, the transcultural integration and interactions of different groups in the region. These activities are located in specific spaces locally and along with these sociospatial practices contribute to the expression of superdiversity in the urban or local space. On the local level, the decisions of other economic and political actors, such as policymakers, investors, or other urban-​planning or municipal-​policy decision-​makers, as well as civil society actors, can also shape the space toward superdiversity. Research on Tokyo has demonstrated that intermediary actors, such as relocation and real estate agencies, substantially impact the sociospatial patterns of transnational professionals by directing them to specific locations based on their assumed preferences or navigating them into upper-​class gaijin ghettos, despite in some cases, their desire to venture out (Yamamura, 2019; Yamamura, forthcoming). Interactions between, for example, Pro-​Global-​Cityites and the local population can effect a subtler change in the urban landscape or increase diversity when different social and ethnic groups also find and offer activities in such spaces.

From Below Sociospatial superdiversifiation from below is a rather common, well-​researched, and, more importantly, usually intuitively associated urban phenomenon. Ethnic towns, such as the Chinatowns that exist in many cities around the world, or the Little Italys, Koreatowns, or even India Towns, are prime examples of transnationalism from below. They are often touristified nowadays, but they were originally developed as areas for labor migrants, and they are characterized by a high density of ethnic-​focal shops. Their

320   Sakura Yamamura streets and shopfronts are full of signs, flyers, and posts in the respective languages and dense with a material culture that is different from the local cityscape. When it comes to actual location within the cities, these ethnic towns tend to be located in less privileged areas, often coupled with a disadvantageous geomorphological location. Sociospatial processes can be found in these urban spaces, too, yet here they are more often strongly linked to specific ethnic groups or regions. These are areas where cultural events, such as Diwali festivals or Chinese New Year parades take place, and cultural social activities are offered by the respective ethnic or religious groups. Ethnic grocery shops catering traditional food and goods are typical, so are also smaller ethnic minority and migrant entrepreneurial businesses that service the needs of their ethnic niche. Travel agents, hairdressers, or even special bakeries that provide catering services for ethnically traditional weddings and other celebrations are often found in such superdiverse areas and streets (Hall 2015). However, beyond this more conventional understanding of ethnic towns, superdiversification is increasingly observed in them too. In fact, recent empirical studies on the entrepreneurial superdiversity in Glasgow have shown that business-​ related diversification strategies contribute to a broadening of the niche markets for the entrepreneur. A Polish delicatessen, for example, can start selling its Polish products to other Eastern European communities; so, too, a Chinese shop might be servicing other East Asian and Southeast Asian populations, or even completely different ethnic minorities (Yamamura and Lassalle 2020). Further, the phenomenon of so-​called middlemen who offer ethnic and ethnicized products to the mainstream market (Zhou 2004) also indicates how the narrower idea of what an ethnic business is, is changing in contemporary societies. In fact, diversification strategies for breaking out of the conventional ethnic niche are often found in second-​generation migrants, even more than in the first (Lassalle and Scott 2018). This also illustrates the degree to which the superdiversity of society in general can lead to the diversification of ethnic and migrant businesses, which then also leads to sociospatial diversifications of the cities in which the different social and ethnic groups concentrate. As can be seen with entrepreneurial superdiversity, the spatial expressions of superdiversity can be different within the same city and even within the same neighborhood (Yamamura and Lassalle 2020). As with transnational migration from above, the mobility and migration patterns of transnational migration from below, and thus also sociospatial superdiversity from below, are embedded in different contexts at different scales. Whereas migration theories, such as dual labor market theory or migration networks, can explain the directions of the global flow of migrants, migration industries aimed at either exporting or importing foreign labor forces at the national level channel migrants to specific countries or, more often, to specific regions. Furthermore, as recent research also shows the connection between migration industries and urban transformation, intermediaries can impact the sociospatial pattern of migrants from below within cities too (Yamamura 2022a). By providing not only housing but also pre-​selected workplaces and specific language-​learning schools for within the respective migration scheme, migration industries direct migrants to specific areas of the arrival cities. Locally, just as ethnic

Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and Spatiality    321 niche markets tend to develop in low-​cost areas, hotspot areas of lower-​skilled migrants also develop. Migrant communities also enhance the local circulation of information about housing, social activities, and cultural events into specific areas within the city, contributing to the shaping of the urban society and landscape. Urban landscapes are shaped through the social interactions and practices of these different and diversifying migrants from both ends of the social strata. Indeed, the global and local contexts and spatiality of superdiversification demonstrate the inherent connection between these sociospatial dynamics and socioeconomic class-​based behavioral patterns of transnational migrations.

From the Middle and Beyond Growing research on migrants including transnational migrants situated between the social polarizations of above and below also contributes to the sociospatial diversification in cities. Middling transnationals–​that is, skilled middle-​class migrants with decent but not extremely high income, such as language teachers (Conradson and Latham 2005; Yang 2020), do not or cannot necessarily cocoon the way the transnational gaijin ghetto migrants do. In fact, as financial capitals are more limited to these middling migrants, different consumption and by that different sociospatial patterns arise. Whereas transnational migrants from above can dine in high-​end restaurants and socialize in expatriate bars, and be targeted by high-​end real estate brokers, middling migrants will choose other locations. Such locations are more likely to be local or at least localized in different areas of the same city. There are avenues of research on this topic that need to be further scrutinized, including the effect of superdiversity, particularly in the context of class-​based transnational migration. Middling migrants often also find that the elite international schools and clubs are too expensive, as one transnational professionals recounted who had recently degraded to a local work contract, thus becoming a middling migrant. In these cases, the options for sociospatial practices can become more localized because maintaining the transnational-​migrant-​from-​above lifestyle requires a high income.

From Superdiversity to Superdiversification of Sociospaces Beyond such economic and financial influences on sociospatial patterns, it must also be noted that different diversity spectrums are also produced by the diversifying spousal and family ties of transnational migrants in general. Multiethnic, multiracial, multinational marriages and partnerships are becoming more common, especially among the generation of migrants who will become multiply mobile over their life courses

322   Sakura Yamamura (Zufferey et al. 2021; Yamamura, forthcoming). The growing variety of these social ties is, naturally, reflected in their affiliation and involvement with different circles in ethnic, gender, professional, national, or cultural communities. With this diversity of communities, which can also be diversified in themselves through different types of migrants and personalities, the sociospatial patterns diversify too. Because spatial expressions are inherently connected to sociospatial patterns—​that is, to social practices that are localized—​superdiversity in society comes with spatial superdiversity. Indeed, spatial superdiversity should not be seen as the end product of superdiversifying societies, but more as a process of sociospatial patterning in a diversifying society that transforms urban spaces differently. Just as space as such has been understood to mean more than a stable physical container and, rather, as a social spatial issue in human geography (Massey 2013; Löw 2016), the spatiality of superdiversity is also dynamic. Recent discussions on urban superdiversity have pointed to temporality as a key factor in the formation of superdiversity in spaces, such as the digitalization of society (Yamamura, forthcoming). In fact, the embeddedness of spatial superdiversity in this context has been tackled by empirical research, breaking the online-​offline divide in space (Blommaert and Maly 2019). As the relative contextualization into digital geographies illustrates, the spatiality of superdiversity depends on the sociospatial practices of the also diversifying and changing constellations of the people themselves. Space is, by definition, relative and constantly produced and reproduced by the people who are involved and engaged in that space. The spatiality of superdiversity is therefore better understood as a superdiversification of sociospaces than an urban transformation to the state of superdiversity. Indeed, the approach of multiscalar embeddedness of spatial superdiversity as it has been presented here brings an analytical framework that can better contextualize the superdiversification processes of migration-​led diversity of society and space. The dynamical changes of society and space depend on different actors at different contextual scales. Economic and political actors influence migration policies and the global economy. Others are involved in transforming regional and urban development, the political-​institutional structures that shape cities. Yet other actors in the migration industries or in the local economy contribute to migrant flows within cities too. Further complexity is added by the increasing socioeconomic and ethnosocial changes that take place in diversifying populations of migrants and locals. The interconnectedness of the interscalar urban processes that link the global phenomenon and the urban and the interconnectedness and embeddedness of the people, places, and spaces in these contexts are important areas for further research on superdiversity. All levels are then also embedded in societal contexts of global mobility and an increasingly digitalized society, which accelerates and enables the interconnectedness of people. Research on the spatiality of superdiversity is a fruitful avenue for research because they capture the spatially visible and tangible, if not sociospatially experienceable, expression of the superdiversity of society in an age of digitalization and increased mobility. As already pointed out, transnational migrants from below and above as well as the middling in-​between, all come together in the same cities, bringing change to

Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and Spatiality    323 the urban society and spaces. Yet these socioeconomic class issues are also reflected in their spatial patterns, creating migration-​led spatial divides within cities. Societal inequalities, especially of migrants, are inherently connected to the discourses on the digital divide (Castells 1996; Dodge and Kitchin 2002; Graham 1998) and the im/​ mobility dichotomy (Sheller and Urry 2016; Turner 2007; Urry 2007). The development and proliferation of digital technologies and mobility infrastructures has strong implications for the migrants’ transnationalism, as earlier works on transnationalism have noted (Vertovec 2009), but also for the sociospatial diversification in cities, as the chapter has shown. These technologies and infrastructures enable and accelerate the transnational connections of cities and impact the local sociospatial patterns of transnational migrants and nonmigrants alike. Simultaneously, those who are barred from these means having limited agency and being disconnected and excluded from specific spaces. Through such sociospatial contextualization and focus on the spatiality, the superdiversity research could and should contribute to the debate on the issues of inequalities and intersectionalities emplaced in these cities. The perspective of the sociospatial superdiversification, especially in the context of global cities (but not limited to), shows how a global phenomenon of economic and social changes is clearly connected to the transformation of the local. Whereas spatial effects of economic and corporate geographical dimension on cities (global city-​making) have been much discussed, and indeed, global planetary urbanization and other large-​scale theories offer predominantly economic explanations, the sociospatial perspective can bring nuance and add layers of social phenomena and impacting factors at different levels in shaping the cities. In fact, this approach can bring the diversity of disciplinary approaches to superdiversity together into a larger context in which superdiversification is occurring.

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Pa rt I V

P OW E R A N D P OL I T IC S

Chapter 22

T he C oprodu c t i on of Inequalit y, Pre c a ri t y, and Dive rsi t y Junjia Ye

Introduction A key dimension of migrant-​driven diversification is the growing precariatization of labor in migrant arrival cities. Precarity refers to those who experience precariousness, and thus conjures lifeworlds that are inflected with uncertainty and instability (Waite 2009; Lewis et al. 2015). Indeed, much of the ongoing diversification is underlined by a parallel insecurity and vulnerability, not only for migrant workers, but especially for migrant workers. Covid-​19 and its measures of migrant management have amplified this precarity. The same neoliberal processes that are restructuring the labor market in the diversifying city are also affecting nonmigrants who are increasingly taking on insecure work. While precarity is itself diversifying to include nonmigrants, this chapter will focus on the coproduction of precarity and diversification in the context of migrant management. Although the linkages between precarity and diversity precede and, indeed, will exceed the current global situation, the management of the pandemic has crystallized how precarity is grafted onto migrant-​driven diversification. In response to Vertovec’s (2007) conceptualization of superdiversity, Suzanne Hall argues that diversity must be “moored” to existing regimes of migrant management with particular reference to Europe (Hall 2017). Just as migration processes are highly place-​based and dynamic, processes of diversification are also not universal. There are multiple modes of negotiating, advocating, experiencing, and producing different forms of diversity that are contingent on historical and geographical circumstances. There is, indeed, a need to “moor” analyses of superdiversity, as Goh (2019) argued. During Covid-​19, this mooring exceeds the simple grafting of diversification onto the changing context of a migrant-​driven diversifying city. Rather than an empirical exercise, this

330   Junjia Ye “provincialism” of diversification speaks conceptually to a wider Foucauldian understanding of a techno-​political project of management and governance (Foucault 2007; Robinson 2003). Singapore’s growing range of migrant management practices and discourses in its developmental aspirations to maintain global-​city status has resulted in a highly stratified diversity. In this sense, diversification processes are embedded in precarity-​generating migration processes. Precarity exceeds the realm of work (Ettlinger 2007). Rather than situate precarity as a life condition (Butler 2004), however, this chapter locates precarity within the constitution of labor (Casas-​Cortes 2014; Deshingkar 2019; Standing 2011). Precarity is, increasingly, the norm; this is a result of historical patterns of uneven development and contemporary global economic shifts that prioritize flexibility, compounded by a reduction of the state’s role in providing social security alongside the increased management of populations through the multiplication of legal statuses. Indeed, as Meissner (2017) argues, the significance of legal statuses in compounding diversity goes beyond conditions of entry and emphasizes how bodily presences are also stratified. This is to say that precarity is differently embedded in the migrant management of diverse peoples. Precarity and migrant-​driven diversity are therefore produced simultaneously through the neoliberalization of markets and migration regimes. More specifically, this coproduction emerges through the practices of state agencies, brokers, employers, and migrants themselves to the extent that the diverse subject—​that is, the migrant—​is also the precarious subject. The management of migrant-​driven diversification thus produces the precarious subject. I aim to explain the intertwined nature and politics of precarity and diversity in Singapore, recentering discussions of inequality within superdiversity with a focus on how diversification is produced alongside precariatization.

Contours of Migrant Precarity Low-​waged migrants are often the denizens of diversifying cities, carrying out crucial jobs that maintain the city, accepting wages and working conditions that long-​time residents reject (Wills et al. 2010; Yeoh 2014; Ye 2016). In this sense, their location within the labor market is essential, yet marginalized. Their participation in the city is marked by differential inclusion with fewer rights and privileges than citizens have (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Ye 2017; Simone, this volume). As such, temporary labor migrants are especially vulnerable to what Lewis et al. (2015) label “hyper-​precarity” brought about by the “ongoing interplay of neo-​liberal labor markets and highly restrictive immigration regime” (3) Their hyper-​precarious status is compounded by their deportability (De Genova 2002; Charanpal 2015). Migrant workers experience not just precarity at work but also the precarity of temporariness. The threat of repatriation shapes the migrant labor subjectivity (Vosko 2000; Robertson 2014). Precarity for these new arrivals

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    331 is produced and managed by the state and mesolevel institutions of the migration industry, such as brokers and agencies, in differential ways. The concept of differential inclusion has traveled widely in sociology and anthropology to theorize various forms of strategic organization and permutations of urban citizenship (Cacho 2012; Espiritu 2003). Differential inclusion not only questions nation-​state belonging, but also urban spaces of inclusion and exclusion that are subject to varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination, and segmentation (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). As I have argued elsewhere (Ye 2017), its strength lies in demonstrating how its deployment through both state and everyday practices governmentalizes the experience of belonging through carefully calculated processes of inclusion that share blurred boundaries with exclusion (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Differential inclusion “registers the multiplication of migration control devices within, at and beyond the borders of the nation-​state . . . and the multiplication of statuses they imply” (Mezzadra et al. 2014, 25). The concept also provides a way of thinking through the discourse and practices of incorporation in the context of the crisis of multiculturalism. Rather than social banishment, inclusion and exclusion share an intimate relationship in which management tools function as devices of conditional inclusion. Within the context of Singapore’s diversification, I revise differential inclusion by employing the term differential diversification (Ye 2021). This term explains the application of governmentalizing practices that multiply and order, rather than nullify, statuses through pandemic management. That is to say, differential diversification sheds light on the productive, biopolitical dimensions of difference-​making in ways that amplify the orientations of migrant management. This project of diversity-​making as difference-​ making coheres with the notion that any migration generates a state of exception that legitimizes treating migrants as separate from the rest of society (Agamben 2005). In short, differential diversification is a structuring of diversity in which precarity itself is produced through diversification.

Producing Migrant Precarities through State-​Driven Differential Diversification Much has been written about the state’s role in generating the quasi-​legal statuses of undocumented migrants in the United States (Price and Rojas 2020; Blue et al. 2020) and asylum seekers in Europe (Floros and Jørgensen 2020). This is largely explained by existing policy measures that regulate these streams of migrant-​driven diversity. There has also been much research based on European contexts about precarity that smuggled migrants (Nobil Ahmad 2008), refugees and asylum seekers face (Vickers et al. 2019)

332   Junjia Ye especially after Brexit (Duda-​Mikulin 2019). Writings on migrant precarity in the North American context have largely examined the consequential growth of vulnerability that stems from undocumented statuses (see, e.g., Special Issue by Chacko and Price, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020). Migrants are primarily labor migrants, most of whom are administered as transient, laboring bodies (Asis and Piper 2008). This is a significant point as migration marked by transience fundamentally shapes the form that precarity takes in Asian cities, whose development is premised on migration. Although diversity within Asian cities, as well as the pathways of migration to and within those cities, is growing increasingly complex, with a growing number of marriage migrants, student migrants, and high-​income work migrants, the majority of new arrivals are transient and low-​ waged labor migrants. The bulk of these new arrivals are selectively incorporated as cheapened laboring bodies with no access to citizenship. As a result, the form and quality of precarity itself is profoundly spatial and diverse as it is generated and experienced elsewhere. Migrant precarity in Asian cities is largely shaped by migration regimes and labor conditions. It has been documented that in contemporary Asian migrant-​driven arrival cities, debt-​financed migration is a common feature underpinning labor mobility (Platt et al. 2017; Hoang and Yeoh 2015; Lindquist 2012; Sobieszczyk 2002). The diverse city is therefore constituted through these intersections of precarity, unfreedom, and debt in the context of low-​skilled temporary migrant labor (Platt et al. 2017). There is a range of actors, from migration brokers to border police and guards, actively facilitate the conditions of noncitizenship as set up by state regulations (Ye 2019; Hernandez-​ Leon 2008). Deshingkar et al. (2019) explain how Bangladeshi migrant workers to the Persian Gulf states are exposed to multiple uncertainties and opportunities co-​created by brokers, employers, and the state. These migrants experience varying degrees of precarity at different stages of the migration process—​which is largely mediated by the actors of the migration industry. Precariousness is therefore situated in an unstable realm of risks and opportunities. In exploring the uneven relationship between employers and migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Parrenãs et al. (2020) demonstrate how employers use “soft violence” by maintaining moral normativities to justify control over female domestic workers. Wee et al. (2019) explore the conditions of domestic workers in Singapore to show how their sociolegal status and the migration industry contribute to their experience of precariousness in the city-​state. High-​income labor migrants are also not exempt from employment precarity and also are confronted with varying degrees of employment insecurity and settlement uncertainty in an era of neoliberal globalization as Zhan and Zhou argue (2020). It is the unpredictability, the balancing act of hope and despair experienced by migrants under conditions shaped and managed by labor and migration regimes that set up the connections between precarity and diversity. As diverse migrants are stratified through these regimes, their inclusion in the receiving societies is increasingly differentiated. Differential inclusion is therefore a key dimension of precarity production, while at the same time, producing diversity itself.

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    333

Differential Inclusion in Singapore Migrant arrival in Singapore has been historically marked by processes that are different and that differentiate. Indeed, as a postcolonial city-​state, Singapore has always had to deal with difference. During colonial times, race was the predominant mode of sorting difference as migrants arrived from Southern China, India, and various parts of the Malay Archipelago (Yeoh 1996). There is, thus, a long-​standing institutionalization of multiracialism in Singapore (Lai 1995). The postindependence government carried forward the multiracial framework of the Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other (CMIO) that still forms its basis of Singaporean multiculturalism. Thus, while more recent European and British writings on diversity shine light on both the potentials and the problems of learning to live with difference now, Singapore, like many Asian port cities, has, historically, already been developing ways to organize and manage diversity (Furnivall 1948). Thus a wider, older mode of diversity management has been foundational to the formation of present-​day communities in Southeast Asia (Goh et al. 2009; Lai et al. 2013). It is within this historical and dynamic regional context that we situate migration patterns to Singapore today. The number of new arrivals to Singapore today remains steadily growing. Foreigners currently make up 33 percent of the total workforce in Singapore, numbering 1,427,500 in total in December 2019 (Strategy Group, Prime Minister’s Office).1 The majority of this growth continues to come from low-​waged male and female transient migrants,with growing numbers of high-​status economic migrants, transnational marriage migrants, and university students. Inclusion into Singapore is differentiated by skill status and income. This inclusion is institutionalized though the issuance of a range of work passes, permits, and social visit passes that determine economic migrants’ access to rights and entitlements. The uneven incorporation of foreigners is highly monitored by state agencies and periodically restructured according to perceived needs of the economy. It is through these passes and criteria that various noncitizen subjects in Singapore are multiplied and categorically reproduced. In this sense, the migrant arrival city organizes diversity by multiplying the varied statuses of migrants. Precarity embedded within the configuration of migration is therefore being reproduced as well. The reproduction of precarity in the city is perpetuated by both formal and informal mechanisms. If formal, state-​driven multiplications generate a politics of exclusion and inclusion, informal mechanisms via social codes and implicit rules adhered to and enforced by migrants themselves also reproduce marginalization. Within the context of Singapore’s diversification, differential inclusion here explains the application of governing practices that multiply and order, rather than nullify, belonging through diversity management. Not only does the state reinforce diversity management, but at the level of the everyday, it is also reinforced by highly managed and marginalized groups themselves. The effect is the simultaneous inscription of both diversity and

334   Junjia Ye precarity. Arrivals at the margins are thus characterized by a diffusion of differential inclusion that is carried out both by state agencies and actors and by marginalized groups themselves.

Spatializing Precarity and Diversity This ambiguity is also embedded in spaces in the city (see Simone and Stansfeld, this volume). Indeed, aside from residential spaces, the intricacies of migrant geographies are also reflected in their use of the city’s public spaces for leisure. Public spaces remain sites where both long-​time residents of multicultural cities must coexist and interact with newcomers in highly prosaic and constantly evolving ways (Lofland 1998). Among the spatial manifestations of these changes is the emergence of migrant enclaves. Traditionally, the literature on migrant enclaves have privileged permanent migrants who settle in their receiving society. This may be pertinent in European and North American cities; however, migrant enclaves in Asian cities are necessarily shaped by migration pathways that are characterized by transience (see, e.g., Muniandy 2015). Yeoh and Huang (1998) discussed how Filipina workers subverted the use of public spaces on Orchard Road on the weekends. Geylang, a neighborhood on the east side of Singapore that the state for a long time designated a “vice zone” (where sex workers could legally operate) is also changing as new Mainland Chinese migrants move in. Little India has since colonial days been seen as a site for the South Asian community. More recently, new arrivals from Bangladesh and India have transformed it to a popular weekend migrant enclave where restaurants, money remittance services, and retail shops cater to this population. The Paya Lebar area, popular with Indonesian domestic workers, is another example of such an enclave that is marked by permanent temporariness (Collins and Shubin 2015, see Fig. 1 and 2). Aside from these more obvious migrant enclaves, low-​waged new arrivals are also using public spaces at times that other Singaporean residents do not. I have written elsewhere about the use of Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations as weekend socializing spaces for Bangladeshi male migrants (Ye 2015). It has been argued that physical spaces like parks are essential for the development of supportive social networks that facilitate belonging among marginalized migrants in the receiving society. Rishbeth and Rogaly (2018, 284) point out that for those excluded in the city, “such as those marginalized by unemployment, ill-​health, loneliness, overcrowded housing and/​or racisms,” accessible outdoor spaces can foster atmospheres of recovery—​bringing respite and hope. The authors further point out that through the routinized negotiations of claiming and sharing space, diverse users of space can become more comfortable with difference (Rishbeth and Rogaly 2018). Wise and Velayutham’s (2014) work has shown that in multicultural Singapore, living in close proximity in high-​density public housing means that there is intensive use and sharing of spaces such as corridors, parks, and playgrounds. This form of unspectacular coexisting produces possibilities for mundane

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    335 intercultural habituation. These spaces of encounter are, however, cut through by “migrant status where the racialized embodiment of temporary migrants marks them out as non-​citizens with only a tentative and provisional entitlement to inhabit public space,” in turn, reducing the possibility of encounters with local citizens (Aquino et al. 2020, 4).

Producing Difference through the Migrant Moral Risk Indeed, low-​waged migrants’ claims to space do not go uncontested and have been increasingly securitized on assumptions of their morality. The making of the arrival city is, as suggested by Collins (2012), produced through the intersections of transnational mobilities of migrants and local constraints of these migrants. Cresswell (2005) explains that moral geographies are social codes that regulate which people, things, and practices belong in which spaces, places, and landscapes, positing that the examination of moral geographies highlights the often taken-​for-​granted relationships between geographical orderings and notions about what is just and ideal. This production of place through moralizing emerged in Yeoh and Huang’s (1998) piece, where they studied how the weekend enclave of Lucky Plaza that is popular with migrants from the Philippines is seen as filthy, crowded, and rife with immoral sex and violence. In 2008, Singaporean residents of the upper-​middle-​class neighborhood of Serangoon Gardens protested a plant to convert a former school to a dormitory of migrant worker dormitory. Other than fearing decreasing property prices, many argued that the migrants would pose moral and security threats to residents. To appease them, the state built a fence and included recreational facilities inside the dormitory compound. The dormitory also changed its plan to house South Asian male migrants and decided to house Malaysian and Mainland Chinese migrants instead.2 After the Little India Riot, in late 2013, all the public areas in Little India were made and remain liquor-​ free zones, monitored by heightened police patrols and CCTV surveillance cameras.3 The Member of Parliament for Jalan Besar, the new town in which Little India lies, said in 2016, Pre-​riot crowds have returned to Little India. Congregations of such high density are walking time-​bombs and public disorder incidents waiting to happen. It is important that we do not take our eyes off this matter lest we want history to repeat itself.4

Although she later apologized for these comments, state agencies took steps to fence in common areas such as playgrounds and the groundfloors of the neighborhood’s Housing Development Board flats. Early in April 2020, a former cabinet minister also apologized for his comment that “it takes a virus to empty the space,” referring to the open green spaces in the new town of Kallang.5 These encounters or, in some cases, the

336   Junjia Ye fear of potential encounters, highlight the “red line of toleration,” as Povinelli argues (2011, 93). As Doreen Massey (2005) reminds us, the spatiality of diverse public places is not only formed through a “myriad of quotidian negotiation and contestation”; further, “through the practicing of place, negotiation is forced upon us” (154). The securitization and policing of public spaces frequented by low-​waged migrants are normalized through the state-​driven gaze that produces migrants as unsavory or criminal (Round and Kuznetsova 2016; De Genova and Roy 2020). These examples demonstrate that these migrants are urban dwellers with constrained mobilities. As I have argued elsewhere, the management of migrants exceeds the state and is also carried out in mundane ways in shared spaces (Ye 2016). These pre-​pandemic forms of spatial cleansing and ordering normalize the low-​waged migrant as a risky body in need of disciplining. Instead of the sharing of space as necessarily indicative of urban conviviality and shared bonds, boundaries, selections, and enclosures are embedded in public spaces (Ye 2018). The limits of coexistence are both implicit and explicit. Aside from explicit rules and regulations enforcing what should and should not be done in public, there are also tacit rules of everyday conduct that new arrivals must adopt to be considered a good migrant (Ye 2017, 2018). The moral order in public, and consequently, the moral migrant is thus distilled through these sanctioned, taken-​for-​granted sociocultural codes of conduct. The effect of such codes is the formation of the moralized subject. Subjectivities, including migrant subjectivities, are produced through these historical and ideological articulations of space (Hoekstra 2019). There are constant tensions, struggles, and disquiet over how things ought to be in such spaces, revealing dynamics—​norms, acceptable and legitimate codes of conduct—​that shape the nature of specific diverse, shared spaces. These form spatial orderings of urban diversity hierarchies in place to which people are subject. Space is thus productive of differences rather than merely reflective of them. This point is critical point to an appreciation of the spatial power and the subject-​forming potential of such experiences (Clayton 2009). Coexistence in a diverse city in this sense is marked relationally by broader structural inequalities, spatial subversion, and selective incorporation (Elwood et al. 2016). Thinking about coexistence as relational, rather than an entity, allows us to think about the precarious nature of coexistence. Furthermore, migrant-​driven diversification is highly differential when we recognize that other groups of migrants, such as high-​income migrants and marriage migrants, are not monitored the same way low-​waged migrants are.

Pandemic Precarity Is Migrant Precarity The structuring of diverse populations is exposed during this exceptional time of control and close management. Although the Covid-​19 virus affects all bodies, its impact

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    337 is differently felt. As myriad ideas emerge about how we ought to be behaving as civil citizens during this time, people also hold different capacities to respond. Indeed, not all bodies undergo the same processes of life and death (Tyner 2015). Arriving—​and returning—​migrants around the world have been caught in the path of the pandemic.6 The groups badly hit by Covid-​19 are by no means limited to low-​waged migrants. Nevertheless, migrants are a part of the various groups of people globally who are disproportionately affected who were already deeply challenged by structural inequalities of race, gender, and income.7 As mentioned earlier, the virus starkly reveals pre-​Covid-​19 inequalities. In this sense, the unfolding of pandemic precarities is also a tale of the continuity of precariousness. The current most pressing, large-​scale problem in Singapore are the infection clusters that have rapidly emerged at migrant-​worker dormitories (Ratcliffe, 2020). Pandemic biopolitics has also reinforced existing spatial precarities while normalizing new ones (Ye 2021). The sharp increase in infections has motivated a wide range of calculations and interpretations of the virus and the (re)location of migrant workers in Singaporean space. The regulations imposed on migrants’ housing also serve to differentially manage and distribute their exposure to the risk of infection. As such, the precarities revealed during this health crisis continue and amplify preexisting inequalities. The sociopolitical life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of migrants by the state and the civil society groups acting as translators of the state (Ye 2021). I would argue that both diversity and precarity are organized through a striking migration management that has crystallized during the pandemic to the extent that the classed, raced, and gendered migrant body is re-​created as a medical risk that must be contained. That is to say, precarity and diversification are fundamentally intertwined where diversification is produced alongside the precarity embodied by the low-​waged migrant. Aside from its diversity, Singapore makes a particularly cogent case for the need to examine the governance of migrant-​driven diversification in a time of pandemic. It seemed to be managing Covid-​19 well in the earlier days of detecting the virus, and was hailed by many cities around the world as an exemplar. (Radcliffe, 2020).8 The numbers of people infected, however, have spiked since March 2020, the vast majority of these cases being migrant men living in large-​scale, purpose-​built dormitories around the periphery of the island.9 While these are unprecedented times, the effects of the pandemic do not occur in a vacuum but, rather, are constituted and lived through preexisting social and spatial stratifications that blur the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion. As the infection spreads, there is a corresponding ordering and multiplication of statuses and experiences of the pandemic in the city. The sociopolitical life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of migrants and precarities. The coproduction of precarity and diversity generates a new subjectivity for the new low-​waged male migrant. They shift from being cheapened labor and a moral threat to being a medical threat that must be isolated from the rest of society; rather than the

338   Junjia Ye “threatened,” they are now positioned as “the threat.” How diversity is organized therefore tells us about how precarity is regulated and crystallizes the precarious migrant subject. That is to say, the precarious subject emerges through the management of the low-​waged migrant. This new precarious subject is the “migrant as medical threat.” Conceptually, the continuities and ruptures in management together demonstrate how governance works to biopolitically generate the Covid-​19 version of the classed, raced, and gendered migrant subject. Pastoral practices of organization are reconfigured during the Covid-​19 pandemic to reflect and intensify already existing sociospatial inequalities through the lens of differential inclusion. Specifically, this shows how state regulations—​which constitute and organize Singapore’s heterogeneity through multiplication—​are magnified during the pandemic using technologies of surveillance. Through this lens, it can be argued that migrant-​driven urban differentiation is managed and cultivated in Singapore as a diversifying city, particularly during a world crisis. The low-​waged migrant is marked as different, and through these markings, their precarity is also produced through multiple regulations. Measures of pandemic management do not only contribute to the spatial regime of migrant management. More crucially, they articulate the subject transformation of the low-​waged migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk. Through the modes of governance that are shaping the pandemic, it appears that the low-​waged, male, presumably heterosexual migrant, who is part of a major wave of diverse bodies entering Singapore, ultimately remains the unintegrateable body. The pandemic, therefore, draws the connections of precarity and diversity closer together.

Concluding Notes Mooring superdiversity through the management of multiplicity is a conceptual opportunity. Accounting for differentiation within migrant-​driven diversification, especially during this emergency, is the sociopolitical dimension of Covid-​19. While the empirical reality that shaped this conceptualization is rooted in a time of pandemic, it also exceeds the present moment. The Covid-​19 crisis has magnified the politics of diversity by highlighting the precariousness of low-​waged new arrivals. It has illuminated the constitution and governance of these politics through differential diversification. Recognizing this allows us to understand the continued importance of the state and its relationship with nonstate organizations in the management and cultivation of differentiated subjects, their spatialization, and the ordering of diversity in the arrival city beyond the pandemic. Asian global cities will continue to experience dramatic demographic changes, with wide-​ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant-​driven diversification. The conditions, directions, and figures of migration are ever-​more unstable globally. Precarity is differently embedded in the migrant management for diverse peoples. Precarity and migrant-​driven diversity are, therefore, produced simultaneously through the neoliberalization of markets and migration regimes. Asian cities, with their

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    339 distinctive pathways of migration and development necessarily have particular modes of precariatization through diversification. Indeed, these closely related processes of precariatization and migrant diversification prompt not only scrutiny of how contemporary Asian global cities incorporate increasingly diverse groups of newcomers. But further, the development of cities is increasingly premised on the development of migrant management to the extent that it generates greater precarity for certain groups. Singapore is distinct in many ways—​even from other cities in the region—​but it is also a microcosm in which the global trends of diversification can be observed. Various modes of migrant management include and exclude in different ways, generating different migrant subjectivities. I argue it is these various modes of management and subjectivities that constitute and explain diversification processes. Precarity needs to be centered within the discussions of superdiversity. It is these modes of management that reproduce the various forms of difference that much of superdiversity aims to encompass. Differential diversification refocuses on precarity to provide conceptual purchase that can distill and explain such differentiation.

Appendix

Fig. 1.  Migrants under the MRT (subway) tracks near Paya Lebar. Photo taken by author.

340   Junjia Ye

Fig. 2.  Migrants sitting outside City Plaza, using railings and trees as furniture. Photo taken by author.

Notes 1. https://​www.pop​ulat​ion.gov.sg/​our-​pop​ulat​ion/​pop​ulat​ion-​tre​nds/​overv​iew (accessed, 10th May 2022). 2. https://​www.asia​one.com/​News/​Asia​One%2BN​ews/​Singap​ore/​Story/​A1St​ory2​0080​906 -​86231.html (accessed May 19, 2020). 3. https://​ w ww.strai​t sti​mes.com/​singap ​ore/​l it​ t le-​ i ndia-​ r iot-​ gov​ ernm​ ent-​ acce​ pts-​ a ll-​ 8 -​reco​mmen​dati​ons-​from-​the-​coi-​0 (accessed May 19, 2020). 4. https://​www.toda​yonl​ine.com/​singap​ore/​mp-​den​ise-​phua-​apo​logi​ses-​des​crib​ing-​large -​cro​wds-​lit​tle-​india-​walk​ing-​time-​bombs (accessed June 5, 2020). 5. https://​www.toda​yonl​ine.com/​singap​ore/​yaa​cob-​ibra​him-​apo​logi​ses-​faceb​ook-​rem​ark -​fore​ign-​work​ers-​gather​ing-​near-​kall​ang-​mrt (accessed May 19, 2020). 6. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​04/​10/​world/​asia/​coro​navi​rus-​migra​nts.html (accessed May 18, 2020). 7. https://​www.bbc.com/​fut​ure/​arti​cle/​20200​420-​coro​navi​rus-​why-​some-​rac​ial-​gro​ups-​are -​more-​vul​nera​ble (accessed May 18, 2020). 8. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​04/​14/​ups​hot/​coro​navi​rus-​singap​ore-​think​ing-​big.html (accessed May 2, 2020). 9. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2020/​apr/​23/​singap​ore-​mill​ion-​migr​ant-​work​ers -​suf​f er-​as-​covid-​19-​sur​ges-​back (accessed May 4, 2020).

The Coproduction of Inequality, Precarity, and Diversity    341

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Chapter 23

Identit y P ol i t i c s in C ontexts of Su perdive rsi t y From Single to Multiple Identities? Dirk Geldof I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. —​Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir

Introduction Superdiversity is a lens to understand processes of (migration driven) diversification (Vertovec 2007, 2017), which lead to increasing diversity within diversity. By better recognizing and understanding these processes of diversification, the lens of superdiversity can help us to move beyond group thinking and culturalizing or essentializing and reductionist approaches of “the other,” “the migrant of origin X or Y,” “the Muslim,” . . . Whether in a descriptive modus, as a methodological or as a practical approach (Meissner and Vertovec 2015), the lens of superdiversity invites us to describe, to measure, and to deal with people’s multiple identities. According to Phillimore (2016), the most attention that has focused on superdiversity has been on the idea that superdiversity offers a new way of interacting with much emphasis placed on observing mixing in superdiverse microspace. Certainly, in majority-​ minority cities or in neighborhoods with a “commonplace diversity” (Wessendorf 2014), the processes of normalization of (super)diversity are ongoing (Crul et al. 2013; Geldof 2016, 2018). Differences and (ethnic) diversity are no longer exceptional but have become part of the everyday reality, although at the same time, some people contest increasing diversity.

346   Dirk Geldof These contested processes of the normalization of superdiversity have two interlinked dimensions. The spatial dimension is about the level of superdiversity and complexity in spaces and places, and the way people and groups deal with differences in public or semipublic spaces or within organizations and institutions. This is closely related with the interpersonal dimension, which asks: How do people interact with each other, in contexts of superdiversity and across differences? How do they see “the other” in contexts of superdiversity? How do people want to be seen and recognized in their identity or their identities? Interaction in contexts of superdiversity implies the recognition of plurality and multiple identities. However, at the same time, we see the rise of identity politics, whereby claims for recognition are made on national, cultural, religious, or ethnic grounds. Some of these identity claims are oppositional toward increasing diversity; others, on the contrary, seem to grow within contexts of superdiversity. I explore in which ways a superdiversity lens can serve as a tool to move beyond polarizing identity politics by recognizing multiple identities. I first describe the concept of “identity,” the search for recognition, and the rise of identity politics, and I propose a distinction between defensive and offensive identity politics in contexts of superdiversity. I then explore how a superdiversity lens can help to overcome identity reductionism by recognizing people’s multiple identities.

Identity “Identity” is a mental construct to bring order into the variety of feelings resulting from the variety of social relations we have. It is a relative new concept. The developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was one of the first to focus on identity and identity crisis in the second half of the twentieth century, distinguishing our personal identity (the self) from our social and cultural identity, referring to our social roles. Our personal identity is developed through reactions of others: it is a “looking-​glass-​self,” as Cooley (1922) named it. The (anti)psychiatrist Ronald Laing focused on the divided self. In anthropology and sociology, George Herbert Mead analyzed the relation between the individual and the group and the role of identity. Identity and the different roles taken up were also an important focus in symbolic interactionism (Heinich 2019). Robert Merton taught us how, just as with status, identities can be ascribed or acquired. More recently, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich points out that it is often much easier to describe what our identity is not than to define it. She distinguishes how identity and our daily identity-​plays are shaped across three “moments” of identity: how we see ourselves (self-​perception), how we present ourselves to others, and how identity is attributed by others. Certainly, in contexts of migration, people often have no grip on their attributed identities. These can be contradictory to self-​perception or representation, leading to identity crises (Heinich 2019, 58).

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    347 Attention for identity started with a focus on individual identities, but most of the debates are about group or collective identities, which can be based on class, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or culture. Kwame Anthony Appiah analyzes 5 c’s—​creed, country, color, class, and culture—​as “the lies that bind us.” Appiah warns that in each of these “species of identity,” we risk to fall into the error: of “supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity, that binds people of that identity together” (Appiah 2018, xvi). In the new debates on superdiversity, according to Zapata-​Barrero, the question of personal identity is much more connected to how people relate to each other rather than the traditional “Who am I?” question based on where someone was born (territory) or who his or her parents were (descent; Zapata-​Barrero 2019, 47). This builds upon the theory of social identity complexity (Roccas and Brewer 2002), which is based on chronic awareness of cross-​categorization in one’s own social group memberships and those of others. The actual complexity of multiple, partially overlapping group memberships may or may not be reflected in the individual’s subjective representation of his or her multiple identities. When one’s in-​groups are similar in their attributes and share their members, a simple representation of the social identity is likely. When a person acknowledges, and accepts, that memberships in multiple in-​groups are not fully convergent or overlapping, the associated identity structure is both more inclusive and more complex (Roccas and Brewer 2002). Recognizing in-​groups as differentiated and complex thus helps to recognize the complexity surrounding others’ multiple memberships (Schmid and Hewstone 2011).

Identity and the Search for Recognition Increasing attention on identity is part of a search for recognition. Charles Taylor (1994) analyzed how the claim for recognition has grown through the years. Taylor places the emergence of recognition as a phenomenon toward the end of the eighteenth century, in conjunction with a wider ideal of authenticity. It is closely related to the notion of dignity. A feature of our modern age is that identity and recognition are no longer as self-​ evident as they once were. They are often contested: Precisely because recognition has been thematized in recent years, it can now either be granted or withheld. Recognition requires the participation of a relevant other, who can and must grant recognition, but who does not necessarily do so. We always define our identity in dialogue with the identities that others wish to recognize in us (Taylor 1994). Since the last decades of the twentieth century, we have witnessed a shift from redistribution toward claims for recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003). From the 1980s onward, the emphasis in social justice literature has moved toward themes like dignity, respect, and identity (Levrau 2011, 37). This shift is closely linked with rising identity

348   Dirk Geldof claims: “politics of recognition” involve the claims of specific groups, usually minority groups, to be recognized and valued for their specificity. These claims for recognition are based on opposition to all forms of cultural discrimination and lack of respect for groups or cultures or both. Many migrant organizations call for the recognition of their uniqueness, individuality, and otherness. Bauböck (2008: 2–​34) speaks about “recognition multiculturalism,” which seeks to rectify the imbalance of power between the minorities and the dominant culture. The public affirmation of cultural diversity is therefore seen as a source of individual self-​respect for members of minority groups. The key question then becomes: Which differences can be recognized or regarded as legitimate? The right to wear a headscarf is currently the subject of increasingly polarized debates in many Western European countries. The desire for recognition often has its origins in the struggle against a perceived cultural-​symbolic injustice. According to Levrau (2011, 20–​27), this perception is rooted in the social patterns of presentation, interpretation, and communication. A policy of recognition seeks to positively endorse undervalued differences between groups via a process of cultural-​symbolic change, based on a positive appreciation of cultural diversity. In this way, the politics of recognition is part of politics of identity, since it involves the reassessment and revaluation of the cultural identity of groups that do not belong to the majority culture. However, there are limits to recognition. The politics of recognition is not a license to recognize every characteristic of every culture, religion, or element that goes to make up people’s identities. This recognition still takes place within the limits set by society, preferably based on a clear human rights perspective. Consequently, there are boundaries to recognition, but these boundaries are variable and must be negotiable in a world of superdiversity. The recognition of identity and culture must be understood as dynamic, changeable, and the result of a continual process of dialogue, but also as the outcome of social action and unequal power positions. It is not simply the one-​sided recognition of a fixed identity by the majority culture. The struggle for greater recognition and redistribution can be seen as a form of democratic engagement and an expression of active citizenship (Faist 2010). What Fraser and Honneth (2003) describe as politics of recognition became identity politics in the twenty-​first century.

From Identity and Recognition to Identity Politics The dynamics of globalization and individualization, or of modernity more generally, are said to destabilize established identities (Song 2013, 170). Individualization offered the opportunity to “write your own biography” less determined by traditions or group identities based on class or religion (Beck 1997). Biographies and identities became more open, or even fluid or liquid (Bauman 2005). And migration and rising mobility

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    349 increased the number of world families, with transnational ties and multiple belongings. It is in this context that we witness the rising importance of identity politics. The term “identity politics” was first coined by the black feminist Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective in 1977. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1977; Garza 2019; Haider 2018, 7). The concept of identity politics soon widened. Based on race or ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, religion, and class, or other markers, groups develop political claims to overcome systems of experienced oppression. The scope can be broad: from attacks on discrimination and social exclusion to claims for recognition or equal rights or for exceptional measures the groups expect as part of their religious or (sub)cultural recognition. Identity politics have been criticized for having become an individualized method, based on the individual’s demand for recognition and suppressing the fact that all identities are socially constructed (Haider 2018, 23–​24). But mostly, identity politics are not so much individual “life politics” (Giddens 1994, 90–​92) but involve forms of collective action. This makes identity politics conflicting. By putting their claims—​mostly those of minority groups—​on the agenda, identity politics often provoke counterreactions from mainstream society. As a result, identity politics today are no longer the exclusive domain of minority groups claiming recognition.

Offensive versus Defensive Identity Politics Superdiversity is reconfiguring complexity and power relations. The way identities are recognized is part of that reconfiguration. To understand the rise of identity policies in contexts of superdiversity, I distinguish offensive and defensive identity politics.

“Offensive” Identity Politics Minority groups claiming recognition for their identity, culture, or religion in contexts of superdiversity can be understood as forms of offensive identity politics. These claims contest experienced inequality in power relations. In Europe today, offensive identity politics inspire decolonization debates, as well as the search for identity of citizens in contexts of diaspora or in majority-​minority cities. Critical race theory and critical whiteness studies challenge White privileges, analytically as well as politically (Wekker

350   Dirk Geldof 2016; Meer 2019). They combine identity formation and recognition with critique of the existing power structures. Stuart Hall, for example, calls “Black” a political signifier: “Its narrative of identification suggested that the similarity that unified these groups who took it on as a ‘badge,’ as Du Bois would put it . . . was greater than the difference that tended to divide them, whether morphology, language, history, custom or religion” (Hall 2017, 96). From Du Bois and Stuart Hall to Black Lives Matter, offensive identity politics challenge the status quo. Slowly, the concept of “race”—​as a social construct and as a positive and offensive identity marker—​enters the debates in continental Europe, where “ethnicity” was more often used as a concept, inspired by recent publications in the United States and the United Kingdom. One example is Afua Hirsch (2018): “Brit(ish): on race, identity and belonging,” translated in Dutch as “Waarom ras er toe doet” (“Why race matters”; Hirsch 2019). Recent pleadings in the United States to “see race again” and to counter “the colorblindness in academic disciplines” (Crenshaw et al. 2019) inspire debates in European universities as well. Offensive identity politics can also be based on religion. In many European countries, we see a rising consciousness of an “Islamic identity”—​of many varieties—​in Western liberal democracies. In contexts of rising islamophobia, many Muslims consider their religion as an important but contested part of their identity. They claim recognition of their religion, their religious identity, and religious representations and symbols in society, such as mosques or headscarves. Overall, contexts of superdiversity seem to function as stimulating “breeding grounds” for claims for recognition based on cultural, religious or historical grounds. Paradoxically, the struggle for recognition sometimes goes hand in hand with processes of self-​culturalization or self-​essentialization of people and groups. Such identity politics are not only criticized in mainstream society, but also “from within.” The shift from redistribution to recognition is often—​but not always—​a shift from social-​economic to cultural and symbolic inequalities. For Haider (2018, 12) identity politics therefore are the “neutralization of movements against racial oppression.”

“Defensive” Identity Politics As a counterreaction, there is a rising popularity of “defensive” identity politics: that is, people or groups belonging to the “mainstream” society defending existing patterns, norms, values, or regulations. As a reaction to migration, groups of people in receiving countries organize themselves to protect “their” identity in contexts of increasing superdiversity. Migration and increasing diversity are experienced as “threats” to the perceived homogeneous identity of the receiving country or region. Nationalist and populist counterreactions against increasing diversity and the fear of losing the national identity can be found in many countries. Many Western European countries were confronted with the rise of extreme right political parties in the 1980s and 1990s, and they are still popular today. Slowly, critiques on multiculturalism became mainstream,

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    351 leading to a “multicultural backlash” at the beginning of the twenty-​first century (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Today, increasing diversity and offensive identity politics, including critiques on White privileges and claims for decolonization (e.g., Wekker 2016; Crenshaw et al. 2019), are experienced as attacks on lifestyle and identity by certain people and groups belonging to (previous) majority cultures. Processes of negative culturalization of others (stereotyping and scapegoating “the Muslims” or “the Moroccans”) in the receiving countries are now complemented by processes of identity formation based on nationality. Nationalist and populist groups and political parties react by “defending” their identity, “their” culture, worldview, or interests in contexts of globalization and migration. Eric Kaufmann (2019) describes these identity claims as counterreactions to what he calls “Whiteshift”: ethnic majorities in the West that are undergoing a transition from unmixed to mixed states, where “white majorities” are becoming minorities. Kaufman analyzes four White responses to the increasing superdiversity and the loss of majority positions: fight, repress, flee, or join. The three first are part of what I call “defensive identity politics.” However, defensive identity politics can also be found among immigrants who are safeguarding or reconstructing cultural, national, or religious identity claims ascribed to the country of origin. Critique on cultural identities can function as a stimulus, making the identities from countries of origin more important again. Islamic fundamentalism can also be seen as a form of defensive identity politics. In the words of Stuart Hall, “their response to globalization—​and to the hybridization of difference that it contradictorily advances—​is to reconstruct forms of cultural identity in closed, unitary, homogeneous, essentialist, and originary discursive terms” (Hall 2017, 157).

What They Have in Common Offensive and defensive identity politics are unfolding in the same places and contexts, mutually reinforcing each other. This results in a paradoxical combination of normalization and polarization processes in contexts of increasing superdiversity: the first one possibly resulting in conviviality and commonplace diversity, the second leading to mutual reinforcement of identity politics and an us-​and-​them thinking. Offensive and defensive identity politics, however different, share a number of characteristics. Both are driven by claims for recognition. Both create boundaries between the in-​group and the out-​group, reinforcing us-​versus-​them thinking. Both emphasize forms of homogeneity of the own group, with high risks of essentialization and culturalization. Both are based on feelings of victimhood. Finally, both risk reducing or neglecting complexity in contexts of superdiversity by (over)stressing one element of people’s or groups’ identities. Fukuyama fears that this rise of identity politics is one of the main threats for modern liberal democracies. Unless we are able to redevelop more shared and universal visions

352   Dirk Geldof on human dignity, identity politics condemn us to everlasting conflicts (Fukuyama 2018). However, since identity politics are important today, we have to look at ways to move forward. Recognizing complexity not only helps to understand superdiverse cities or neighborhoods; it can also inspire to overcome polarizing identity debates.

Identity Politics through the Lens of Superdiversity Why, and in which ways, can the identity debate benefit from the lens of superdiversity? How can identity policies move forward by applying the lens of superdiversity? A superdiversity approach can be linked to theoretical and practical frameworks focusing on people’s multiple identities. Each of these theoretical frameworks uses a constructionist approach to identity. I distinguish three theoretical approaches on (multiple) identities that can contribute to fully acknowledge complexities.

Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitan Vision At the beginning of the twenty-​first century, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (2004, 2008) argued that we need a “cosmopolitan view” to take us beyond methodological nationalism and the dominant frame of us-​and-​them-​thinking in social sciences and in society as a whole. In order to understand the complexities and realities of our changing societies, the cosmopolitan vision attempts to replace the dominant “either . . . or” way of thinking (either a native citizen or a migrant) with a more flexible “and . . . and” logic. Beck (2008) criticized researchers and policymakers for being locked in the “either . . . or” mode, trying to cordon off what is “ours” and “familiar” from what is “theirs” and “strange,” usually by applying territorial and ethnic “either . . . or” criteria to the question of identity. This metatheory of identity-​society-​politics alienates us from the superdiverse reality of the world of “and . . . and,” where people are recognized in their multiple identities. In contexts of superdiversity, it is no longer possible to understand the complexities by using exclusive categories, which leave no room for ambivalence or hybridity. A new reality has grown up between “us” and “them,” a mixed reality of people who are living “here” and have acquired a new identity “here” but still have their roots in migration, a reality of children who are born “here” but also have a migration past. It is also the reality of people who migrated recently or of people living in mixed marriages and their children, as well as the reality of people who never migrated, but share the same streets and cities in superdiverse neighborhoods. Classic assimilation theory struggles with double ethnic identities or combined nationalities: a person can for example not be both quintessentially Belgian and

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    353 Turkish. But in recent decades many non-​native citizens have developed more complex patterns of identity. Sometimes religious beliefs can play an important role in that. Complementary or double patterns of identity are becoming more common. Superdiverse societies are societies with multiple and layered identities. This transition from an exclusive “either . . . or” to a more inclusive “and . . . and” thinking is a crucial step in developing a cosmopolitan vision and in understanding these complexities (Beck 2004). In this way, Beck opens perspectives to new intermediary forms of identity and ambivalence. It is one way to de-​essentialize identity debates. Recognizing multiple identities builds upon the acceleration of individualization processes that began in the 1960s. Individualization did not imply that all social frameworks disappeared overnight or that people are completely free to choose their own identity and develop their lives as they best please, detached from all ties of family, country, nationality, history, upbringing, and social class. But individualization processes offer an increased freedom to recognize ourselves and others as complex, multiple identities. Contexts of superdiversity today are places where the individualization processes finally also become accepted for citizens with migration backgrounds, no longer reducing them to a single part of their migration or ethnic identity. Recognizing multiple identities is a logical consequence of individualization processes in superdiverse population and migration settings.

Superdiversity Resonates with Intersectionality Superdiversity implies looking beyond the ethnic lens. In the transition toward superdiversity, there still is a strong focus on ethnic differences. Paying attention to processes of differentiation and increasing diversity within diversity invites us to broaden the scope of how people differ from each other. There are differences between old and young, rich and poor, religious or nonreligious, male or female, high or low educated, urban versus rural, heterosexual versus homosexual or bisexual. Ethnicity thus is only one of the ways people can differ from each other. As such, superdiversity resonates with intersectionality (Collins and Bilge 2016), although there are differences between both theoretical frames. Intersectionality approaches have a stronger focus on social inequality and questions regarding political and legal struggles. Superdiversity often focuses more on place; intersectionality addresses the significance of position. Superdiversity has been criticized because power and scale are often absent from superdiversity scholarship (Humphris 2015). Intersectionality approaches have in common with superdiversity that reducing people or groups to one aspect of their identity reduces or neglects complexity and multiple identities. Vertovec distinguishes intersectionality and superdiversity, but both share the recognition of the composite effects of social categories (Vertovec 2017). However, “intersectionality emphasizes multi-​variable effects, but by far most of the intersectionality literature focuses more exclusively on the combined workings of race, gender and class. The concept of superdiversity does not challenge anything about

354   Dirk Geldof theories of intersectionality in this sense; rather, the former is concerned with different categories altogether, most importantly, nationality/​country of origin/​ethnicity, migration channel/​legal status and age as well as gender” (Meissner and Vertovec 2015, 545). This implies analyzing identities as a result of these composite effects or, in other words, as multiple and layered identities. Boccagni adds the relevance of how social actors perceive, make sense of, and react to the situated intersection between multiple attributes over the life course. It stimulates moving beyond identity politics waged in the name of diversity, while recognizing the importance of individual trajectories (rather than cross-​sectional categorizations) of migration, labor market participation, and legal statuses. Superdiversity thus can serve as a lens to further de-​essentialize ethnic and cultural differences and to focus as well on the underlying concurrent processes of societal differentiation, individual identification, and group (dis)alignment (Boccagni 2015, 611).

Stimulating New and Shared Identities A third way of dealing with identity in contexts of superdiversity is the creation of new identities. Many (majority-​minority) cities promote urban identities by stimulating “urban citizenship” and local belonging in contexts of globalization and mobility. Cities promote their urban identity, with large-​scale campaigns that “sell” the city to the outside world as well as to their own inhabitants. The campaigns surrounding the London Olympics in 2012, the “I Amsterdam” project, or “Be-​Berlin” are typical examples. Such branding campaigns not only serve as city marketing to attract tourists and investors; they also attempt to create a shared urban identity, bridging ethnic and other differences in majority-​minority cities that host 170 different nationalities or more, and increasing diversity within diversity. Such urban identities contribute to a further normalization of superdiversity by recognizing diversity as a characteristic of the urban dynamic of the twenty-​first century. They add a shared urban identity as an extra layer of identity based upon the recognition of the multiple identities of their citizens. Another way of managing increasing diversity is stimulating forms of intercultural citizenship. According to Zapata-​Barrero (2019, 5, 41–​45), interculturalism could become a distinctive value of a European identity as part of a pan-​European view on migration-​related diversity recognition, that rejects imposed or ascribed identities and encourages freely chosen identities. As such, intercultural citizenship can break up the congealed view of identity and belonging. Creating such cultures of diversity is not limited to diversity recognition, but involves diversity participation and active diversity management, again, often at an urban level (Zapata-​Barrero 2019, 31). Similarly, Richard Alba’s critique on the narrative of majority-​minority cities in America can be understood as a search for new identities. Alba concludes that the actual American demographic data system reinforces cleavages between the dominant White majority of the twentieth century and the non-​White minorities in the United States. As a result, we underestimate the increasing importance of mixed racial marriages. Where

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    355 the majority-​minority narrative leads to counterreactions and defensive identity politics, the narrative of mixed marriages opens our eyes to the slow transformation process of the mainstream, which might be expanding, instead of declining (Alba 2020). In this case, the mixing through marriages and families is a way to move beyond the ethnic lens, by recognizing the rising importance of multiple and hyphenated identities.

Multiple Identities, Group Identities, and Collective Action In contexts of superdiversity, social cohesion will no longer be a matter of accepting and adjusting to a single national identity. In a world of increasing migration and complexity, reality is characterized by a series of overlapping and mutually supporting identities, which continuously influence and change each other. For an increasing number of citizens, ethnic or migration backgrounds are a crucial part of these multiple identities. Holding on to static images of nationality or identity increasingly becomes a problematic way to understand today’s complexity. However, many people still behave as though there is such a thing as a Flemish, Belgian, Dutch, German, British, or French. identity, which has not changed since the nineteenth century and will persist as it is far into the future. Such static national identities do not exist. Similarly, there is no such thing as an unchangeable and static Moroccan, Turkish, Syrian, or Chinese identity that will remain immune to the passage of time. And finally, because of the processes of individualization and diversification in contexts of superdiversity, the way individuals give weight to their cultural, ethnic, religious, or migration backgrounds increasingly differs. The French sociologist Jean-​Claude Kaufmann (2014, 49) argues in his work on identity politics that we should not confuse the history of a country with its national identity. For Richard Sennett (2010, 50), a society become more primitive to the extent that its people see themselves more categorically in terms of a fixed identity. This applies equally to our individual identity. Neither our national identities nor our individual identities are to be found in our roots, origins, or memory; instead, these identities are a reflection of the constructed sense of meaning that we give to the present. Only a vision of identity that is open to change and dynamic, pluralistic and hybrid, contextual and relational can do justice to the complexity of our modern society. In words of Stuart Hall: “Cultural identity is always something, but it is never just one thing: such identities are always open, complex, under construction, taking part in an unfinished game” (Hall 2017, 174). However, where recognizing multiple identities is recognizing people’s uniqueness in contexts of diversification, not all layers of someone’s identity are recognized in equal ways. Some species of identity are valued higher or lower in society. Therefore, analyzing as well as recognizing multiple identities must always incorporate the awareness of inequality, and the power—​or lack of power—​to make identity choices. The rise

356   Dirk Geldof of conflicting identity claims and identity policies in contexts of increasing diversity make clear that superdiversity goes together with conflicts over how to deal with difference. Changing power relations mostly require forms of collective action, based on group identities. In contexts of multiple identities, one element of these identities can become the ground for collective action and offensive claims for recognition. To the extent that the superdiversity lens is not only descriptive and methodological, but also practical in exploring ways to deal with and live in contexts of differentiation, we have to be more explicit in which ways superdiversity challenges monolithic and static approaches of identity. A better understanding of complex and multiple identities, of (competing) claims for recognition and the reconfiguring power relations, including changing patterns of inequality, can help to enable and better manage living with differences.

References Alba, R. 2020. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Appiah, Kwame. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. London: Profile Books. Bauböck, Rainer. 2008. “Beyond Culturalism and Statism: Liberal Responses to Diversity.” Eurosphere Working Paper Series (EWP), no. 6, Eurosphere Project.,. Bauman, Z. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1997. Kinder der Freiheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Beck, Ulrich. 2004. Der kosmopolitische Blick, oder: Krieg ist Frieden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Beck, Ulrich. 2008. Die Neuvermessung der Ungleichkeit unter den Menschen: Soziologische Aufklärung im 21: Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Boccagni, P. 2015. “(Super)Diversity and the Migration–​Social Work Nexus: A New Lens on the Field of Access and Inclusion?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 608–​620. Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Combahee River Collective. 1977. https://​comb​ahee​rive​rcol​lect​ive.wee​bly.com/​the-​comba​hee -​river-​col​lect​ive-​statem​ent.html. Cooley, C. 1922. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Luke Harris, Daniel HoSang, and George Lipsitz, eds. 2019. Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines. Oakland: University of California Press. Crul, M., J. Schneider, and F. Lelie. 2013. Superdiversity: A New Perspective on Integration. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Faist, T. 2010. “Cultural Diversity and Social Inequalities.” Social Research 77 (1): 297–​324. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-​Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garza, Alicia. 2019. “Identity Politics: Friend or Foe?” Othering and Belonging Institute, https://​belong​ing.berke​ley.edu/​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​fri​end-​or-​foe. Geldof, Dirk. 2016. Superdiversity in the Heart of Europe: How Migration Changes Our Society. Leuven and The Hague: Acco.

Identity Politics in Contexts of Superdiversity    357 Geldof, Dirk. 2018. “Superdiversity as a Lens to Understand Complexities.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge, 43–​56. London: Routledge. Giddens, A. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Haider, A. 2018. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso. Hall, Stuart. 2017. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Edited by Kobena Mercer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heinich, H. 2019. Wat onze identiteit niet is (Ce que n’est pas l’identité). Amsterdam: Prometheus. Hirsch, Afua. 2018. Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Jonathan Cape. Hirsch, Afua. 2019. Waarom ras er toe doet. Amsterdam and Antwerp: Atlas Contact. Humphris, Rachel. 2015. “Intersectionality and Superdiversity: What’s the Difference?” IRiS Key Concepts Roundtable Series, April 30. https://​sup​erdi​vers​ity.net/​2015/​05/​28 /​inters​ecti​onal​ity-​and-​sup​erdi​vers​ity-​whats-​the-​dif​f ere​nce/​. Kaufman, E. 2019. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Penguin Books. Kaufmann, J. 2014. Identités, la bombe à retardement. Paris: Editions textuel. Levrau, F. 2011. Politieke, culturele en redistributieve rechtvaardigheid: Over de politiek-​ filosofische dimensies van erkenning in een multiculturele samenleving. Steunpunt Gelijkekansenbeleid—​Consortium Universiteit Antwerpen en Universiteit Hasselt. Meer, N. 2019. “The Wreckage of White Supremacy.” Identities 26 (5): 501–​509. https://​doi.org /​10.1080/​10702​89X.2019.1654​662. Meissner, Fran, and Steven Vertovec. 2015. “Comparing Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–​555. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2015.980​295. Phillimore, Jenny. 2016. “On Superdiversity.” In Superdiversity in the Heart of Europe: How Migration Changes Our Society, edited by Dirk Geldof, 9–​14. Leuven and The Hague: Acco. Roccas, S., and M. Brewer. 2002. “Social Identity Complexity.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 6 (2): 88–​ 106. https://​belong​ing.berke​ley.edu/​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​fri​end-​or-​foeA. https://​doi.org/​10.1207/​S1532​7957​PSPR​0602​_​01. Said, Edward. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schmid, K., and M. Hewstone. 2011. “Social Identity Complexity: Theoretical Implications for the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.” In Social Cognition, Social Identity, and Intergroup Relations: A Festschrift in Honor of Marilynn B. Brewer, edited by Roderick Kramer, Geoffrey Leonardeiza, and Robert Livingston, 77–​102. Psychology Press Festschrift series. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Sennett, R. 2010. De mens als werk in uitvoering. Amsterdam: Boom and Internationale Spinozalens. Song, M. 2013. “The Changing Configuration of Migration and Race.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies, edited by J. Gold, and S. Nawyn, 169–​179. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by A. Gutmann, 25–​74, 43–​56. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Superdiversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (6): 1024–​1054. Vertovec, Steven. 2017. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://​doi .org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2017.1406​128.

358   Dirk Geldof Vertovec, Steven, and Susanne Wessendorf, eds. 2010. The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices. London: Routledge. Wekker, G. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014. Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Superdiverse Context. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Zapata-​Barrero, R. 2019. Intercultural Citizenship in the Post-​multicultural Era. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Chapter 24

“ Not in a Rel at i onsh i p” Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race” Steve Garner One name always drags with it another: nothing travels alone. —​Mengiste (2019, 3)

Introduction The term superdiversity (SD) has so far accrued an extraordinary amount of interest in its fifteen-​year lifetime. SD identifies a change in the speed and trajectory of migration patterns that is requiring adjustments in public policies around migration in the early twenty-​first century. Its fields of application have diverged from migration policy (the provision of services to migrant populations and integration) to sociolinguistics: a Google search in January 2021 returned over 16,000 hits. More than a decade later, the reflexive writing on SD (Vertovec 2007, 2017, 2019; Meissner and Vertovec 2015) provides some insights into its original conceptualization as an attempt to reframe the policy debates on migration. Vertovec (2014) himself argues that this was primarily a descriptive exercise, without a supporting theory of change, and that SD’s intended meaning was “a changed set of conditions and social configurations which call for a multi-​dimensional approach to understanding contemporary processes of change and their outcomes” (Vertovec 2014, 87). Yet, as with most concepts, the challenges to SD’s epistemological certainties have been widespread. Some historians argue that the novelty it was forged to depict is not actually new (Foner 2017). Some sociologists argue that it does not do justice to the field it seeks to embrace (Hall 2017); and sociolinguists point out its failure to adequately engage with either the “social” or the “linguistics” (Flores and Lewis 2016). Others insist the concept is more about branding than scholarship (Pavlenko 2018). This chapter’s

360   Steve Garner critique has to do with the SD’s lack of a meaningful relationship to the concepts of race and racism. For some, this “lack” might actually be an emancipatory element, to be appreciated: the freedom from the political assertion of dubious ontological or epistemological value into a supposedly neutral space of objectivity, so that other, more relevant identities and statuses can have their exposure. The departure point is that while including race and racism in your set of assumptions about how the social world functions and trying to account for it is always a political act, so is discounting it, a priori, from accounts of how the social world functions. There isn’t a “neutral” unraced position. Choosing to start here in no way downplays the importance of including other variables that superdiversity does make a point of including: My suggestion is “both/​and” rather than “either/​or.” In this chapter, then, I want to engage in a discussion from a critical race perspective, via a combination of what Vertovec (2019) calls “talking around” and “talking about” superdiversity. The objective is to identify the limits of SD and critical race scholarship (CRS) and suggest what race scholarship might bring back into the mix in a more productive engagement.

SD and Migration: “Race” No Longer Included Vertovec specifically sought variables that were “migration-​related” instead of race, class, and gender to be the main focus of SD (2019, 134). “I always intended super-​diversity to be first and foremost a descriptive concept, constructed for a special purpose in order to tie together a set of observed, co-​occurring phenomena that supersede phenomena that were previously evident (hence the ‘super-​’ prefix)” (my italics). The rationale for this focus is at the same time very clear and very opaque. It is intended as a way to highlight intersections that had not previously been the focus of much research. Those other variables include ethnicity, although Vertovec does argue that SD should move beyond this, using migration status, age, language capacity etc., all of which feature prominently in the corpus. Notwithstanding that Vertovec sees this question as “both/​and” rather than “either/​or,” this framing is also ambiguous enough for scholars to have used it to draw a temporal boundary beyond which “race,” class, and gender are no longer valid frames. “Supersede” is the key word here. As a critical race scholar, I would ask: According to what measurements, on what scales, in what timeline, and in which geographical sites has “race” been superseded? We will return to those questions later in the chapter. For the moment it is enough to acknowledge that the injunction to drop “race,” however qualified, has largely been successful. Of the 250 academic publications featuring SD in their title, only two also contain the term “race.”

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    361 Table 24.1. Indicative Reference to the Concepts “Ethnicity” and “Race” in the Most Highly Cited Publications on Superdiversity, 2007–​2019 Author(s) (date of publication) Vertovec (2019)

Mentions of ethnicity (1)

Mentions of race (2)

30

11

Grzymala-​Kazlowska & Phillimore (2018)

11

0

Meissner (2015)

16

2

Meissner and Vertovec (2015)

17

2

Crul et al. (2013)

85

4

Phillimore (2012)

6

3

Phillimore (2011)

24

6

Vertovec (2007) Total

49 238

6 34 (7:1 ratio)

Moreover, derivations of ethnic/​ethnicity have retained their significance, as Table 24.1 indicates.

Ethnicity Rather Than “Race” This table cannot present anything but the most basic information about the mentions given to the two concepts, but the discrepancy in references is stark. Ethnicity is referred to seven times as often as race, and these eight highly cited pieces (with a hundred citations each or more) refer to ethnicity around thirty times each on average. Of course, different articles could be identified that might reduce this ratio, and Crul et al. (2013) does boost the “ethnic” side considerably. Although one of the initial drivers for developing the superdiversity concept was to reduce reliance on ethnicity (and minimize “race”) in favor of less well-​researched statuses, the effort to shake off the former has not been as successful as the one to disengage from “race.” We could speculate as to why this is. The ongoing use of ethnicity as an official status in the Census; the understanding of ethnicity as inherently cultural and sometimes achieved, compare the understanding of race as inherently physical and ascribed; and some overlap, where ethnic is a preferred synonym, particularly in some European contexts in which race is officially frowned upon due to the experiences of World War II. However, we might well query the race–​ethnicity binary, and suggest that in practical use, both terms cover culture and physical appearance: Ethnicity is assumed to be at least partly embodied, and “race” has from the outset been an amalgam of bodies and culture (Garner 2017).

362   Steve Garner Why is this relevant? Because superdiversity’s application to social relationships covers spaces where “race” as a concept that merges the physical with the cultural could fit—​as well as, if not better than, ethnicity—​and in fact, might help us understand to a greater extent the contexts and practices that are in play. Moreover, “race” is not only about migrants but is an element of social stratification that has global, regional, and local patterns (the latter may be highly idiosyncratic). First, “migrant” comprises a number of bureaucratically created and sustained statuses that are not citizenships, yet citizens are racialized and discriminated against, just as they might engage in discourses and practices that include them and exclude other groups from the dominant one. Second, everyone is racialized—​including the host White UK population—​so the production of the frame (ethnicity, or race) is a set of social relationships, in which the omission of one element does not advance our understanding of the dynamics. If complexity is the name of the game, as superdiversity claims, assiduous attention to racialization shows that the processes it analyzes are seldom exclusively about “race,” and that there is no single linear hierarchy. Some members of the same ethnic and racialized groups have different statuses, placing them at different points on a spectrum of advantage and disadvantage. The interest in intersections and different statuses evidenced in SD studies cannot fulfill its objectives however, because first, its methods and tools are specifically designed not to bother with race. The closest we come to engagement is a blanket recognition that racism exists and is implicitly, or explicitly referred to. Second, by prioritizing ethnicity SD seeks cultural, chosen identities (rather than ascriptive ones) without engaging with the baggage ethnicity has accrued as a working concept in the social sciences. That baggage should push us to understand ethnicity as having a status every bit as fragile as that of “race.” Moreover, “ethnicity” as a concept is meaningless without “race” as its silent partner. In the anglophone social sciences, the original use of “ethnic,” in late 1940s US anthropology, was to distinguish strands within whiteness (Lloyd Warner and Srole 1945). In assimilation theory models (Park and Burgess [1921] 1969), each successive generation of migrants becomes more American and less migrant, leading to the ethnic descriptors of hyphenated Americans. Also—​“plural societies” theorists of the colonized world (Furnivall 1939; van Lier 1971) focusing on colonial and postcolonial settings in which groups had been socially engineered so that first race, then ethnicity (as a synonym of race) were, from the 1970s (Kuper 2017) understood as a point of fracture within societies built on coercion, and whose order and institutional base was fragile. The contemporary uses of ethnicity in the social and political sciences veer between these three poles: replacing “race,” signaling potential social breakdown, and explaining cultural distinctions within racialized groups. There is no consensus or absolute order in its deployment. With regard to ethnicity, SD provides neither: and why should it, when other paradigms do not either? Particularly when its stated aim involves looking elsewhere. Ultimately, the key to SD’s conceptual squeamishness about race revolves around the evolutionary hierarchy of terms alluded to by Vertovec’s (2019) reference to phenomena being superseded by others, which will be explored below.

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    363

Contingent Hierarchies of Whiteness One way in which the distinction between “race” and ethnicity that I am trying to explain and operationalize can be understood is through the concept of “whiteness.” Critics of the term like to depict it as a blunt instrument incapable of producing nuance, grouping the rich with the poor, women with men, White migrants with White nationals etc. There is, of course, a grain of truth in these configurations, but I would claim that this is itself the nuance rather than the bluntness. Dominant groups reproduce themselves through power relations, that is, relationally. Upper class/​other classes; men/​women; people without disabilities/​people with disabilities etc. It is perfectly logical therefore that if the category is a racialized identity, then it will be transversal to other sources of identity. Although it takes resources away from people who are not categorized as White (I’m using the highest level of abstraction here), whiteness grants advantage to people who are (whether they like it or not, or are conscious of it or not). This is found repeatedly in quantitative studies and in qualitative ones focusing on experiences of racism. This advantage may be highly dependent on intersectional patterns, but it is relative advantage. How, then, is whiteness useful in helping us understand a critique of superdiversity that revolves around the distinction between race and ethnicity? What I have elsewhere labeled “contingent hierarchies” (Garner 2007) captures the local and sometimes national constructions of power, based on who the dominant group understands as belonging, and therefore acceptable. This hierarchy can be simultaneously intensely local and idiosyncratic and draw down from long-​standing historical and global hierarchies. Indeed, when race theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to explicitly evoke the “white race” and its destiny, the designation was subdivided into manageable regional and cultural strands. Anglo-​Saxon and Nordic were generally at the top of the hierarchy, and Slavs or Celts were generally at the bottom (Deniker 1897). An example of how this works in the twenty-​first century are the ways White Eastern and Central European migrants have experienced their social positioning in the United Kingdom since accession to the European Union in 2004. A small but growing literature has identified the ambiguity of their position, at once White Europeans but also migrants, and, importantly, migrants with what is seen as a less developed culture. Regardless of how they deploy resources they are unable to argue themselves consistently into the unproblematically White space of power.1 While borders shift because they are technologies of state, the social boundaries constructed are simultaneously between White and “Other”; and between various hierarchical layers of whiteness (determined by distance from the national norms through a messy amalgam of nationality/​region of origin, language, perceived cultural deficit, appearance, religion, etc.). However, the culturally defined distinctions within the nominally “white” group do not pertain to everything or every social interaction. Eastern and Central Europeans can identify with norms of the White national dominant group and engage in racist practice and discourse (Fox and Moglincka 2019). As some of them

364   Steve Garner strive to whiten themselves through these practices, other White UK people strive to un-​whiten them through discourse and practices aimed at culturally downgrading them (Elgenius and Garner 2021). Although these migrants will not be recategorized as Black or Asian, for example, neither will they be absorbed into the discursively dominant group—​that is, White UK people who do not have to justify their presence on UK soil or their entitlement to state resources (Garner 2015). Here Lloyd Warner and Srole’s (1945) model of race subdivided by ethnicity can help us see the distinction. What does this have to do with superdiversity? Well, those ethnicity and race are not synonyms but cousins: They overlap but do different work in different contexts. In Lloyd Warner and Srole’s model, ethnicity only has meaning because it is engaged (like a set of cogs) in and with “race.” Overrelying on ethnicity as if race were insignificant—​which is my critique of most superdiversity scholarship—​skews the frame to the point that we miss out the power relations. Yet by establishing racialization as an important element of superdiversity, we restore this edge and framing, without missing the nuance and complexity produced in the microlevel fieldwork, which, for me, is the main positive contribution of the SD frame.

Race as the Dinosaur in the Room? The presence of “race” in SD work is a haunting, a remnant of other ways of thinking and doing that have been superseded. Neal et al.’s (2015, 467) revealing account of interactions in public green spaces in London implies a tension between the complexity of superdiverse multiculture and “archaic ‘difference work,’ reducing people to their visible characteristics, and emphasizing/​defining (their) difference on this basis”? If so, is it an “either/​or” or a “both/​and” situation? “The allocations of ethnic categorization,” they write (467), “felt like an engagement, not so much with a new world of super-​diversity and complex multiculture, but with an older parochial world of reducing people to racialized sets of other identification.” First, note the slippage again between “ethnic categorizations and racialized . . . identification.” I think this concern to reflect on juggling labels expressed in this particularly nuanced piece of fieldwork provides a neat abbreviation of my concerns with SD: It feels like we (White researchers) are hiding behind a curtain not wanting the older parochial world to spoil the new one. Yet this act of binary categorization (new, old; complex, parochial) itself constitutes the performance of an analytical act that makes it permissible to downplay the continuing and relentless relevance of the “archaic difference work” being accomplished at both structural and individual levels. Race and racism are not the dinosaur concepts they are implied to be. SD is not the event that wiped them out, and they are not confined to a Jurassic Park. And the power of people in the White UK host communities (as in those of other majority White countries in which SD work is carried out) to perform gatekeeping and discriminatory discursive and physical acts is greater than that of people who are not racialized as White, and who are also UK nationals. And greater than that of most migrants. While this is

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    365 acknowledged somewhere on the horizon, it really does not play an important role in the social structures that are explicitly engaged with in SD work. The suggestions that follow therefore are not based on a zero-​sum logic: You do not have to pack the various statuses of migration up in a bag and put it back in a cupboard. An intersectional approach that uses migration status as a variable is very relevant, and to be maintained. Indeed, Crenshaw’s (1990) original essay on intersectionality uses migrant status as a central element of her narrative explaining the term’s application.

Toward a Productive Dialogue: SD and Critical Race Scholarship Analysis of micro interactions in specific geographies enables us to examine the nuts and bolts of people making multiculturalism “work.” Moreover, the focus on different intersections and bases for shared action and understanding is appreciated. It is when the discussion broadens to critique of integration or the uses of diversity that technical issues arise, because SD is not equipped to interrogate power relationships or explain patterns of inequality. SD cannot explain much about continuing patterns of inequality, including ethnic penalties, or Black Lives Matter’s uptake in Europe, or Brexit—​it is not an explanatory framework. This is freely admitted: “I must first stress that super-​diversity is not a theory. I regard theory as providing an account of how-​things-​work (inherent relations or causalities). Nor is it a hypothesis (or to-​be-​tested theory)” (Vertovec 2017, 1575). CRS can contribute something theoretical and explanatory to complement the empirical and microlevel orientation of SD.

Stratification We will start where SD’s concern and trajectory sail closest to those of critical race scholarship. In this passage on stratification, Steve Vertovec (2017) writes about being inspired by Lydia Morris (2002), whose idea of migrant statuses as a social stratification system was at the core—​and, for me, remains as a defining feature—​of the notion of super-​diversity. Here the idea is that not only are migrants generally stratified in a number of ways by their legal status, but –​ due to the patterns of characteristics surrounding migrant flows –​whole clusters of migrants (by way of combinations of nationality, ethnicity or race, gender, age, language and human capital) are socially positioned in a stratification system. (1576)

Stratification systems require processes that produce the unequal and hierarchical collective outcomes. So, to develop the proximity between CRS and SD, we will look

366   Steve Garner briefly at three connected questions: What is migration as a field of inquiry? What tools does CRS bring? How might CRS tools be used to develop SD in practice? Migration as a field envisaged in SD entails the identification and analysis of patterns of stratification that revolve around migration status as a key ordering principle. Migration statuses are bureaucratic creations, conferring differential conditions, advantages, and disadvantages to the various groups of migrants a migration regime produces. These groups typically are those that require and do not require visas; have preferential access to visas; have longer stays attached to the visa; can change jobs or residence (or both) or even leave the country without a new visa, etc. Yet this field is far too narrow to capture stratification much beyond noting the new combinations of statuses. Indeed, a stratification-​ centered approach entails attention to socioeconomic disadvantage, as will be shown. Although the focus in SD is on patterns of stratification and the experiences of migrants encountering the organizations that provide services, there is little interest in the regimes that produce these statuses. Indeed, one of the most powerful critiques of SD (Hall 2017) is based on this lack of attention, to which Vertovec has responded positively (2017). Moreover, there is little engagement with the postcolonial racialized logics governing such regimes in Europe in the 2005–​2020 period in which SD has been a live framework.

The Field of Migration Studies SD scholars are migration scholars, and migration scholarship has a particularly fraught relationship with race scholarship (Romero 2008). Why race? If you think race is an old-​fashioned, limited-​use dinosaur concept that has little to tell us about the modern world, and you’re studying migration, then I urge you to keep reading, at least until the end of the paragraph. First, racism exists, and the stratification can be measured in areas where such measurements are possible: distributions of wealth, life chances, health patterns, access to different kinds of resources; crime figures; Criminal justice system figures, and so on. Moreover, migration as a public conversation is also a significant presence in migrants’ lived experience, as public interaction with political rhetoric and policies demonstrates. Although the SD focus is on the diversification of diversity and the increasing complexity of identities, the action seems to take place in a space devoid of these big battles. Racism is a living thing with systemic and individual dimensions. The next question is, Why don’t SD scholars explicitly engage with race more often? I propose four likely answers, from SD scholars’ point of view, to start a conversation: race is understood as an old and overused blunt instrument framework; it does not tell us anything new about migration; its study absorbs energies that could go into demonstrating a more complex picture of society; and it entails committing to structures that are about power and things not changing very quickly, which is the opposite of the core learning from SD. Meissner (2015, 558) argues compellingly: “I wish to emphasize that understanding the contingency of complex social constellations without

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    367 assuming their permanency, and seeing value in understanding social patterns rather than foregrounding causalities, has become a relevant part of social science research. Superdiversity as a concept is particularly commensurate with this task.” Despite the appeal of identifying and labeling change (and who doesn’t love a new frame?), I think we also need to understand and reflect upon how some things change very, very slowly. While the intellectual abstinence from race can indeed produce deeper understanding how people “do” multiculture, and by tailoring services in a more bespoke way, I want to suggest that this abstinence might also be a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Critical Race Scholarship I use the term critical race scholarship to bring together any form of analysis, from any discipline, which centers the concept of race and the practices of racism. It assumes that both are social realities, and attempts to explore how they function as ideas, practices, and systems. It is not a monolithic prescriptive body of thought, and it includes critical race theory and social science concepts that illuminate the social relationships inscribed by race, such as “racialization,” “whiteness,” or forms of racism such as Islamophobia, anti-​Semitism, anti-​Black, anti-​Gypsy/​Traveler racisms, etc. Placing these topics at the center of your analysis does not mean you can avoid engaging with other forms of discrimination and stratification: indeed, it is normal for the intersections to arise. However, though an acknowledgment of everyday intersections involving racialized identity is crucial, critical race scholarship is informed by the knowledge that no one else is going to durably prioritize race in their studies. In SD (as in most areas of migration studies), the statuses that constitute the social stratification seem to emerge from a nonspecified past, and the moment at which race became irrelevant for studying migration and its resulting diversity is not explained. So far, I have argued that SD deliberately evades engagement with race, and that this is an error, not least because the scholarship around race and racism could broaden and enhance SD scholarship. So how could critical race scholarship improve SD? On one hand, it is difficult to find a point of access in a literature that is so steadfastly resistant to the paradigm I am trying to advocate, and reflecting its workings and impacts as if they went without saying. However, one starting point would be to adopt the concept of “racialization.” We will look briefly at this before moving on to “integration” as a case study of applying racialization to SD.

Racialization The concept of racialization (which requires “race” as a variable, however ostensibly fictitious it may be) does vital work, linking discourses; spaces; and bodies, which can be

368   Steve Garner racialized, across time and space. Racialization is the process by which “race” becomes a salient element of social relationship, producing and reproducing hierarchical, stratified patterns of outcomes. Studying racialization entails a historical method, identifying the channels by which race becomes important, discourses are constructed, the agents of such processes, and the outcomes. Lastly, racialization focuses on a particular field, timeline, place, or space. For the researcher to identify people as “Black,” “Asian,” or “White” in this method does reduce them to one dimension, as has been pointed out, but only insofar as this reflects the ideological work that racism has already accomplished. In doing so, the researcher has to know that a set of power relations drives the process; and that in this, people are “hailed” in different ways and at different moments, as combinations of “women,” “middle-​class,” “middle-​aged,” “Muslim,” etc., which are also the category types that people use in everyday discourse. Importantly for discussions of migration and migrants, scholarship demonstrates that White UK people do not necessarily distinguish between migrants and UK nationals and, particularly, not between different migrant statuses, which, among other things, renders the results of most opinion polls on the topic highly questionable. When people are asked questions about immigration and immigrants, without definitions being supplied, they are not constrained to give responses based on anything apart from their own data and definitions. Those understandings produce racialized outcomes that are important in the ongoing public conversations (public, media, policy). While the focus on policy detail and the differentiated impacts on the groups under the overall umbrella category “migrant” is an important strand of SD, in the circle of policy-​response-​policy that governs the space in which SD fieldwork is carried out, we have to recognize we are working in a highly racialized space. For the public, the distinctions between migrants and nonmigrant minority groups, and those between migrants with differing statuses are absolutely unimportant in understandings of policy at national level. Recognizing and accounting for this parallel world would be a significant step forward. The people who populate the spaces through which the subjects of SD fieldwork move are not wholly indifferent to racialized difference. The last section consequently focuses on SD work on integration to highlight what critical race scholarship could bring to the discussion, using racialization as a key concept.

Integration Both Dahinden (2016) and Favell (2019) provide robust arguments that the term integration is not useful as a social science concept, and is part of the normalization of state-​ speak and policy parameters that critical scholars should actively avoid. This chapter does not suggest throwing out the baby of informed and revealing fieldwork conducted in SD research with the bathwater of conceptual issues tied to the fictions evoked by national integration and its relationship with migration studies. Instead, I propose a shift

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    369 of emphasis in the conceptual arsenal. Racialization shifts the critical responsibility onto researchers in a different way. The impetus is on researchers to be able to keep pace with the dynamics of the superdiverse character of the societies being studied by tracking two things at once: first, how multifaceted social identities that are simultaneously specific to time and place develop; and second, things that change slowly, that is, the racialized structures and frames that impact on people’s life chances. Much was made in the British media of the racist aspects of both the Brexit discourses around immigration and belonging and the peaks of violence around the campaigning. However, British people of color who were interviewed, for example, by Benson and Lewis (2019), saw this more or less as “business as usual.” In other words, it does not matter to what extent the young Dutch-​speaking, headscarf-​wearing, urban European women engaging in global, diasporic conversations on their smart phones on Crul’s (2013) Amsterdam bus appear “integrated.” In the framing of the state, they are also subject to discursive and political power regimes that reduce their identities to that of “brown-​skinned Muslim woman” in a space where the risks of discrimination attached to that combination of identity elements is high. The large-​scale cogs of racialization turn relatively slowly; the smaller, connected cogs of Dutchness turn more rapidly. So far, the SD work has zoomed in on the latter, blurring the former. The SD work on integration (inter alia, Phillimore 2011; Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018, 3) alludes to and provides evidence for increasing complexity, but does not provide a definition. It also lacks substantial focus on the host population’s function and role in integration outside the provision of services. As the emphasis on complexity becomes more acute, the picture’s capacity to capture and take account of the broader terrain of social forces diminishes. Indeed, van Breugel and Scholten (2017) have a major issue with socioeconomic inequalities dropping out of the frame in SD scholarship. They suggest that policy responses tend to adopt anti-​redistributive orientations and rationales when enacted through neoliberal governance in twenty-​first-​century Europe, avoiding engagement with socioeconomic inequality, which Abdou and Geddes (2017) argue “is a central aspect of superdiverse societies in urban spaces” (503). The striking and empirically measurable socioeconomic stratification of the host societies into which migrants arrive is undervalued in these SD engagements. Moreover, integration is a national policy issue implemented through quite uneven local practices and in very different demographic contexts. If you were interested in migration but read only SD articles, you would emerge thinking the world was a smorgasbord of urban ethnic diversity. It really isn’t. I did fieldwork in not-​very-​diverse urban areas of provincial England from 2005 to 2012 (Garner 2015). Living in an electoral ward with a less than average percentage of ethnic minority residents is the norm for the majority of people racialized as White in Europe, North America, and Australasia (although that is slowly shifting in specific locations). Could SD be used in superhomogenous settings? Even this framing of a limit of SD requires a critical race studies perspective. In other words, some places are descriptively “superdiverse,” even if you only use ethnicity as your variable and the conditions enable the salience of a set of methods in which this can be a useful departure point for social science. Other places are not.

370   Steve Garner This is relevant for two reasons. First, the same social processes—​movements and accumulations of people, capital, and money and segregating patterns—​make some places highly diverse (and susceptible to an SD approach) and others more homogenous. Second, migrant status does not hold a monopoly on ethnic minority status. Some of the microlevel ethnographies produced under the heading of SD are simultaneously rich and leave an unsatisfied feeling because we are so close to the feast of difference explored that it feels like there are no patterns. Rosbrook-​Thompson’s (2018) excellent fieldwork on an amateur football/​soccer club London is as example, combining a fine-​grained authenticity with a dizzying array of players’ personal stories in a supremely multicultural space. Moreover, the notion of the “everyday” has also been assumed by SD as an indicator of benignly banal interactions. There is a subgenre of such studies, many of which are fascinating. Meissner (2015, 557) points to SD’s focus on “social patterns that are not necessarily marked by perceived inequalities, but where the simultaneity of multiple axes of differentiation results in positively or ambivalently perceived social relations. This is also where superdiversity differs most from previous conceptualizations aimed at incorporating multi-​dimensionality or its intersections in the analysis of social differentiation.” However, if everyday superdiversity captures a state in which what we refer to as “racialized diversity” may have been rendered unremarkable in some patterns of interpersonal interactions, then racial and gendered microaggressions, for example, are similarly rendered unremarkable because they are so frequent, normal, predictable. And their workings exist beyond and underneath the narrow frame of SD’s focus. Questions arise: To what extent does this describe particular spaces and neglect others? In other words, is this space and its social relations produced as an everyday pattern? How can this pattern be explained when other scenarios are in place where the “archaic difference work” is done, and the systemic patterns produce disadvantage? CRS can still understand the homogenous places, within a system and a history, and therefore also understand the diverse places and where they fit in the ecosystem of place-​ based inequalities and the demographic dimensions of those inequalities. Moreover, SD explicitly focuses on migrants, but migrants are not the only ethnic minorities: Ethnic minority citizens disappear from some of these studies and have weakly theorized positions in others. While theoretically, citizen status places them above noncitizens in the stratification system, in practice there is not such a clean distinction, particularly under interpretations of immigration regimes that are local equivalents of the UK’s “hostile environment” (Goodfellow 2020). The focus in critical race studies on “race” as being transversal to social relationships captures that race also cuts across migrant statuses: Islamophobia or anti-​Black racism can impact on refugees, asylum-​seekers, and people who are third generation British citizens alike. The contexts in which the interactions studied take place are racialized: Colonial and postcolonial immigration regimes have produced the variety of statuses that SD uses in its grille of diversity. These regimes have been racialized, and this articulates with citizenship status to produce patterns of experiences.

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    371 After World War II, UK immigration law shifted, in stages, from conceptualizing nationality based on membership in the British Empire to nationality based on bloodlines, following the concept of “patriality.” This transition ended up conferring advantage—​in terms of citizenship, visa access and residency—​to migrants with a grandparent born in the UK, and hence disadvantaged most migrants from former empire countries and regions, such as the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and part of Africa. Recruitment into work, the types of employment accessed, and the primarily urban areas where this work was available have set the patterns of settlement on which the current studies of the United Kingdom are based (Garner 2017). Moreover, the United Kingdom’s de facto membership in the Schengen Area from 1988 to 2020 period favored access and settlement by White European migrants (who could travel within the area without visa restrictions), over those from anglophone former colonies. Such histories and tensions underpinning contemporary urban superdiversity has a lot to do with racialized immigration regimes, examination of which features nowhere in the superdiversity framing or fieldwork. It’s easier to feel everyday diversity if you are not aware of previous generations’ everyday racism experiences. And even this statement supposes that the current everyday is benign, whereas BLM and indigenous movements in the West suggest otherwise. Finally, critical race studies suggests that the framing of “integration” as a discourse derives not merely from a tension between assimilation and the two-​way process (Phillimore 2011), in which the latter is fighting a losing battle (Favell 2019), but also from an underpinning racialized framing that claims White European societies are more civilized (cultured, urban, historical, Christian, equal, capable of democratic organization and sustaining institutions) than others. This part of the story of the concept of race goes back at least to the fifteenth century, and since the 1950s, it has manifested in forms various scholars have labeled “cultural racism” (Modood 1994), “differentialist racism” (Taguieff 1989), “crisis racism” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991), which now inform the global geopolitics of immigration and security (van Hotum 2010). SD’s project of drilling down to the microlevel for ethnographies and qualitative interviewing research produces rich detail that complicates the metanarratives and would not otherwise be collected. However, its seemingly willful avoidance of engagement with race scholarship diminishes its capacity to tell us more about the social world. Moreover, racism backgrounds articulations of SD’s rationale like a watermark. It functions, for example, to bookend Crul et al.’s (2013, 69) view of the best and worst social outcomes. This ideal scenario of empowerment and hope is the future destiny of cities which offer equal opportunities to newcomers and their children, where racism is actively dealt with and where there is an open atmosphere, focused on the wider world outside. The doom scenario of fear and humiliation will be found in cities where new groups and their children are given few opportunities for upward mobility and where racism and discrimination are rife. SD’s development of integration as a thematic has so far been to highlight new combinations of variables and contexts that impact how people can be integrated into host societies. The experience of racism affects people’s lives, at all points on the

372   Steve Garner timescale of integration and in statuses apart from migrant ones. By not engaging explicitly with these experiences, the patterns of stratification racism produces, and the structures that generate them, SD risks being understood as a paradigm that reflects a disproportionately dominant racialized view, because it does not design its instruments or analytical frameworks to take account of subaltern experiences and framings.

Conclusions I used the Facebook tag “not in a relationship” in the chapter title to humorously signal that these bodies of scholarship are not engaging with each other, although race inhabits accounts of superdiversity. I hope to have made a case that such engagement would be mutually beneficial, providing SD with some structural and explanatory tools, and highlighting how race is articulated in complex ways with a host of other variables in the messy process of racialization. Indeed, as Crul et al. (2013) comment, “The very final taboo in the integration debate would appear to be the discussion of discrimination and racism” (65)—​which is a perfect description of SD. It is all the more difficult to understand because the SD advocates clearly know about racism and discrimination and say so. As a colleague once pointed out to me when I was working on my PhD, the most effective way to not see something is not to look for it in the first place. Effectively, by systematically not including race as a variable or a status, that’s the outcome. SD has not made race obsolete: it has not wiped clean the old laws. The current corpus relies on the overrepresentation of very diverse urban places at the expense of others that are also sites of migratory and postmigratory struggle, and neglects host populations and their weight in making and responding to migration policy in particular. Lastly, the emphasis on microlevel studies that is most prevalent among SD practitioners often misses the macrolevel framing, the historicization and context that CRS could bring. When I read much of the superdiversity literature, I see a multitude of connections into scholarship on race, lit up like scintillating maps of neural pathways, because the situations, experiences, and terminology evoke the movement of ideas that are so bound up in one another. And as Maaza Mengiste observes, nothing travels alone. Definitely not in the scholarly trajectories of work reproducing analyses of the experiences of people crossing borders into the Global North. “Race” is inextricably embedded into migratory experiences, and this is how I want to pitch my vision: as an invitation to complete a picture, so as not travel alone.

Notes 1 Includes terms derived from “ethnic” (ethnicity, ethnically, ethnicification) in the title, abstract, and main body of the text. Does not include references/​journal titles.

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    373 2 Includes terms derived from “race” (racial, racially, racialization, racialize(d), racism) in the title, abstract, and main body of the text. Does not include references/​ journal titles. 3 And the set of articles they edit in this special edition of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(2) (2018).

Note 1. See Elgenius and Garner (2021).

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374   Steve Garner Goodfellow, Maya. 2020. Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats. London: Verso. Grzymala-​Kazlowska, Alekszandra, and Jenny Phillimore. 2018. “Introduction: Rethinking Integration. New Perspectives on Adaptation and Settlement in the Era of Super-​Diversity.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (2): 179–​196. Hall, Suzanne M. 2017. “Mooring ‘Super-​Diversity’ to a Brutal Migration Milieu.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (9): 1562–​1573. Kuper, Leo. 2017. Race, Class, and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change in Plural Societies. London: Routledge. Lloyd Warner, William, and Leo Srole. 1945. The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Meissner, Fran. 2015. “Migration in Migration-​ Related Diversity? The Nexus between Superdiversity and Migration Studies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 556–​567. Meissner, Fran, and Steven Vertovec. 2015. “Comparing Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–​555. Mengiste, Maaza. 2019. The Shadow King. New York: W. W. Norton. Modood, Tariq. 1994. Racial Equality: Colour, Culture and Justice. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Morris, Lydia. 2002. Managed Migration: Civic Stratification and Rights. London: Routledge. Neal, Sarah, Katy Bennett, Hannah Jones, Allan Cochrane, and Giles Mohan. 2015. “Multiculture and Public Parks: Researching Super-​Diversity and Attachment in Public Green Space.” Population, Space & Place 21: 463–​475. Park, Robert, and Burgess, Ernest. [1921] 1969. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pavlenko, Aneta. 2018. “Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Innovation and Academic Branding.” In Sloganization in Language Education Discourse: Conceptual Thinking in the Age of Academic Marketization, edited by B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, and L. Küster, 142–​168. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Phillimore, Jenny. 2011. “Approaches to Health Provision in the Age of Super-​Diversity: Accessing the NHS in Britain’s Most Diverse City.” Critical Social Policy 31 (1): 5–​29. Phillimore, Jenny. 2012. “Implementing Integration in the UK: Lessons for Integration Theory, Policy and Practice.” Policy & Politics 40 (4): 525–​545. Romero, Mary. 2008. “Crossing the Immigration and Race Border: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Immigration Studies.” Contemporary Justice Review 11 (1): 23–​37. Rosbrook-​Thompson, James. 2018. “Understanding Difference amid Superdiversity: Space, ‘Race’ and Granular Essentialisms at an Inner-​City Football Club.” Sociology 52 (4): 639–​654. Taguieff, Pierre-​André. 1989. “The Doctrine of the National Front in France (1972–​1989): A Revolutionary Programme? Ideological Aspects of a National-​Populist Mobilization.” New Political Science 8 (1–​2): 29–​70. van Lier, Rudolf. 1971. Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of Surinam. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Van Breugel, I., and Peter Scholten. 2017. “Mainstreaming in Response to Superdiversity? The Governance of Migration-​Related Diversity in France, the UK and the Netherlands.” Policy & Politics 45 (4): 511–​526. Van Houtum, Henk. 2010. “Human Blacklisting: The Global Apartheid of the EU’s External Border Regime.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (6): 957–​976.

Superdiversity’s Anomalous Disengagement from “Race”    375 Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–​1054. Vertovec, Steven. 2014. “Reading Superdiversity.” In Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, 86–​88. Oxford: COMPAS. Vertovec, Steven. 2017. “Mooring, Migration Milieus and Complex Explanations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (9): 1574–​1581. Vertovec Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139.

Chapter 25

The Governa nc e of Su perdive rsi t y A Complexity Perspective Peter Scholten

Introduction Superdiversity as a specific form of social complexity challenges traditional views on policymaking in the area of migration and migration-​related diversities. Ideas about societal steering, the role of central government, rationality, and controllability is often in conflict with the reality of complexity in which the role of government is often limited and societal processes are unpredictable and characterized by high levels of uncertainty. This is also what other scholars have found for other complex policy areas, including Verweij and Thompson (2006) for climate change and Walby (2005) for gender. This chapter brings a complexity perspective to the governance of superdiversity. As I will show, belief in societal steering and in central government has for some reason remained entrenched in this policy area (see also Boswell 2011; Bertossi 2011). Under the pressure of public and political contestation, there has been a strong urge to seek “quick fixes” to immigration or integration issues, for instance. This is illustrated in when countries choose to “solve” migration or integration “problems” by fortifying borders, establishing civic integration programs, or imposing a variety of legal conditions or financial incentives. A complexity governance perspective will show that coping with complexity requires a different perspective on policies, policymaking, and the role of central government (Peters 2017), one that is not based on a relativist view about how societies can be governed or an objectivist belief that societies can be engineered. In fact, I will argue that failing to come to terms with complexity is one of the reasons policies in this area seem to derail so often, as has been seen in the “refugee crisis,” the “multicultural crisis,” and the many other crises that this policy area has gone through.

378   Peter Scholten I will describe this tendency to ignore, deny, or fail to cope with complexity as “alienation,” or a form of policy estrangement from the complexity of superdiverse societies (see also Scholten 2020). I will argue that alienation is one of the probable sources of the frequent crisis mode in migration and diversity governance. I will elaborate a complexity governance perspective on how policy processes can come to terms with complexity through a structural process of mainstreaming migration and diversities in society and in institutions. Migration and migration-​related diversity are therefore not approached as stand-​alone topics that can be engineered or “fixed” from a state-​centric perspective, but as complex topics that cut across generic policy sectors and institutions and that require a structural and responsive approach to often unpredictable and uncertain situations with a broad actor network.

The Complexification of Migration and Diversity To understand the governance of superdiversity it is important to first understand what makes diversity so complex. Policy sciences literature differentiates between different types of policy problems (Hoppe 2011; Peters 2017). On the one hand, there are relatively well-​structured problems characterized by low levels of contestation and good availability of means for tackling them. Usually, these problems are addressed in relatively small and closed policy networks, or “subsystems,” by actors who are the most directly involved or have the requisite knowledge of the issues and means of intervention. This includes, for instance, infrastructural policies and, to some extent, agricultural policies. On the other hand, policy problems characterized by uncertainty, a lack of knowledge and the means to tackle the problem, or high levels of contestation are often described as wicked, unstructured, or complex. For these problems, there is often no clear way of demarcating who is involved and who is not involved, and policy processes are often very dynamic and contested. Studies of superdiversity argue that the complexity of migration and migration-​related diversity has increased over the past decades. For instance, Hollinger (1995) speaks of the “diversification of diversity,” referring to a shift from a social context in which diversity was defined primarily in ethnic terms to a social setting in which many diversities (ethnicity, race, status, position, etc.) intersect. Vertovec (2007) refers to superdiversity as an increase in the levels and kinds of diversities, involving 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” (13). The first and most often referred to aspect of the complexification of migration and diversity involves what can be described as a “deepening” of migration and diversity. This means that the “internal complexity” of these phenomena has increased. The traditional perspective on migration as a pattern whereby a migrant leaves one place, goes on a journey, arrives, settles in, and then integrates into a “host” society no longer captures

The Governance of Superdiversity    379 the different mobilities and uncertainties associated with migration today. Several scholars refer to “liquid migration” or “liquid mobilities” (Bygnes and Erdal 2017; Engbersen 2016). Similarly, the complexity of migration-​related diversity has deepened in a way that forces us to think beyond the “ethnic lens.” This means that we need to think of diversity much more in terms of complex intersectionalities between various aspects of diversity instead of trying to narrow down it to one dimension (such as ethnicity). A second aspect of complexification can be described as a “broadening” of migration and diversity. This means that migration and diversity have become so interconnected with other aspects of society that they cannot and should not be approached as stand-​ alone topics (Dahinden 2016); they have become an integral aspect of almost every aspect of modern social life. Migration is not just about managing the entry into or exit from a territory or the “integration” of specific communities; it is also about how a society is organized in a way that may encourage or discourage migration and inclusion. Think about how a country’s economy is organized in a way that may encourage or discourage migration, how welfare states may create opportunities or obstacles to inclusion and mobility, how international relations may affect mobilities and inclusion, how climate policies may affect the drivers of migration drivers, and so on. Here, there are important similarities between migration and migration-​related diversities, on the one hand, and topics that are equally generic and cross-​sectoral in nature, such as gender and environmental policies, on the other. A third aspect of the complexification of migration and diversity, one that is often overlooked, concerns the variations in the configurations of mobilities and diversities across time and space. Superdiversity does not necessarily expect diversity to look the same at every place and time. It is not a one-​size-​fits-​all concept. In migration scholarship, there has been increasing attention on different levels of governance, such as in the context of the “local turn” in migration studies that has shown that local configurations of migration and diversity may vary significantly. Particular local economic and social circumstances and specific migration histories mean that cities can be more superdiverse or less superdiverse than others or have a very different sort of superdiversity. There is an ongoing debate within migration studies over whether this is a new situation or whether the ethnic or racial dimension of diversity was simply overemphasized in the past. However, for purposes of this chapter, the particularly important question concerns to what extent complexity is acknowledged and recognized in migration and diversity governance.

A Complexity Governance Perspective: Mainstreaming versus Alienation The primary focus here is to understand what this complexification means for the governance of migration and diversity. To better understand the governance of

380   Peter Scholten superdiversity, I will employ a complexity governance perspective to challenge conventional perspectives on migration and diversity governance and policymaking. Complexity governance is a perspective from the field of governance studies and policy sciences that seeks to conceptualize and theorize policymaking in the face of complexity. It has been applied extensively to other complex areas, as noted, including gender and climate (Dalal-​Clayton and Bass 2009; Daly 2005; Jones and Webster 2006; Lombardo and Meier 2006; Nunan, Campbell, and Foster 2012; Walby 2005). Complexity governance rejects the traditional opposition in the policy sciences between models of orderly policymaking and of disorderly or chaotic policymaking (Geyer and Rihani 2012). It rejects the idea found in “orderly” policymaking models that complex problems can be fully “solved” as long as the policymaking is rational. It also rejects the assumption in the disorderly models that policymaking, as well as societies, is so chaotic and irrational that no form of intervention or policy is possible. It argues instead that complex problems require a different approach; or, in the words of Verweij and Thompson (2006), that messy problems ask for messy solutions. The perspective of complexity governance resonates strongly with the broader sociological literature on reflexivity in the context of the late-​modern risk society. Beck (1992), Bourdieu (2004), Schon and Rein (1995), and other scholars call for reflexivity in the face of uncertainty, meaning that actors need to reflect critically about the causes and consequence of problems and constantly adjust their actions responsively. Beck (1992) speaks of “responsive governance.” Schon and Rein (1995) argue that “human beings can reflect on and learn about the game of policymaking even as they play it, and, more specifically, . . . they are capable of reflecting in action on the frame conflicts that underlie controversies and account for their intractability” (37). The “messiness” of complexity governance has several characteristics. One is that, instead of offering rational solutions or “quick fixes” to issues of migration and diversity governance, complexity governance asks for a flexible, adaptive, and responsive approach to these often highly uncertain and contested policy issues (Geyer and Rihani 2012). Rather than view policy as a “masterplan,” complexity governance sees policy as a process that is constantly responding to new insights and new situations, and not solution per se. Another thing that makes complexity governance messy is that addressing complex problems usually requires complex actor networks (Klijn and Koppenjan 2014; Jessop 1997). The role of one actor, such as central government, is usually limited. This relates to another factor, which is that complexity governance usually requires a polycentric approach that does not confine itself to a specific policy area or sector, policy actor, or policy level. This means that contestation and uncertainty are usually integral to the efforts to deal with complex problems; they are the rule rather than the exception, and rather than consider contestation and uncertainty as an unwelcome deviation from policymaking, we should consider them as core aspects of how we come to agree on the governance of complex issues. Mainstreaming is a specific form of complexity governance that has been applied to other issues characterized by high levels of social complexity and cut across a variety

The Governance of Superdiversity    381 of policy sectors (such as gender, disability, and the environment). Building on this broader literature, we can define mainstreaming as a governance approach that tries to structurally embed responsiveness to migration and diversity in generic structures and institutions (Lombardo and Meier 2006; Scholten and van Breugel 2017). This involves a polycentric approach in which migration and diversity are not treated as stand-​alone issues but approached integrally by generic policies and institutions (Rhodes 1997). Further, it involves a complex actor network that may include but is usually not limited to centralist governance and that targets not only migrants or specific communities but the whole diverse population. Finally, mainstreaming entails constant responsiveness and policy adjustments in specific spatial and temporal circumstances. However, despite the recognition of the growing role of complexity and the need for responsive governance in a risk society, many studies also point to the limitations of policy systems and policy actors to adequately respond to and cope with complexity. Dunlop (2017) argues that complexity, and the contestation that comes with complexity, often limits policy learning and critical reflection in a way that allows “policy pathologies” to be created or sustained. Schneider and Ingram (1997) even argue that the social and power dynamics in politics and policymaking would lead to “degenerative policy designs” that are driven by interests and perceptions rather than a sincere desire to engage with the complexity of a situation. Bovens and ’t Hart (2017) argue that the inability to respond to complexity is one of the key drivers of “policy fiascoes.” I will define the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge and respond to complexity as a form of “alienation,” or the estrangement of governance processes from social complexity (Scholten 2020; Tummers, Bekkers, and Steijn 2009). There can be various reasons for this alienation. One is that the actors may fail to understand the complexity of a situation because of a lack of access to information or having only limited information, or an unwillingness to engage with certain information or knowledge about a problem situation. This can be described as problem alienation. For instance, the strong belief that migration knowledge can justify intervention to control “migrant integration” can be seen as a form of problem alienation because it ignores the complexities of diversity and the limits of government intervention. Political alienation refers to estrangement driven by specific interests or inequalities in the policy process—​for instance, client politics, where policies are shaped by specific interests. Institutional alienation refers to estrangement due to the inability of institutions to adapt or flexibly respond to complex circumstances, as illustrated by the path dependency of welfare states originally designed for societies that were less mobile and diverse than today’s societies are. Finally, social alienation refers to estrangement because of the use of complexity-​reducing or -​denying classifications that also have social implications for the social categories and groups involved. Here, there are many examples from this policy field in particular, where “minorities,” “immigrants,” and a broad range of ethnic and racial classifications have always played an important role.

382   Peter Scholten

Complexity Mainstreaming and the Governance of Superdiversity From a complexity perspective, what can be said about current modes of governance in relation to migration and diversity? To what extent can we see a mainstreamed approach to the governance of superdiversity? And what aspects of alienation could stand in the way of the governance of superdiversity? There are various illustrations of mainstreaming. Policies on migration involve much more than regulating migrant entry and exit. Migration is also affected by economic policies, international relations, social policies, and a variety of other policies, including environmental and human rights policies. For many countries, an interest in mitigating migration flows is one reason they become involved in development or climate-​ adaptation policies in various places around the world. For instance, migration management is a key part of the European Union’s policy in the Euro-​Mediterranean area and the United States’ approach to relations with Mexico. The United Nations has also played a leading role in connecting migration and climate policies at the global level, preventing that the two issues are seen too much as separate. Furthermore, with various green card or blue card systems, countries have been making labor migration policies an integral part of their broader economic and social policies. In the governance of (migration-​related) diversity, mainstreaming has, since the 2000s, played an important role in the movement away from what used to be known as “integration policies.” Various European countries have gradually abandoned their integration policies for specific groups in favor of a more generic approach with measures based on specific needs or areas rather than groups (Scholten, Collett, and Petrovic 2017). For instance, Denmark no longer targets language-​training measures to groups but at reported language deficiencies of all school children. In France and the Netherlands, policies were targeted at specific areas or neighborhoods rather than at groups; especially France had a long history of such an approach in the Politique de la ville. In the United Kingdom, a similar trend since the 2000s has led to a community cohesion approach, which emphasizes intercultural relations within specific areas rather than the position of specific groups. To some extent, this shift to a needs-​based or area-​ based approach can be seen as a search for “proxies” to address certain issues without singling out specific groups or categories (Scholten and van Breugel 2017). Many countries have also included diversity in their social citizenship policies, which in Germany, for example, play an important role in primary school education for everyone regardless of background. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2000, many countries included antiracism and anti-​discrimination measures in social citizenship programs aimed at the entire population. There have also been examples of mainstreaming that resemble processes that have (to a much greater extent) been adopted in the field of gender diversity. At an organizational level, policies to increase workforce diversity are an prime example. At a

The Governance of Superdiversity    383 governance level, anti-​discrimination measures are an important mainstreamed instrument because they are (usually) generic, applying to all sectors and organizations and across different categories. Finally, another manifestation of mainstreaming is that migration and diversity governance increasingly involves actors beyond the central state. Many NGOs, for instance, play a crucial role in the development and implementation of anti-​discrimination policies at various levels. Airlines and airports also play a key role in the implementation of migration policies. NGOs also play a crucial role in refugee migration and refugee reception; a lot of the support for refugees during the European refugee crisis of 2015 came from NGOs rather than governments. However, the government response—​ criminalizing some of the NGOs that were involved in refugee migration—​shows that the “mainstreaming” of the governance approach is not uncontested, and there continues to be a fine balance between central government control and the broader actor network. Nonetheless, various studies have concluded that though examples of mainstreaming as a form of complexity governance can be found, the mainstreaming approach by no means captures the full dynamics of superdiversity governance. Phillimore (2015) concludes that superdiversity has, in fact, scarcely played a role in institutional adaptation. Van Breugel (2020) speaks of “incomplete mainstreaming” and notes that, although various governments have been deinstitutionalizing their integration policies, they have not always managed to adopt an active generic approach that lives up to the ambitions of mainstreaming. In fact, van Breugel shows, in some cases mainstreaming has been used as a frame for government retrenchment. In this sense, a failure to mainstream policies can also lead to what De Zwart (2005) has described as a “politics of denial.” Various scholars, such as Lambardo and Meier (2006), have pointed to a similar risk of retrenchment under the banner of mainstreaming on the issue of gender.

Alienation and the Crisis Mode in the Governance of Superdiversity Although mainstreaming can be seen as an effort to acknowledge and respond to social complexity, there are also many drivers in the field of superdiversity governance that impede complexity governance. Here I take stock of some examples of the different forms of alienation: problem alienation, institutional alienation, political alienation, and social alienation. As noted earlier (see the section “A Complexity Governance Perspective: Mainstreaming versus Alienation”), problem alienation is a form of estrangement of governance from the social complexity of a problem situation. A specific form of problem alienation that has been widely discussed in migration studies is the strong belief in interventionism and state-​centric approaches. For instance, Favell’s (2003) critical

384   Peter Scholten perspective on “integrationism” shows how various states have conceptualized and organized their approaches to integration so as to legitimize the central state’s intervention with immigrants and minorities. This reflects a conviction that integration can (or should) be engineered, and that it is most appropriate to do this at the nation-​state level. Various researchers have challenged this belief as invalid or inconsistent. Bertossi (2011, 238) argues that “models should not be considered as homogeneous and stable cultural entities—​and even less as independent variables—​but as complex structures of reference on the basis of which a multiplicity of conceptions of identity, equality, and inclusion are developed by a wide range of social agents in each national context.” Integrationism also reflects a belief that integration can be singled out as a separate policy issue, requiring a different approach targeted at specific groups. The civic integration programs that have been adopted in almost all European countries are an example of this dedicated approach. Yet such programs have been broadly challenged by those who say that rather than advance integration, they would rather legitimize broader national frames of integration. Institutional alienation refers to estrangement of institutions from social complexity. Institutions such as welfare states or citizenship regimes tend to create their own dynamics characterized by institutional survival and path dependency. This makes it difficult to be responsive in complex settings. For instance, as Banting and Kymlicka (2006) have extensively argued, welfare states were often designed for populations assumed to be relatively stable. The complexification of migration challenges in a profound way the question of who should be considered a citizen and to whom the solidarity of the welfare state can extend—​the ongoing struggle of welfare states between internal solidarity and external exclusion. Another illustration of institutional alienation involves variation in institutional logics of various institutions. The dynamics at the local, regional, and national levels in one country can be quite different. This can lead to institutional contradictions and conflicts, such as when some US and European cities declared themselves cities of refuge, in opposition to the national regulatory frameworks or the dispute between Scotland the UK central government over immigration approaches. In the multilevel governance literature, much attention has been devoted to how policy variation across and between levels can actually be helpful in accommodating complexity, whereas contradiction and conflict may obstruct it. Political alienation refers to estrangement where specific interests, power structures, or inequalities take policy processes away from dealing with complexity. A much-​ studied example in the field of migration is that of client politics. Freeman (1995) shows how, despite a generally restrictive political discourse, migration policymaking is often driven by specific organized interests, including business interests. As a consequence, immigration policies often remain relatively open for specific types of (often labor) migration, despite otherwise restrictive policies. This has been described as the “liberal paradox.” Guiraudon (1997) has applied a similar argument to the extension of social rights for migrants, where NGOs, courts, and migrant organizations often play key policymaking roles.

The Governance of Superdiversity    385 Political interests can, of course, also be a key driver of political alienation. Governments may choose to ignore or deny the complexities of migration and diversity for political reasons. Recall that various governments in Europe decided to declare multiculturalism a failure during the 2000s in response to political pressure from the electorate; or, how the United States chose to build a wall on the US-​Mexico border under the political pressure during the Trump administration, while being fully aware of the economic interdependencies between United States and Mexico. Finally, social alienation refers to an estrangement of discourses and social classifications from social complexity. In the targeting of policies, but also in the more generic discourses to legitimize those policies, social categorization often plays a central role. Categorizations are often contested because they reflect specific interests and inequalities (Schneider and Ingram 1997), among other reasons. From a complexity perspective, and from the perspective of superdiversity, categorizations are problematized because almost by definition they reduce or deny the complexity of superdiverse societies. For instance, categorizing migrants by ethnic group or community ignores the multilayered complexities of identity and social interactions (Simon, Piché, and Gagnon 2015). The ethnic lens can also have performative effects on how actors relate to groups and how groups behave and self-​identify (GlickSchiller, Çaglar, and Guldbrandsen 2006); it not only reifies and singles out only one aspect of identity, it usually also problematizes it to legitimize government intervention. This has implications for research. Dahinden (2016) and other scholars have called for a “de-​migranticization” of migration and integration research to ensure that it does not contribute to this reifying effect by focusing studies on “migrants” when social complexity often brings a broad variety of rapidly changing intersections between multiple dimensions of identity.

Conclusions A complexity governance perspective offers new ways of understanding the challenges and opportunities that come with superdiversity. Instead of focusing on the dynamics of migration and migration-​related diversity per se, it focuses on how governance can respond to complexity and on what happens if governance does not manage to cope with diversity. A complexity perspective can help us understand why the governance of migration and diversity is so often in “crisis mode.” Strong beliefs in state-​centric steering and about the efficacy of engineering “integration” and migration control are in conflict with the highly complex, uncertain, and changeable nature of superdiversity (problem alienation). Instead of “quick fixes,” the governance of superdiversity requires constant cross-​sectoral and cross-​level policy adjustments and the involvement of broad actor networks. Policy systems and institutions often develop path dependencies that make responding adequately and swiftly to new complexities difficult (institutional alienation). Superdiversity and liquid mobility challenge the conventional thinking

386   Peter Scholten on welfare states and citizenship regimes. Power structures, interests, and inequalities may be other reasons that policy processes are estranged from complexity (political alienation). For instance, client politics is an important reason the complexities of migration and diversity are reduced to serve specific interests, such as those of business elites that benefit from immigration. Finally, social discourses tend to reduce rather than illuminate complexity (social alienation). The ethnic lens in policymaking, research, and societal discourse has served to reify ethnic identities and legitimize interventions that do not take into account intersectionalities and multiple dimensions of identification. Understanding the various forms of alienation or estrangement can be the first step in coming to terms with complexity and advancing the governance of superdiversity. Precisely because of this complexity, there is no one way, no “great model,” for policies on superdiversity. As Verweij and Thompson (2006) argued, complex problems require complex approaches. In this context, mainstreaming has developed as an approach for moving past perpetual crisis mode and helping governance coming to terms with complexity by offering a responsive, cross-​sectoral, and broad-​actor-​network alternative. Mainstreaming takes superdiversity into “the mainstream,” preparing our society for complexity rather than reducing it and acknowledging superdiversity rather than problematizing specific diversities or treating migration and diversity as stand-​alone topics.

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Chapter 26

Supe rdiversit y t h rou g h the Lens of Bre x i t Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane

Introduction In 2016 the United Kingdom voted in a referendum to leave the European Union in a process popularly known as Brexit. Brexit has been closely associated with nationalist and antimigrant politics and a focus on national identity, sovereignty, “taking back control” of borders, and creating a process of the rebordering of the United Kingdom (Benson 2020; Virdee and McGeever 2018; Burrell and Hopkins 2019; Valluvan and Kalra 2019). How does Brexit relate to superdiversity? How can Brexit be understood in the context of the United Kingdom as multiethnic nation, and how can superdiversity, a social phenomenon produced through complex and fragmented migrations, mobilities, and settlements, be reconfigured and reimagined in the contexts of the populist and defensive nationalisms that characterize much of the politics in the Global North? This chapter sets out to respond to these questions. Between 2001 and 2020, the United Kingdom saw significant increases in global migration settlement. These new mobilities—​at scale and involving diverse groups of people, from elite to refugee migrants from varied geographies—​were key to the development of the concepts of transnationalism and superdiversity, reflected in Meissner and Vertovec’s (2015) definition of superdiversity that identified superdiversity as not only entail[ing] the movement of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds, but also the ways that shifts concerning these categories or attributes coincide with a worldwide diversification of movement flows through specific migration channels (such as work permit programmes, mobilities created by EU enlargement, ever-​changing refugee and “mixed migration” flows, undocumented movements, student migration, family reunion, and so on); the changing compositions of various migration channels themselves entail ongoing

390    Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane differentiations of legal status (conditions, rights and restrictions), diverging patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants’ human capital (education, work skills and experience). (542)

These transformative, multiscalar shifts doubled down on the highly differentiated politics and routes of migration—​effectively captured by Bauman (1998, 89) when he observed that “migrants often travel surreptitiously, often illegally, sometimes paying more for a crowded steerage of a stinking unseaworthy boat than others pay for business-​ class gilded luxuries”—​as well as on racialized migration policies and the governance of ethnic diversity. In the United Kingdom this has been articulated in variations of highly conditional “managed migration” approaches alongside a broader anti-​migration “hostile environment” politics focused in particular on “illegal migrants,” asylum seekers, and refugees. This “hostile environment” translated into government policy, based on a commitment to cut migration numbers to tens of thousands, that targeted the everyday life of migrants as a particular site for migration surveillance and control (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019). As the former Prime Minister David Cameron explained: “If you come here illegally we will make it harder for you to have a home, to get a car, to have a job, to get a bank account and when we find you, and we will find you, we’ll make sure you’re sent back to the country you came from. It is really right that the British people know that we have a fair immigration system that says to people ‘if you’re here illegally you should go home’ ” (BBC News, July 29, 2014). This migration management approach has been accompanied by interventions focused on the securitization of cultural difference as reflected in policing and education policies targeted against the “radicalization” of young people and on the promotion of “fundamental British values” (as expressed in the controversial counterterrorism Prevent strategy). As Yuval-Davis et al. (2019) note, this represented a shift from migration control at a nation’s borders to the construction of borders within the nation and what they define as the everyday bordering of migration. In one of the most infamous examples of this the government sponsored “go home” buses that drove through multicultural areas announcing that illegal migrants would be identified and deported (Jones et al. 2017). The UK government’s explicit delivery and enactment of policies that were intended to create a hostile environment for immigrants were discredited by the Windrush scandal in 2018 (which highlighted the negative experience of many migrants from the West Indies who had been caught up in it) and led to the resignation of the UK government’s home secretary. But the political antimigration milieu those policies established remains virtually unchanged. However, this official policy of hostility and governance of cultural difference exists alongside a more complex and dynamic lived experience of older and newer forms of migrant settlement, political struggle, contestation, and multiculturalism, which has been the focus of an extensive body of work exploring the new social relationships, interactions, conflicts, and tensions (Amin 2012; Neal et al. 2018; Back and Sinha 2018; Husbands and Alam 2016). While superdiversity is about more multiplicities than simply the demographics of places (Vertovec 2019), the patterns of new migrations,

Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit    391 to urban places in particular, have become a shorthand for what superdiversity means in practice (Rhys-​Taylor 2013; Neal et al. 2013; Wessendorf 2014). In its most intense forms, superdiversity has tended to build on a dynamic relationship with new migration settlements, the legacies from older migrations, and other mobility processes, such as gentrification, which have generated new lines of social division and social interactions shaped by racialized conflict and the convivial interactions and negotiations demanded by everyday multiculture. As Meissner and Vertovec (2015) remind us, the “conditions of superdiversity are inherently tied to power, politics and policy” (552). In this context, the populations in certain areas of England’s big cities have seen significant shifts over recent decades. This is particularly apparent in London, where 35 percent of the UK’s total foreign-​born population and only 10 percent of the UK-​ born population are resident (2020 figures from The Migration Observatory website, https://​www.migra​tion​obse​rvat​ory.ox.ac.uk; see also Lessard-​Phillips and Sigona 2019). With over 1 million non-​British EU citizens, Sigona (2019) describes London as “the EU’s most ‘Europolitan’ capital.” Greater London has the smallest percentage of White British (44.9%) people of any English or Welsh region, and eight out of ten of the most ethnically diverse local authorities in England and Wales are in London (www.ethnic​ ity-​facts-​figu​res.serv​ice.gov.uk). But many of the United Kingdom’s other big cities including Bristol, Glasgow, Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry, and Manchester also have increasingly complex, ethnically diverse demographic profiles. Beyond these urban centers of superdiversity there has been a wider dispersal of ethnic diversity in a process of multicultural drift as minority ethnic residential settlement and relocation patterns have begun to change smaller cities and towns, with these becoming part of a new geography of migration settlement and ethnic diversity. Rural places, too, which are not usually associated with international migration (Woods 2018; Neal et al. 2021) have also become sites of global mobility, EU migration, and migrant labor markets. This, too, incorporates forms of superdiversity, captured in the description offered by Elen, a participant in a research project exploring Brexit in rural areas of the United Kingdom (Neal et al. 2021). Elen works as a community cohesion policy adviser in Powys, a remote rural area of Wales, and she explained some of the complex new migration patterns being experienced there: “We have a Syrian refugee program bringing in refugees. Eastern Europeans have come to work in the farming industry and in the health and care industry. We have dots of sort of Greek and Chinese, and certainly in Brecon the Gurkha population, and they tend to work in catering and food industries.” Elen’s description illustrates a changing rural picture that is quite different from dominant visions of the countryside as a timeless site of monoculture and unchanging social relations. Some of the tensions arising from the ruralization of migration in the United Kingdom were sharply illuminated in the 2016 Referendum. The highest Leave vote in the United Kingdom was in Boston, a small local authority area in the largely agricultural region of Lincolnshire in the East of England. The area has experienced significant EU accession migration, reflecting demands for labor, particularly in agribusiness and food production. The implications of Boston’s vote, as well as that in northern England’s

392    Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane deindustrialized regions, have been widely interpreted as the place-​based articulation of antimigration, anti-​superdiversity politics (see, e.g., Goodhart 2017). But the voting patterns may mask more complex processes of social and political change in the United Kingdom, and it is to these that we now turn.

Situating Brexit—​in England-​outside-​L ondon The dominant framing of most of the writing about the Brexit vote and what it has to tell us about British politics (particularly, the politics of England and Wales) has tended to focus on finding explanations for the Leave vote. In 2017 Anthony Barnett summarized the pattern of the vote as follows: There are five parts to the UK: Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, London and England-​without-​London. Scotland, a self-​conscious country with its own parliament, voted to remain in the EU by 62 per cent to 38 per cent, a hugely impressive majority of 24 per cent. Northern Ireland, a province with an electorate of only 1.25 million, whose domestic government is now established by international treaty, known as the Good Friday agreement, voted on a low turnout of 62 per cent for Remain by 55.8 per cent to 44.2 per cent, a comfortable majority of 12 per cent. Wales, a small, long-​colonised and linguistically divided country, voted Leave by 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent, a narrow majority of 5 per cent, and the only part to return a close result, well below double figures. London, a global city bursting at the seams, populated by 8.5 million, of whom 3 million are foreign-​born, with an electorate of 5.5 million, voted Remain by 59.9 per cent to 40.1 per cent, an overwhelming 20 per cent majority. England-​without-​London, by far the largest of the five, with 46 million inhabitants, and with the highest turnout, voted Leave by 55.4 per cent to 44.6 per cent, a decisive majority of close on 11 per cent. By doing so, England-​without-​ London swung the outcome. It voted by a majority of over 2½ million for Leave, the other four parts of the Kingdom combined voted by just under 1½ for Remain. (Barnett 2017, 101)

But the balance between the votes, in a referendum process so heavily pitched around national inclusion or exclusion, controlling borders, and migration, was much closer across the country than is implied by simply focusing on the regional level. Not only was there a fairly solid band of Remain support around London, but it extended along a line to Bristol and Cardiff, and had a strong expression around some cities in the North of England. In some areas the Remain vote was close to 70 percent; and similarly, in other areas the Leave vote was close to 70 percent. But elsewhere the differentiation was less sharply defined. Even in the Midlands and the North of England the Leave vote was not universally strong, and some rural areas with low levels of diversity (including Stroud in Gloucestershire, Ceredigion in Wales, and rural areas and small towns across Scotland) voted to remain.

Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit    393 The level of detail is valuable because of the extent to which it enables a more nuanced and “greyscale” understanding of the political geography behind the Brexit vote. As well as London, it confirms that a majority in several other big (and not so big) and more superdiverse cities in England voted to remain: Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, Cambridge, Oxford, York, Exeter, and Brighton. It also confirms that even as most of the suburban home counties of the South East (Oxfordshire, Surrey, and Sussex) voted to remain, other parts of that supposedly prosperous region (including much of Kent and Hampshire) voted to leave. Even several of the boroughs on the outer east of London (including Barking and Dagenham) voted Leave. The places that had longer histories of migration and had experienced relatively high levels of more recent migration settlement tended to vote Remain, while those that bordered on them were more likely to vote Leave (not the cosmopolitan cities but the neighboring suburban and peripheral areas). Whatever the complexity, in practice England-​without-​London has been at the center of most of the commentary and discussion around the vote, and though some (such as Dorling and Tomlinson 2019) have pointed out that the pattern of the referendum vote confirms that it was rooted in the traditional center-​right Conservative Party voting in suburban and quasi-​rural areas of the United Kingdom, the explanatory emphasis has been on the experience of the so-​called left behind, understood as a homogenized “White working class” in the now postindustrial areas of the English Midlands, the North of England, and South Wales. And this way of approaching the issue has led some to argue that there has been a wider shift in political attitudes across what had been the traditional working-​class heartlands of the United Kingdom’s center-​left Labour Party, and that it has been accompanied by the identification of what has been called the White working class as an active political player, in counterposition to what are identified as the metropolitan concerns associated with urban superdiversity (Mattinson 2020).

The Rise of a Defensive Nationalism The ways in which the “left behind” have been understood have seen a mix of patronizing and critical commentary (Clarke et al. 2017). So, for example, Jennings and Stoker (2016) distinguish between (liberal) people who live in cosmopolitan areas and (illiberal) people who live in what they characterize as deprived, monocultural backwaters; and others have seen the process as a revolt of the oppressed—​the left “out” rather than the left “behind”—​against elites (McKenzie 2020); this has shaded into the view that the left out are involved in the reclaiming of a traditional, patriotic national identity from those who have marginalized and belittled them (Goodhart 2017; Kaufmann 2018). From another perspective, of course, such a construction can more accurately be seen to embody fundamentally racist tropes (Benson and Lewis 2019; Bhambra 2017). The identification of a White working class has, above all, been presented as a response and challenge to the rise of superdiversity. Paradoxically, of course, such an approach can be seen as

394    Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane introducing another identity to the mix, just as much a form of identity politics, just another aspect of superdiversity. In a sense all of this analysis comes from the perspective of those to whom the vote came as a surprise or was a social shock that needed to be explained. But bearing in mind the arguments made by such scholars as Bhambra (2017), Valluvan and Kalra (2019), Benson (2020), it might be instructive to invert these arguments and ask why so many people voted to remain and to reflect on how that might be interpreted. The European Union, after all, is not a particularly progressive institution, and its approach to migration into its territory from the outside is not positive or permissive—​though it may have a commitment to cross-​border migration among its citizens, it is equally committed to maintaining its own borders, as a kind of Fortress Europe. The Remain vote was not a vote for EU institutions or reflect any misplaced assumption that the experience of racism is less a feature of everyday life in the member states (Benson and Lewis 2019). As discussed, all of England’s regions, outside London, recorded a vote to leave the European Union, although a majority in many of the larger (more superdiverse) cities voted to remain a member. But this raises fundamental questions for those who see the English vote as representing the rise of a new English nationalism—​it may, but it also highlights the extent to which “England” itself is a fundamentally contested and uncertain category, not one united around any clear-​cut nationalist agenda. This is a point (Virdee and McGeever 2018, 1815–​1816) make when they argue that the multicultural realities of England undergird the unsettled nature of English nationalism, and when, highlighting the dynamism of the Black Lives Matter movement, refugee support, and decolonizing protests, they emphasize that any “push back against the exclusionary narrowing of Englishness today will more than likely involve those who directly incur the injuries of racism.” In their analysis of Brexit and its implications for understanding contemporary British politics, Sobolewska and Ford (2020) have suggested that the vote reflected a wider set of shifts as a result of which contemporary politics is now framed by sets of identity and cultural politics that have superseded old divisions based on class or income. They identify the emergence of what they call “tribal” politics associated with the impacts of vastly expanded higher education and mass migration. According to this analysis, those who have undertaken higher education tend to be what Sobolewska and Ford identify as conviction liberals (positively committed to the newly diverse Britain), while those who are part of past and present waves of migration can be understood as necessity liberals (whatever their wider attitudes, they are part of the newly diverse Britain). They describe a third group as identity conservatives—​that is, those whose assumptions about contemporary society have been challenged by the big changes reflected in the rise of the other identity groups. It is in this context that considering the implications of superdiversity becomes necessary as a means of more closely interrogating (and questioning) such broad categories. So, for example, among minority ethnic groups there was a significant Leave vote, even if it only amounted to around 30 percent in aggregate terms. For some groups (particularly from South Asian communities), there is evidence that concerns about the inequity between their own treatment and the experiences of migrants from EU countries

Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit    395 (particularly the accession states after 2005) encouraged a leave vote, in the hope that post-​Brexit Britain would allow an easier route to migration from Commonwealth countries (Begum 2019).

London—​a Superdiverse Brexit Exceptionalism? In much of the discussion around the politics of the Brexit vote and the 2019 election result, emphasis is placed on the relationship between the superdiversity of London and the rest of the United Kingdom and, in particular, the rest of England. And, the referendum vote certainly illustrated aspects of the disconnection between the London city region, the scale of its overwhelming Remain vote, and the rest of England. In such discussions London becomes the condensation of all that is wrong with contemporary Britain when viewed through the lens of racism and postcolonial melancholy (Gilroy 2005; Back and Sinha 2018). It is the home of cosmopolitan elites associated with the networks of global finance and the center of national power, defined by its concentration of wealth and power. At the same time, it is perceived as a center of multiculturalism, superdiversity, and migration and capable of undermining the ways that Britain has historically defined itself as a nation. As Back and Sinha (2018, 2) explain: “London’s restless and ineffable cityscape is prone to being appropriated by different political interests. The capital either represents a world that is ‘losing its culture’ and falling apart, or is lauded enthusiastically for its intoxicating cosmopolitan super-​diversity.” London is a world city and in that role it has helped to maintain and reinforce patterns of inequality across the United Kingdom. The interests of its elites have tended to dominate political and economic decision-​making, and that has been reflected in the patterns of infrastructural investment, as well as the language of politics. London is a deeply divided city. Its role as financial center may have shaped some aspects of its relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom, but London is more than that. A series of inequalities and exclusions go alongside the defense of privilege in the city and its region. There is a danger of understating—​or, perhaps better, failing to sufficiently recognize—​ the ambiguity of London’s position. London is more than its elites. The Remain vote in London was not just a vote of the elites (many of whom live in the wider South East); it was a vote of the young, the multicultural, and the dispossessed as well as the privileged. In emphasizing the role of the elite two other aspects of change may be underplayed. The first is simply to recognize that even the industrial sectors dominated by the elite, particularly business services, higher education, the media, publishing, and tech industries, require a workforce that is not reducible to that elite. London draws in young people from across the United Kingdom and beyond to work in the new postindustrial industries that dominate it, even as they face dramatically increased living costs as they seek to do so. They may not be poor, but neither are they (yet) part of the elite.

396    Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane Second, there is a danger of downplaying nonelite transnational aspects of the London experience. London’s success relies on the more mundane contributions of migrant labor and production, wherein poverty exists alongside wealth, immiseration alongside gentrification (Judah 2016). Not only do many of those living there identify with London more than with any national formation, but also, as was noted earlier, the White British population as defined by the Census became a minority: Those identifying as White British declined from 60 percent to 45 percent between 1991 and 2011 (ONS 2012). The linkages and connections to multiple elsewheres that are implied by such a population highlight what it means to imagine a global city region from below as well as above. London is one of the places within which living with difference is a taken for granted rather than exceptional experience. Stuart Hall’s insight that London is made up of an intricate lattice of differences, is one that opens up a range of possibilities (Hall, 2006). It certainly has the potential to generate dramatic divisions (expressed, for example, in the 2011 riots, as well as in increases in race hate crime), but it is also a space within which, whatever the tensions, people are compelled to live with and negotiate complex cultural and social difference, recognize racism, inequalities, and the legacies of empire. And it was in London’s most superdiverse boroughs, such as Hackney, Haringey, and Lambeth, with their entanglements of historical and contemporary migrant settlement, that the highest Remain votes were recorded. It is in this context that “London” has become a symbolic marker of a much wider process that finds an expression across the larger cities of England, even if London’s positioning as a superdiverse world city means that its experience is not simply transferable to other places. Similar stories could be told and similar tensions identified if the focus was on Manchester, Bristol, or Liverpool, where there was also a significant majority Remain vote, and in those other big cities, including Birmingham, Leeds, and Newcastle, where the result was very close one way or the other, as well as in some of those where a Leave majority was recorded. But it is also emblematic of wider shifts as migration and minority ethnic populations become taken for granted in smaller cities, towns, and even rural areas across England. London’s construction as a place somehow divorced from the rest of the United Kingdom (particularly England-​outside-​London in Barnett’s [2017] words) is to miss the extent to which its experience of superdiversity is an intensified expression of the wider shifts taking place across the United Kingdom.

Superdiversity after Brexit and a Politics of Hope? The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the EU and the politics of Brexit did not come out of nowhere. For theorists such as Bhambra (2017), Brexit can only be fully understood through the optics of colonialism and racist melancholy (Back 2021). The politics of

Superdiversity through the Lens of Brexit    397 Brexit were seeded, nurtured, and grown in the long history of race, colonialism, and the hierarchies of belonging that antimigration and antidifference discourses and policies have generated. For Benson (2020), Brexit is “the culmination of longer histories of racism in Britain”; Valluvan and Kalra (2019) emphasize that Brexit delivered a mainstreaming of “little Englander” forms of nationalism and “signaled one significant instantiation of a successful new nationalist political program that hinges substantially on the ostensible problems of immigration, multiculturalism, and ethnic diversity more broadly.” Virdee and McGeever (2018) argue that Brexit presents a strange paradox between a defensive nationalist desire to return to the nation’s older status of global player or force and a defensive nationalist desire to withdraw from the global world. Much of the post-​referendum analysis has stressed the role of migration as a racialized focus that influenced how people voted—​and certainly, that was one of the central themes highlighted by those campaigning for the Leave vote. But English nationalism is a “nationalism” with a rather fragile and uncertain presence, and contradictory expression. The England to which it appeals is wrapped up in nostalgia for a past that never was and fits uneasily with the reality of a national formation that is already deeply divided, between London and a set of deindustrializing or deindustrialized regions, between big cities and small towns, between areas at ease with multicultural expression and migrant populations and those (often neighboring) that are not. The danger of seeking to capture social change in the language of votes and voting behavior is that it encourages the clustering of complex social phenomena into apparently coherent groups (capable of being described as being “tribes” or having shared identities). The concept of superdiversity is a powerful reminder that there is an everyday politics of living together, of negotiating space, that cannot be reduced to such divisions. As John Clarke and Janet Newman (2019) forcefully remind us, while it is possible to generate political mobilization around specific political projects (like Brexit), it is also important to recognize the extent to which other ways of thinking, other identifications, are possible. What matters is to explore how “shifting formations of class are interwoven, in unsettling ways, with shifting racialized and gendered formations, such that people come to identify themselves, and act, through a range of different repertoires” (Clarke 2019, 138). This suggests there may be a politics of hope (Back 2018, 2021) that can be scratched into superdiversity as a social phenomenon. Drawing a line of intersectional connection—​ however fragile, oversimplified, partial, and precarious—​between superdiversity and opposition to Brexit is important because it allows a proxy space in which antimigrant politics can be disrupted, challenged, and resisted by Remain identities, decolonizing protests, and antiracist social movements. As Back and Sinha (2018), citing Gilroy, note, it also has the potential to generate the “habitation of multiculture” that is able to work through “the legacies of departed empire” (Gilroy 2006, 27). Although they share this optimism, Virdee and McGeever (2018, p. 186) also stress the urgency of this, noting: “[T]here are resources of hope, but time is running out—​we are at five minutes to midnight.” While Vertovec (2017) argues that superdiversity is not in itself a theory, our analysis of the Brexit process highlights the importance of developing new theorizations around

398    Sarah Neal and Allan Cochrane the experience and implications of superdiversity). The rebordering efforts and nationalist recalibrations encouraged by Brexit and the long reach of the antimigrant hostile environments facilitated and enacted by governments will not stop human mobilities. Nor will Brexit diminish the diversifications within these mobilities or the transnational, interconnected identities and the interdependencies of migrant and nonmigrant populations. It might even increase these through the definition of new categories and trajectories of migration. Developing theorizations around superdiversity as an antiracist, trans-​, or postnational lens for analyzing cultural difference and racialized inequalities implies the need to think about superdiversity beyond the politics of place, even as it is informed by the nuances of place-​based politics and demographic and social transformations.

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Pa rt V

C ON C E P T UA L E N C OU N T E R S

Chapter 27

Transform at i ons , C om plexit y, a nd Rapid Cha ng e Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Introduction Whereas the concept of superdiversity addresses the recent diversification of diversity, this chapter aims to contextualize this tendency by connecting it to the acceleration of acceleration and some of its implications for social and cultural identification. The early twenty-​first century comes across as an unusually hectic and restless period in the history of humanity. The great acceleration of the postwar years (McNeill and Engelke 2016) has shifted to a higher gear. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, which saw the end of the Cold War, the triumph of global neoliberalism, and the rapid spread of the Internet, acceleration has accelerated in a number of domains. If the nomenclature of the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007) were to be officially adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the Holocene (which began just after the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago) becomes a brief interlude in the history of the planet. Ours is an era that since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, has been marked by human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways. In this world, nature has changed from being a constant threat to human culture to being fragile and weak, itself threatened by culture and needing protection by humans. The steady acceleration of communication and transportation in the last two centuries has facilitated contact and made isolation difficult, and it is weaving the growing global population ever closer together, influencing but not erasing cultural differences, local identities, and power relations. Indeed, as decades of research on collective identification has shown, intensified identity management and the assertion of group boundaries are likely outcomes of increased contact and the perceived threat to group integrity (see,

404   Thomas Hylland Eriksen e.g., Mishra 2017). A general formula is that the more similar we become, the more different we try to be, although it could be added that the more different, we try to be, the more similar we become, since there is a shared global grammar for the effective expression of uniqueness. The standardization of identity currently witnessed in nationalism and religious revivalism is a feature of modernity, not of tradition, although it tends to be dressed in traditional garb. Ranging from foreign direct investment and the number of Internet connections to global energy use, urbanization in the Global South, and increased migration rates, rapid transformations impact social life in many ways, and have in some respects visibly stepped up their pace since the early 1990s. Dramatic alterations to the environment, economic transformations and social rearrangements are the order of the day and of such an intensity that it may be appropriate to speak of the global situation as being “overheated” (Eriksen 2016, 2018). “Overheating” does not merely reference climate change. In physics, heat is a function of speed, and translated into the language of social science, overheating can refer to fast change. The changes brought about by modernity have unintended, often paradoxical consequences, and when changes accelerate, so do the unintentional side effects. The term “overheating” calls attention to both accelerated change and the tensions, conflicts, and frictions it engenders; it also—​implicitly—​signals the need to examine, through dialectical negation, deceleration, or cooling down. Generally speaking, when things are suddenly brought into motion, they create friction; when things rub against each other, heat is generated at the interstices. Heat, for those experiencing it, may result in torridness and apathy, but it may also trigger a number of other transformations, the trajectories of which may not be clear at the outset. In the twenty-​first century, it has been argued, human civilization finds itself at a “systemic edge” (Sassen 2014), as economic, social, and cultural forms of globalization expand into ever new territories, often changing the very fundamentals of ordinary life for those who find themselves caught in the whirlwinds of change. These processes are not unilaterally negative or positive for those affected by them, since what some may perceive as a crisis others may very well perceive an opportunity, and the potential for spontaneous transformative moments is always present. Even climate change is sometimes welcomed, for example, in cold regions, where agriculture becomes feasible, or even in the Arctic, where the melting of the sea ice produces opportunities for oil companies and may lead to the opening of new shipping routes. Overheating consists in a series of unintended, and interrelated, consequences triggered by global neoliberal deregulation, technological developments that render communication instantaneous and transportation inexpensive, increased energy consumption, and a consumerist ethos that is animating the desires of a growing world population. One significant aspect of overheating is the lack of a thermostat or governor. There is no entity that has the authority to order the Anthropocene world to cool down because of heat’s destructive effects. As a result, runaway competition continues to escalate, and at the time of this writing, it is uncertain to what extent the sudden deceleration caused by the Covid-​19 pandemic from the first months of 2020 will have lasting effects.

Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    405 Accelerated change can be identified in a number of areas. The most familiar exponential growth curve of the twentieth century was that of global population growth. At the beginning of the century, the global population stood at less than two billion. By the end, it had grown to seven billion. It had taken humanity a few hundred thousand years to reach the first billion, and it subsequently took only two centuries to increase sevenfold. Overheating can be identified in many domains. Tourism increased sixfold between the late 1970s and the onset of the pandemic in 2020, from 200 million to more than 1.2 billion international tourist arrivals annually in 2019. Global energy consumption, which has increased by a factor of thirty since the Napoleonic Wars, doubled between 1975 and 2019. Since the possible long-​term outcomes of the pandemic are unknown, they are not considered here, but it should be mentioned that the effects of the pandemic on mobility, trade, work, and digital communication (which has sped up as the physical world has slowed down) may carry the germs of a deeper systemic change and, perhaps, a cooling down of our overheated world. Capitalism, globally hegemonic since the nineteenth century, is becoming universal in the sense that scarcely any human group now lives completely independently of a monetized economy. Traditional, often communal forms of land tenure are being replaced by private ownership; subsistence agriculture is being phased out in favor of industrial food production, siphoning former peasants into the informal sector in cities; the affordances of the smartphone replace orally transmitted tales; and by 2007, more than half the world’s population lived in urban areas. By the middle of this century, the proportion may be 70 percent (United Nations, 2019). The state by now enters into people’s lives almost everywhere, though to different degrees and in different ways. It is an interconnected world, but not in a smoothly and seamlessly integrated way. Rights, duties, opportunities, and constraints continue to be unevenly distributed, and the world system itself is fundamentally volatile and ridden with contradiction. One basic contradiction consists in the chronic tension between the universalizing forces of global modernity and the autonomy of the local community or society. The drive to standardization, simplification, and universalization is often countered with a defense of local values, practices, and relations. In other words, globalization does not lead to global homogeneity, but highlights a tension, typical of modernity, between the system world and the life world, between the standardized and the unique. At a higher level of abstraction, the tension between economic development and ecological sustainability is also difficult to act upon, and it constitutes the most fundamental double-​ bind of early twenty-​ first-​ century capitalism. Almost everywhere, trade-​offs are made between economic growth and ecological concerns. There is a broad global consensus among policymakers and scientists that the global climate is changing irreversibly because of human activity (mostly the use of fossil fuels), yet the curves of fossil fuel consumption continue to point upward. Other environmental problems are also extremely serious, ranging from air pollution in cities in the Global South to phosphorus depletion (a key ingredient in chemical fertilizer), overfishing, plastic waste in the oceans, species extinction, and soil erosion. The same politicians and world leaders

406   Thomas Hylland Eriksen who express concern about environmental problems also advocate continued economic growth, contradicting another fundamental value and probably undermining the conditions for their own continued existence. The biggest irony of contemporary modernity is the fact that fossil fuels, the salvation of humanity for two hundred years, are becoming our damnation. The very reason for the comfortable lives led by the global middle and upper classes is also the cause of the unmaking of the world order that makes these lives possible. If anything, the contemporary world—​the information age, the Anthropocene, the era of global neoliberalism—​is a globalized one, which the academic community discovered in the early 1990s. Since then, many important books have been written about globalization. Quite a few of them highlight the contradictions and tensions within the global system—​the sociologist Ritzer (2004) speaks of “the globalization of nothing” versus “the glocalization of something”; the geographer Castells (1996), about “system world” and “life world.” The political theorist Barber (1995) makes a similar contrast with his concepts of “Jihad” and “McWorld” (though his concept “Jihad” is misleading since it refers to all kinds of resistance to global modernity), and the anthropologists Hann and Hart (2011) contrast a neoliberal economy with a human economy. In all cases, the local strikes back at the homogenizing and standardizing tendencies of the global.

The Significance of Identity at an Overheated Time For a while in the 1990s, just as the current period of accelerated change was taking off, the concept of “identity” seemed to be everywhere. It has subsequently faded away somewhat as a key term in the social sciences, which is to be regretted, since we live in a time when sharply focused research on social identification is acutely needed. Indeed, the need for the term identity may be even more pressing today than it was then, if the high-​speed transformations we have witnessed in a broad range of domains across the globe over the last few years are anything to go by. Questions people typically ask in a situation of rapid change are, How can I be the person I want to be when changes take place at a frightful speed and nobody asked me about my opinion? What is the essence of being me/​us? What forces are threatening our ability to remain who we think we should be? and What kind of changes do we embrace, and what kind do we see as threatening? The work of tracing a line connecting the past with the future, via the present, in a compelling and meaningful way, is easy when there is mainly repetition, but difficult when there is no clear script relating the past to the future, no story of either continuity or development that is persuasive. While spatial belonging and a degree of stability could once be taken for granted and were for a long time nonissues for most of humanity—​these things went without saying because they had arrived without saying—​there is an important sense in which

Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    407 social identity has become a scarce resource today. Mobility, mixing, electronic communication, the destabilization of gender and rapid economic changes have severed ties formerly perceived as stable and unquestioned, resulting in an explosion of creative, self-​conscious identity work. Some celebrate the new freedom engendered by accelerated modernity; others lament the ostensible loss of stability and tradition; indeed, many if not most of the contemporary ideological tensions we experience today can be described through the contradiction between rootedness and tradition, on the one hand, and choice and freedom, on the other hand, or more simply, as nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism versus individualism, or religious conservatism versus reformism. The philosophical debate between communitarians and liberals (Kymlicka 1988; Taylor 1992) formulated this contradiction in abstract terms.

From Class Politics to Identity Politics In a fast-​changing world of rapidly increasing connectivity and mobility, mounting environmental challenges, rapid economic transformations, enormous investments in infrastructure, and the rise of often virulent nationalisms or other forms of identity politics, the formerly dominant forms of belonging to places, groups, parties, or communities are being challenged in ways that are still only partly understood. There has been a perceptible shift from class politics to identity politics in the last few decades—​and not just in the North Atlantic world—​from Trump to Orban, from Brexit to Salvini. Unlike in the postwar decades, Indian politics are to a great extent defined through hindutva, Hindu nationalism, as a center of gravity; contemporary Chinese political rhetoric does not delve into the virtues of Communism as much as it glorifies the history and current economic and technological achievements of China; in African societies, conceptualizations of autochthony—​first-​comers—​have become important aspects of rights claims in ways that were unknown until recently, and similar tendencies can be discerned in Latin America as well. Politicized nostalgia and an eagerness to build walls, physical and virtual, against the impurities and contaminations of the outside world, are pitted against an enthusiasm for openness, free trade, and cultural exchange, sometimes aligned with cosmopolitan values and inclusive forms of humanism that defend the rights of migrants and cultural minorities on universalist grounds. In other words, people in otherwise very different societies raise strikingly similar questions about who they are and what is at stake. In rapidly changing surroundings, the answers are fraught with controversy, often pitting ambivalence and doubt against withdrawal and a reassertion of boundaries. The shifting, multiple, contested, and unstable social identities that may form the basis of a meaningful sense of belonging can be viewed through the lens of accelerated change (Eriksen and Schober 2016). Phenomena that led to fast changes in the

408   Thomas Hylland Eriksen postwar decades—​migration, urbanization, tourism, communication technology—​are changing even faster in this century. Adjusting to new circumstances is therefore necessary, and several options are available. To use Hirschman’s (1971) famous trichotomy of strategies in organizations: Should people opt for exit (withdrawal into the secure and safe), voice (resistance and protest), or loyalty (adapting to the powers that be)? Or perhaps a pragmatic cocktail mixing the three? And how can a world that has been ripped apart, whether because of industrial development, migration, or the expansion of financial capital, be patched together again so that it appears meaningful and secure? How can continuity with the past be created in a convincing way when change is taking place at an enormous speed? And in what ways do global crises influence forms of belonging and the sense of self? These are some of the questions that need to be raised in order to make sense of the seesaw of openness and closure, the dilemmas of identity and the often-​heated conflicts between identity formations in our time. The concept of superdiversity, combined with an analysis of global overheating and an appreciation of Anthropocene challenges, can be an illuminating starting point for such an exploration, which inevitably reveals a multitude of identity options, few of them pure in the sense of being consistent. Even conservative Islamists use apps; even committed cosmopolitans may cherish their traditional Christmas rituals.

Boundedness and Openness In a situation of overheating, there is often a tension between boundedness and openness. Many intellectuals have argued against essentialism, emphasizing the flexible and fluid character of human identification. An eloquent expression of this position can be found in a remark made by Bauman (1996): “If the modern ‘problem of identity’ is how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open” (18). Perhaps especially in societies with a strong individualist ethos and a positive attitude to change, the preference would be to keep the options open for change and mobility, should an attractive opportunity present itself. There may be sound normative reasons to endorse Bauman’s position, but it is insufficient as a guideline for empirical research. Notwithstanding globalization and the universalization of some of the categories of modernity, differences and boundaries continue to exist. However, in a context of overheating, keeping boundaries intact requires hard work, and to what extent maintaining strict divisions between named groups is possible is an empirical question. Complex societies offer an almost infinite number of possible criteria for delineating subjective communities for whom the term “we” can be used meaningfully: Us, the supporters of the Labour Party. Us commuters. Us lesbians. Us jazz musicians. Us Christians. Us copywriters. Us women. Regardless of the many possible forms of “we-​hood,” an underlying question remains and is made acutely relevant in highly

Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    409 differentiated societies—​namely, what symbolic basis exists for a shared subjective identity encompassing a number of persons who can identify as a collectivity. Despite decades of criticism of the methodological nationalism social science has suffered from (Tilly 1984; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), the nation still, in many parts of the world, has an indisputable and enduring ability to create strong abstract communities, quite the contrary of what many theorists of globalization predicted toward the end of the last century. It has its detractors, and it has its “entropy-​resistant” persons or groups, who will not be part of it even if they are sharing the same territory (Gellner 1983), but national and ethnic identities remain resilient and strong in most parts of the world. The political controversies that are dividing many European populations in the 2020s do not mainly concern the nation as such but how it should be delineated symbolically and demographically, who should be included, and on what conditions. The nation (or ethnic group) must now share collective identity with various other symbolic communities, many of them shifting, unstable, and transnational, some complementary, some competing. Yet social identities cannot be manipulated at will, nor can they be fully understood within rational choice theory. They are “imagined, but not imaginary,” as Jenkins (2002) puts it, no less real for being socially constructed. If, as J. D. Y. Peel once said, the present is “really nothing more than the hinge between the past and the future” (Peel 1989, 200), the delineation of the past, and its substance, remains supremely important, even in a state of accelerated structural amnesia. Connerton, whose work on social memory (1989) has been influential in anthropology, would later describe a world divesting itself of its collective memory at an enormous speed. In How Modernity Forgets (Connerton 2009), he describes a number of ways in which modern societies obliterate their pasts, including so-​called urban renewal. Distinguishing between monuments and loci of memory, he fears not for the future of monuments (or their pasts), but for the continuity in everyday sites of encounters to which people have attached their tangible, corporeal experiences, and which are under threat, at least in cities that can afford to get rid of their pasts in efficient and unceremonious ways. Uprootedness through migration may engender similar feelings of not belonging, and besides, this phenomenon is not confined to city life. Rapid transformations of rural terrains may also create problems with the reproduction of identity; if your personal and collective attachment is to a landscape, you will suffer when your surroundings are no longer recognizable. These changes, which influence collectivities, may be spurred on by economic investments—​Connerton partly had the controversial urban renewal of eastern London in mind—​but they can also take the shape of ecological devastation motivated by economic interests.

Superdiversity and Acceleration Overheating is never the only game in town. It is always accompanied by eddies and billabongs, stagnation, and reversals, some of them voluntary, others enforced. Through

410   Thomas Hylland Eriksen migration, the shift from a fast life to a slower one, or vice versa, can be excruciating, and in any given society, change follows different rhythms. Moreover, recent works in social anthropology have shown how a sense of temporal acceleration prompted by unprecedented social and economic transformations may in fact lead to quite the opposite of what Connerton feared—​namely, a conscious appraisal of the past in the shape of nostalgia or conservative identity politics. How temporality is made sense of greatly varies in individual lives. Through his influential conceptualization of disjunctures, Appadurai (1990) has shown how people lead multiscalar and multitemporal lives by engaging in “scapes” of different scope. Temporality, however, can also vary within cultural and social worlds. Some phenomena change fast, and others seem sluggish or even stable. Just after the World War I, the sociologist William F. Ogburn (1922) proposed the term cultural lag (to describe a situation where ideas and concepts about the world lag behind changes in the physical world. In this situation, the disjunctures are systemic, and the maps cannot be made to fit the territory. An ideology of economic growth may be dysfunctional in a world of severe ecological problems, and an ideology of cultural cohesion at the level of the nation may not be appropriate in an increasingly diverse population. Smartphones have changed the everyday lives of billions since their introduction in 2007, but people still go to church, the mosque, or temple. In responding to the problems Connerton raised, many find oases of continuity; but in an overheated situation, they have to seek them out actively. It was in this context that Vertovec (2007) proposed the term superdiversity to designate a new social pattern, where migrant mobility and cultural streams have accelerated and changed in character. Whereas people formerly came from a few places and went to a few places, Vertovec explained, they now come from many places and go to many places. Whereas one could speak of the acceleration of acceleration in the context of overheating, superdiversity calls attention to the diversification of diversity. Whereas in the postwar decades, diversity in many cities could credibly be described by using conventional classifying devices, by now it had exploded and bifurcated in so many directions as to turn contemporary cities into demographically messy places. The term designates a new social pattern, where migrant mobility and cultural streams have accelerated and changed character. More than three hundred languages are currently spoken in London, Vertovec points out, but as he has repeatedly emphasized (e.g., Vertovec 2019), superdiversity is not merely about the proliferation of ethnic and cultural minorities. It also denotes the diversification of all kinds of identification. The people who live in a city like London might be refugees, EU labor migrants, the children of migrants from the colonies (such as the Windrush generation), or the beneficiaries of family reunification policies; they may also be students who stayed on after graduating, tourists who somehow forgot to leave after their visa expired, au pairs from the Philippines, or adventure seekers from Denmark. The “diversification of diversity” described by Vertovec and others (Arnaut et al. 2015; Blommaert 2013; Meissner and Vertovec 2015) describes a situation where how people identify and on what grounds they define their social identity cannot be taken for

Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    411 granted. This insight builds on a recognition of the facts of acceleration, where stability and cultural memory become scarce resources, and where mobility and reterritorialized communication have increased sharply.

Competing Discourses about Identity Baumann’s (1996) study of Southall in southwest London was an early expression of the perspective later developed into the study of superdiversity. The main theoretical contribution of his Contesting Culture consists in his identification of two kinds of discourses about social identities: the dominant discourse and the demotic (popular) discourse. The dominant discourse, reproduced chiefly through the media and in the public sector, tends to equate ethnicity (often vaguely defined) with community and culture; one ethnic group constitutes a community with a shared culture. Since dominant notions of “communities” can be based on either language, religion, or origin, any individual can belong to several communities, for example, a Gujerati one uniting Hindus and Muslims, a Muslim one uniting people of any linguistic or regional origin, and a subcontinental one uniting Indians and Pakistanis. Be this as it may, Baumann’s ethnography shows that the demotic discourse is more flexible and complex, that it recognizes the situational and multifaceted character of individual identification, and contests some of the terms in which the dominant discourse is framed: Alternative identifications, such as blackness (which may or may not include Asians), feminism, socialism, interfaith networks, and multiculturalist ideologies of tolerance contribute to softening the ethnic boundaries, creating “frontier zones” instead. Despite the lack of fit between the dominant discourse and popular representations, which is confirmed in the lack of a simple fit between class and ethnicity, many Southallians continue to reproduce the dominant discourse in certain situations. This could be seen as a simple effect of elite influence, but it is probably more accurate to say that since resources flow through ethnic or religious channels defined by the authorities, people have no choice but to present their claims in ethnic or religious terms: “The dominant discourse represents the hegemonic language within which Southallians must explain themselves and legitimate their claims” (Baumann 1996, 192). What Baumann shows is that the classificatory system characteristic of the modern, liberal state encourages the social construction of ostensibly stable, reified, ethnic or religious communities (he himself italicizes this word throughout the book, as if it were a problematic and untranslatable “native concept”). It is by virtue of their ethnic identity that minorities are discriminated against, but it is also chiefly through that identity that they can claim rights. They have no option other than to classify themselves as members of bounded groups, even if the facts on the ground indicate that they belong to lots of partly overlapping groups. In a later study from Hackney in London by Wessendorf (2014), the superdiversity of this area often entails the creation of shifting public arenas and foci of group

412   Thomas Hylland Eriksen identification that are based not on ethnic or religious origins but on shared interests or activities. Whether this kind of fluid identification is sufficient to create a sense of belonging is an empirical question, of relevance not only to researchers but also to policymakers, civil servants, and—​primarily—​the residents of these complex, often fluid residential areas. The issues politicians typically take up concern conditions for the integration of diverse populations into a shared urban fabric, whereas residents are concerned with the challenges of everyday life. The contrast between Wessendorf ’s Hackney in northeast London and Baumann’s Southall in southwest London, separated by just twenty years, shows a transition from complex diversity to superdiversity. Hackney contains far more nationalities than Southall—​among other groups, European labor migrants live there—​and a broader range of identity constructions. Group membership is less important in Wessendorf ’s analysis, and many of the residents of Hackney have such mixed origins that their allegiance to the place is more significant than their provenance, which resembles rhizomes more than roots. Wessendorf ’s Hackney comes across as a thoroughly creolized place, and similarly, Gilroy has often mentioned certain parts of London as exemplars in his depiction of conviviality as a mode of interaction following the loss of empire and formerly hegemonic assumptions about cultural and ethnic hierarchies (Gilroy 2004). At the same time, one striking commonality between Southall in the early 1990s and Hackney in the early 2010s is the continued importance of the public/​private boundary. Conviviality across ethnic and cultural differences is the norm in the public sphere, whereas informal social networks continue to follow these lines; less so in Hackney than in Southall, but religion, language and ethnicity continue to function as organizing principles at the microlevel of social organization.

Plural or Postplural Society? There are echoes of the classic models of the plural society, described by Furnivall (1948) for Southeast Asia and Smith (1965) for the West Indies, in this configuration: The discrete groups meet in the market place, but remain separate in other domains. There are nevertheless important differences. Notably, there is no ethnic division of labor, there are many institutions apart from the market where people intermingle, from schools to civil society associations, and in the case of Hackney, intermarriage is widespread. Public life in Hackney thus comes across as an instance of what Josephides and Hall (2014) speak of as everyday cosmopolitanism, fueled by conviviality and founded in shared interests that are based on place rather than kinship. In this kind of setting, there are tendencies of boundary-​making and withdrawal into primordialist identities both among minorities and majorities (the parallel in Europe between the extreme right and Islamism is striking); there are vibrant debates about what it takes to be a good X (Montenegrin, settler, return migrant, etc.), and processes of hybridization or creolization at the level of symbolic culture may or may not match

Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    413 parallel processes of mixing in social life: You can stay endogamous, homosocial, and heterosexual, even if the cultural stuff that makes up your world is taken from diverse sources. Social identification has to be reconceptualized when circumstances change, and although there is no linear or predictable direction to the changes in identification, there are a few likely scenarios or, perhaps, a range of options available in any given situation. It is likely that there will, in any discourse and practice surrounding perceived change, be elements of traditionalism, willingness to adjust, resistance and loyalty, quests for purity and celebrations of mixing. The growth in immigrant populations in Europe has not been as fast as the growth of the Internet, but the two processes may fruitfully be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both the electronic revolution and the polyethnic one have contributed to placing stable, territorially based identities under pressure. The Romantic nationalist formula “a people =​an ethnic group =​a territory =​a state =​a language” no longer works in a destabilized situation like this. This is why debates about national identity have been so lively, and often acrimonious, in so many European countries since the 1990s. The new complexity, epitomized in these two processes, has grown out of a period characterized by consolidation, homogenization, and the production of similarity. Gellner (1983) once compared premodern Europe with a painting by Oskar Kokoschka, the Viennese artist known for his colorful paintings with many small details. By contrast, Europe after the great leveling of nationalism had taken place, could be compared with a picture by Amedeo Modigliani, whose most famous pictures are dominated by large, serene, monochromatic areas. In a comment to Gellner, however, Hannerz (1996) points out that Kokoschka appears to have returned in a time when large cities increasingly become cultural crossroads and transit terminals, when all forms of mobility and movement become faster and smoother, and where identity politics at the micro level ensure that many newcomers resist assimilation to the majority. The belief that modernity would lead to the obsolescence of “primordial identities” has long been abandoned, but it can be important to distinguish between tradition (which “goes without saying”) and traditionalism (a reflexive choice). In the literature on indigenous peoples and their attempts to (re)define their place in a world where nearly everybody is forced to be a citizen, discourses about tradition and its entanglements with the state and its institutions have a central place, whether the study concerns Australian Aborigines’ attempts to produce narratives creating the necessary hinges between past and future (Kearney 2016) or the Filipino Aeta’s quest for land and livelihood (Schober 2016; see also Forte 2009). Indigenous people complicate the picture of how social reproduction and identity matters are currently undergoing change, because they tend to have been under great duress from various outside actors for much longer periods, which makes their strategies to create continuity during the recent era of accelerated change all the more worth noting. Rapid change—​be it in the realm of the economy, politics, or the environment—​ potentially limits people’s options for economic, social, and cultural reproduction. This, in turn, challenges collective identities, which are often based on notions of temporal, spatial, and social continuity, leading to a broad but finite range of options for the people

414   Thomas Hylland Eriksen affected by and/​or contributing to those changes. Outcomes of this destabilized situation may range from nativism and traditionalism, at one end of the spectrum, to creolization and mixing, at the other end. The superdiverse society created by more encompassing processes of accelerated change may thus periodically come to be dominated by withdrawal into traditionalist identities, as recent political developments in Europe and elsewhere have indicated.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank AbdouMaliq Simone and Nando Sigona for their excellent comments and suggestions.

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Transformations, Complexity, and Rapid Change    415 Hirschman, Albert. 1971. Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenkins, Richard. 2002. “Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Modern World. In Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, edited by Jeremy MacClancy, 114–​128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Josephides, Lisette, and Alexandra Hall, eds. 2014. We the Cosmopolitans: Moral and Existential Conditions of Being Human. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. Kearney, Amanda. 2016. “Cultural Wounding and Healing: Change as Ongoing Cultural Production in a Remote Australian Aboriginal Community.” In Identities Destabilised: Living in an Overheated World, edited by T. H. Eriksen and E. Schober, 114–​134. London: Pluto. Kymlicka, Will. 1988. “Liberalism and Communitarianism.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (2): 181–​203. McNeill, John R., and Peter Engelke. 2016. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meissner, Fran, and Steven Vertovec. 2015. “Comparing Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–​555. Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ogburn, William F. 1922. Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Peel, J. D. Y. 1989. “The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis.” In History and Ethnicity, edited by Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, 198–​215. London: Routledge. Ritzer, George. 2004. The Globalization of Nothing. London: SAGE. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Schober, Elisabeth. 2016. “Indigenous Endurance Amidst Accelerated Change? The US Military, South Korean Investors and the Aeta of Subic Bay.” In Identities Destabilised: Living in an Overheated World, edited by T. H. Eriksen and E. Schober, 135–​152. London: Pluto. Smith, M. G. 1965. The Plural Society of the British West Indies. London: Sangster’s. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Human Beings Now Overwhelming the Forces of Nature?” AMBIO 36 (8): 614–​621. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. United Nations. 2019. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision. Report ST/​ESA/​ SER.A/​420. Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. New York: United Nations. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. “Super-​Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–​1054. Vertovec, Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139. Wessendorf, Susanne. 2014. Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Super-​Diverse Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond. Nation-​State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks 2 (4): 331–​334.

Chapter 28

Superdiversi t y a nd the Everyday Amanda Wise

Introduction If superdiversity signals the “diversity of diversities” (Vertovec 2007, 2019; Meissner and Vertovec 2015), what does that mean for race and ethnic relations and the everyday lived experience and politics of cultural diversity? This chapter attends to the question of multicultural coexistence and how we might think superdiversity “through” what Wise and Velayutham (2009, 2014) have previously termed everyday multiculturalism. The chapter advances two propositions. The first is that the “everyday” is not so everyday. A relational perspective on scale (Caglar and GlickSchiller 2018) and temporality allows a more nuanced picture of the nature, possibilities, and outcomes of inhabited lived diversity. The second, related proposition is that the concept of superdiversity offers productive insights into the opportunity structures that influence patterns of coexistence and everyday intercultural sociality. Superdiversity attunes us to the forces that enable or delimit the emergence of solidarities and affinities in diversity, and to the power of structural forces that shape everyday racisms and disjunctures that occur across varying axes of difference. These include the standard intersections of gender, race, and class, as well as the multifractal varieties of “difference” identified in the superdiversity literature, not the least of which include immigrant status and the stratifications of multicultural urban citizenship these produce. The chapter situates superdiversity as an enriching paradigm for the concept of everyday multiculturalism, one that demands a more granular assessment of power and inequality in relation to quotidian coexistence. Since its first articulation (Vertovec 2007), the superdiversity paradigm has challenged thinking across the spectrum of work that makes up the loose configuration of migration, race, and diversity studies. In my subfield, its introduction opened a Pandora’s Box, challenging many of the

418   Amanda Wise fundamental premises of “first wave” multiculturalism as it was understood in the Australian context, particularly in relation to questions of identity, inequality, recognition, rights, redistribution, and legal status. Superdiversity significantly enriches earlier work on intersectionality (Anthias 2013; Yuval-​Davis 2006) by highlighting factors beyond the “big four” dimensions of race, gender, class, and socioeconomic status—​most profoundly through the introduction of legal status and immigrant generation as variables (Meissner 2018). Migrant legal status highlights questions of both temporality and variegated inclusion. These forms of social differentiation identified in “superdiversity” literature offer new insights of value to the study of everyday multiculturalism.

Everyday Multicultural-​ism A variety of terms have been coined, by various authors, to describe the lived experience of racial and cultural diversity on the ground. These include “commonplace diversity” (Wessendorf 2014); “everyday multiculture” (Swanton 2007; Gidley 2013; Neal et al. 2017) “living” or “urban multiculture” (Neal et al. 2017); “conviviality” (Gilroy 2004; Valluvan 2016; Wise and Noble 2016; Back 2019; Nowicka and Vertovec 2014; Padilla et al. 2015); the “multicultural real” (Hage 1998, 233), “urban multiculture” (Back and Sinha 2016);1 “working class” (Werbner 1999), and “ordinary cosmopolitanism” (Lamont and Aksartova 2002). Contributing to this conversation, Velayutham and I (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 2014, 2020; Wise 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2016b, 2016a) published a series of sole and jointly authored pieces using our framework of “everyday multiculturalism,”2 articulated largely on the back of empirical ethnographic work on lived diversity in Australia and Singapore. It is a concept that we have found fruitful, and it exists within a wider empirical and theoretical ecosystem, including that of superdiversity. As always though, ideas and concepts evolve and mature over time, and that is the case here. Although further elaboration and sharpening is needed, our original definition more or less still holds. In our original articulation, we defined it thusly: Everyday multiculturalism [i]‌s a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter. It explores how social actors experience and negotiate cultural difference on the ground and how their social relations and identities are shaped and re-​shaped in the process. . . . The focus is on the microsociology of everyday interaction, [however,] the everyday multiculturalism perspective does not exclude wider social, cultural and political processes. Indeed, the key to the everyday multiculturalism approach is to understand how these wider structures and discourses filter through to the realm of everyday practice, exchange and meaning making, and vice versa.” (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 3)

Superdiversity and the Everyday     419 Like superdiversity, everyday multiculturalism is a mesolevel methodological and conceptual approach to understanding the everyday relations, practices, possibilities, and outcomes of everyday living in superdiverse societies. The overarching interest is in (1) how new communities of difference form (or not, as the case may be); (2) identifying the shape and timbre of social relations in situations of lived cultural diversity, such as how tensions and divisions brew and are challenged or worked through, as well as patterns of affinity and solidarity, disjuncture, and division in diverse contexts; (3) describing changing patterns of identity and belonging and the nature of new social ties, and (4) identifying patterns of contradiction and ambivalence in coexistence, including patterns of hate and racism at the everyday level. Finally, it is concerned with (5) the nature, malleability, inclusiveness, and resilience of new forms of community in diversity, more established urban multicultures, and the shifts and reworkings of identities and belongings over time. The immediate methodological interest is in sites of sustained everyday encounter—​ such as local public spaces, neighborhoods, apartment complexes, local shopping areas, various kinds of micropublics such as workplaces, schools, leisure activities and spaces, formal sports teams and informal sports, and craft groups, as well as local welfare initiatives and local civil society. Methodologically, the approach finds its strength in the commitment to ethnographic and related qualitative approaches, particularly, grounded theory and the development and deployment of subsets of sensitizing concepts relevant to the research context and questions. Our fieldwork has been especially influenced by Chicago school ethnographic urban sociology and the symbolic interactionist tradition, as well as by classical works in anthropology and sociolinguistics and some cultural geography, especially nonrepresentational theory. It is an approach that is attuned to the micropolitics and practices of relating across difference, including ways of talking, humor, and other social rituals of encounter. The domains of sense and affect, habitus, and embodied practice are central to the analysis of everyday multiculturalism because they express relationships between lived experience, received dispositions (habitus and doxa—​ Bourdieu), “social facts,” and “institutions” (Durkheim). This also draws in the concerns expressed in the convivialities literature around the practices and dispositions of coexistence. Thus, fieldwork in the spaces of encounter has often focused on affect and the senses; language scripts; and multicultural lingua francas, such as metrolingualism; everyday humor; rituals of gift exchange, service, and helping; neighboring practices; food cultures; everyday bridging work; interaction rituals (and learned embodiments); and a focus on individuals I’ve termed transversal enablers (Wise 2009, 2018). Spaces that foreground practice, craft, or other embodied “languages” such as sport, or food have been important. Always, the focus has been on situated spaces of encounter, the development of social ties, and the role of place and institutional context, particularly when filtered through the chamber of neoliberal cities, the built environment and associated governmentalities, and also the world of work. Yet these do not represent the limit of relevant methods, which is often overlooked in critiques that have expressed concern at the “methodological neighborhoodism” of this and related literatures.

420   Amanda Wise Everyday multiculturalism is thus both a method for field-​based research on coexistence that functions as a sensitizing concept in the field and a mesoconcept (middle theory), and organizing device, that aims to achieve the kind of relational thinking that Caglar and Glick-​Schiller (2018) and others have argued for, where scale is understood as relational, and structures of unequal power exist within multiple but not nested networked hierarchies (Caglar and GlickSchiller 2018, 11).

A Note on the “-​ism” It is precisely due the imperative to keep a “multi-​scalar” and diachronic (Caglar and Glick Schiller 2018, 11) relational analysis at the heart of our approach that Velayutham and I have always insisted on using the term “everyday multiculturalism.” Unlike the variants “lived diversity,” “urban multiculture,” or even “conviviality”—​which have, unfortunately, too often been used as synonyms for everyday multiculturalism—​the -​ism insists that attention be paid to the structural and the ideological in our analyses of the everyday because they cannot be separated from lived experience. This point is often missed in critiques of everyday multiculturalism (Sealy 2018; Mansouri and Modood 2021), which conflate it with methodological neighborhoodism (Berg et al. 2019), and either misunderstand it as a normative concept in opposition to “traditional” rights-​ based theories of multiculturalism, or take it as a synonym for concepts of “conviviality” or “everyday multiculture,” or worse, which are both normative and uncritically descriptive. To reiterate, everyday multiculturalism is more than the study of local interpersonal relations across cultural differences. Social relations are always mediated and shaped by structures, institutions, laws, and prevailing norms. There are many “isms” to be accounted for in understanding everyday multiculturalism, the terms of everyday coexistence, identities, and lived relations across cultural and relational differences, including patterns of racism, “conviviality,” and otherwise. Most obvious are actual government and institutional policies and programs of formal multiculturalism. These includes ideologies of accommodation, assimilation, integration, interculturalism, and conceptions of multiculturalism that vary across national contexts. The “isms” include the nature of group-​based recognition and rights, and the forms of diversity-​related redistributive justice that predominate at the nation-​state and local governance levels, and the ecosystem of social service provision and attending policy and legislation, including whether services are “mainstreamed” or operate in a traditional “multicultural” service-​provision mode. To this we can add schooling, patterns of diversity and segregation at school and their causes and consequences, and models of multicultural education (or their absence). It also includes wider economic structures and economic flows, not the least of which are changing patterns of work, labor markets, employment, and workplace relations and how these “sort” difference. This political economy of difference includes (but is not limited to) temporary migration schemes and their labor market consequences, ethnic immigrant labor market niches, and patterns of racism

Superdiversity and the Everyday     421 and discrimination in the labor market. The built environment, arrangements, and governmentalities of public space are also part of the mediating “ism,” and all of the above are influenced by the local and global race and diversity “climate,” media discourse, political debate, and the political zeitgeist. The final “ism” shaping all of these things are the histories of race, racism, and colonization. Threading through all of these are the traditional axes of differentiation: gender, race, and class and their intersections, but in addition, the variegated forms of identity, origin, migrant citizenship, and migration regimes signaled in the superdiversity debate (Vertovec 2007, 2019; Meissner and Vertovec 2015). The interrelationships between the lived micro experience of multicultural inhabitance and the wider forces just described, might be illustrated in Figure 28.1.3 The mediating factors are not confined to those listed in the chart; these instead are indicative categories, and need to be seen as interlocking dynamics that shape the most mundane of everyday encounters, intercultural and race relations, and patterns of migrant integration and sociability.

EVERYDAY MULTICULTURALISM

ENCOUNTER INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS AS EVERYDAY ENCOUNTER, EVERYDAY LIVED AND NEOTIATED CO-EXISTENCE...WORK, SCHOOL, SPORT, NEIGHBOURHOODS, PUBLIC SPACES CITIES ETC

ECOSYSTEM

MEDIATING ETHOS

EVERYDAY MULTICULTURALISM

MEDIATING ETHOS, HISTORIES, CATEGORIZATIONS OF DIFFERENCE, RACISMS, MEDIA DISCOURSE-INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA, POLITICAL ZEITGEIST

Figure 28.1.  The ecosystem of everyday multiculturalism.

STRUCTURES -MEDIATING STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONS, REGULATIONS, POLITICAL, LEGAL AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS, PROGRAMMES, BUILT ENVIRONMENTS, TECHNOLOGIES, LOCAL AND GLOBAL ECONOMY AND PREVAILING IDOLOGIES EG NEO-LIBERAL GOVERNMENT TALITIES

422   Amanda Wise

The Superdiversity Q The significant conceptual and methodological advances made in the original (Vertovec 2007) and secondary scholarship on superdiversity attune us more precisely to an important set of interlocking variables that significantly enrich the conceptualization of everyday multiculturalism, as understood in the way I’ve just described (in “Everyday Multicultural-​ism”). Superdiversity speaks naturally to the question of relational scale. It attends to the diversity of diversity, and the diversity of inequalities. Superdiversity also highlights significant mediating factors that shape the most mundane encounters with and experiences of diversity and difference, and in turn shape relations and formations of community. These mediating factors run from major global and structural forces to mesolevel institutional organizing forces, such as those found in the domain of work and workplaces, schools, or neighborhood urban governance. And like everyday multiculturalism, these forces are felt and expressed at the level of embodied experience. The sociological literature has long had an interest in in modern and neoliberal selves and the ways in which these become embodied in disposition, and in aspiration. Recent scholarship also draws a relationship to legal status and various forms human intimacy, from social networks, solidarity friendship, and love (see Kathiravelu 2012; Sigona 2012; Enriquez 2020). An enduring challenge to operationalizing superdiversity is the “diversity” of its “diversities”—​from legal status and its consequences in a whole range of areas such as class, gender, race, generation (both in terms of age and immigrant generation), to length of residence; national, ethnic, and linguistic diversity; social policy; and differentiated welfare regimes (see Phillimore et al. 2021)—​just to name a few. In the next section (“Legal Status, Temporality, and the Uneven Terms of Coexistence”), I zero in on one of the more significant variables identified in the superdiversity literature—​ legal status—​and think this “through” the paradigm of everyday multiculturalism. For purposes of illustration, I telescope in on two situations of encounter and parse these through this single variable. Specifically, I attend to the question of temporary legal status and how it gives shape to the politics, sociabilities, possibilities, and outcomes of lived diversity in everyday multiculturalism. The domains of work and neighborhood are our spaces of encounter here, and the core variable is not racial, ethnic, or national origin but temporary visa status. This allows us to spotlight the question of temporality as it links to spaces of encounter and the meso-​and macrolevel mediating forces of work, governance of the built environment, and immigration policy.

Legal Status, Temporality, and the Uneven Terms of Coexistence Legal status has been identified as a key variable in many of the significant contributions to the superdiversity literature. Meissner’s (2018) piece develops this link most explicitly

Superdiversity and the Everyday     423 and sets out a thorough review of relevant studies. In line with my framing of everyday multiculturalism, Meissner convincingly argues that the configurations of locality are only partially determined in local contexts (2018, 288). Given the rapid rise and proliferation of temporary migration schemes in large, migrant-​receiving societies such as Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Germany, it is surprising how little scholarly attention to this mode of diversification there has been in the literature on integration and formal multiculturalism. Meissner (2018) argues that, with a few exceptions (see Phillimore et al. 2021) the burgeoning literature on integration (see Grzymala-​Kazlowska and Phillimore 2018) has engaged very little with comparative research on legal status migration as a core form of immigrant differentiation. Australia at once claims to be “the most successful multicultural nation in the world” and has been and is at the forefront in advancing a proliferation of complex entry conditionalities for migrants, especially temporary ones. For example, international students must have recognizable school qualifications, and the funds to pay the fees; those from certain countries must, in addition to their first year of tuition fees, show evidence of having $21,000 AUD in a bank account that can be used for living and welfare expenses, or show that a parent or spouse in the home country has an annual income of at least $72,000 AUD. To obtain a temporary work visas (TSS Visa 482), an applicant must have the skills and two years of work experience in an occupation the government has identified as an area of skills shortage, a designated level of English, satisfy health requirements, and be nominated by an Australian employer. There are two occupation lists for this visa; the Short-​Term Skilled Occupation List (STSOL), which channels applicants into the visa subcategory that allows two years of temporary-​worker status, and the Medium and Long-​Term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL), which qualifies the applicant for the four-​year temporary work visa that offers a permanent residency track after three years. The latter list being mostly professional level qualifications, though a substantial number of skilled trade occupations are included. For refugees, only those granted asylum “offshore,” or who were granted another type of visa “offshore” are offered permanent residency. So called “onshore” applicants—​for example, someone who is in Australia on a valid student or temporary work visa and then applies for asylum—​can apply for refugee status leading to permanent residency. A person who arrived on a tourist visa, family visit visa, or from certain designated countries, or someone who arrived without another kind of “valid” visa or who has not cleared immigration border control on arrival (or both) can only access a three-​year Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) that must be renewed at the end of that period for another three years. Some, but not all, of those on TPVs can apply for a Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV), which allows immigrants a five-​year stay and access to some welfare benefits if they live and work in a regional area. Then there is the “permanent residency pathway,” where a refugee on a SHEV must live and work in a designated regional area and not have received any social security benefits for four years. If that person entered Australia without a valid visa or was not cleared by immigration on arrival, they cannot apply for permanent residency after their five-​plus-​five years of living and working in regional Australia.

424   Amanda Wise In each of these three cases (international students, migrant workers, and asylum seekers and refugees), the conditions of entry determine who can access permanent or temporary status and for what tenure and the welfare and social security safety net. The system “sorts” people based on the demographic profile of those who constitute each category. There is thus differentiation by national origin, socioeconomic status, and occupational status, just to name a few. Visa conditions tied to work and residence in regional areas have the effect of sorting people geographically. Visa conditions that deny access to permanent residency to anyone who has received welfare payments “sorts” many hopeful migrants into the world of precarious work to survive. Clearly, more attention must be given to how these temporary legal statuses pattern population change, temporalities, and geographies of settlement, and channel migration flows (who moves, when, from where, to where), to the production of variegated processes of integration, and the consequences for how we understand questions of multicultural citizenship and associated claims to social and cultural justice. This is a small but indicative slice of the variegated visa conditionalities imposed in the Australian immigration system, and they reflect policy trends that, increasingly, are present in other immigrant-​receiving societies, such as the United Kingdom. These regulations shape both who migrates and their experiences once they are here. Meissner (2018) thus distinguishes between what she calls “conditionalities of entry” and “parameters of presence” and argues that both are important mediating factors in producing social differentiation under conditions of superdiversity (Meissner 2018, 288). Conditionalities of entry are the specific entry requirements that make one eligible for a particular migration status track (291). Meissner’s second grouping—​“parameters of presence”—​are the differentiations that become salient once a particular legal status has been granted (2018, 291). It is important, she argues, to interrogate how these differentiations “come to matter locally but also relationally as different individuals inhabit different status trajectories” (303). That is to say, visa status conditions both the demographics of those who enter and their lived realities once here. More than, or as a consequence of, the impositions of temporary legal status, researchers such as Tazreiter (2019), Robertson (2021), and Wang and Collins (2020) emphasize the affective dimensions of the temporary migrant experience. Robertson (2021) highlights the biographical disruption that many temporary migrants experience, particularly those caught up in a pattern of status churn, which often stretches over years and across multiple temporary visas, each with different conditions, in pursuit of a longer term goal of permanent residency (see also Merla and Smit 2020; Sigona 2012). Tazreiter (2019, 92) describes the affective “ambivalence” that characterizes the subjective experience of many temporary migrants in her research, where their precarious spatial and temporal position within the host society produces a kind of psychic “splitting” as a consequence of their inability to adequately imagine a secure future. This splitting results in an instrumental and “nimble approach of adaptation to fast changing rules, conditions, and opportunities,” and is distinct from a permanent migrant orientation to multicultural citizenship that has a more future oriented reciprocal response to “adaptation” and “integration” into multicultural citizenship. Moreover, Wang and Collins (2020) remind

Superdiversity and the Everyday     425 us that there are many temporalities that work on temporary migrants. They cluster these broadly into three groups; “everyday times,” which are the self-​directed and externally imposed everyday timetables that shape social, family, and work life (2020, 578); the longer horizon of “aspirational time, “linked to life-​course biographical time; and “institutional time,” which comprises the temporalities demanded by political and economic change, migration policies or time-​length of work contracts. These “times” are relational—​that is to say, each temporal category inflects the others. Focused specifically on the domain of work, Axelsson et al. (2017, 169–​170) propose a similar typology in their study of Chinese temporary migrant workers in Sweden’s hospitality industry. Temporariness should be seen thus as both a sensibility and a material reality for those migrants subjected to the vagaries of precarious legal status. As argued earlier, everyday multiculturalism is particularly interested in the patterns and mediating contexts of coexistence at the level of lived diversity. This means interrogating the dynamics of temporariness as they relate to questions of cosmopolitanism and intercultural encounter, and how the various temporalities shape the terms, possibilities, and affective dispositions toward those encounters (Wang and Chen 2020; Wise 2016b, 2016a; Boccagni 2017; Higgins 2019). Legal status confers temporalities that shape who arrives, where they live, for how long they stay, the extent to which a stable future can be imagined, the daily patterns of work-​time, the long (and transnational) horizons of indebtedness. It produces uneven and variegated access to welfare and social security, schooling, work, and locality; it also creates labor market niches that frequently become racialized. And finally, it shapes individual and collective subjectivities and affective states, and, in turn, orientations to “integration,” citizenship, friendship, neighboring, workplace solidarities and collegialities, community, and belonging. That is to say, these temporalities fundamentally shape every aspect of social relations in everyday multiculturalism.

Space of Encounter: Work and Neighborhood Two particular spaces of encounter—​work and neighborhood—​have been the focus in my sole and joint (with Velayutham) ethnographic research and publications on everyday multiculturalism. How does superdiversity, specifically, temporary legal status intersect with our findings? The impact of temporariness was a consistent theme in our comparative research on diverse workplaces in Sydney and Singapore (cf. Wise 2016b, 2016a; Wise and Velayutham 2020). In Sydney, we looked at bus drivers, nurses, and hospitality and warehouse workers; in Singapore, we focused on nurses and hospitality, shipyard, and warehouse workers. Temporal flux characterizes much of the work that many temporary migrant workers are forced into: insecure work, unfavorable shift work, temporally

426   Amanda Wise intense work (diminished break time, lack of slow time), labor hire temporary jobs moving from workplace to workplace, being around other workers who come and go, short-​term roles, long hours. In Singapore, there were marked differences in the relations between “different” locals compared to “different” workers, and the differentiation was both racial and cultural and a consequence of temporary legal status. Although we found interaction rituals, including joking, bridging scripts, relations of reciprocity expressed through care or food, and other micro rituals of social connection were important in bridging difference, temporalities really impacted. Whether that was the temporal dimensions of the work itself (e.g., fast-​paced, insecure casualized warehouse work done by international students, or slower time in a small eatery) or the specific conditionalities of temporary migrant worker status—​these mattered in shaping and differentiating relations across difference at work at the everyday level. The consequences of these conditions are profound. The slow relational time, the “getting to know you” across difference time, becomes scarce. Likewise, relations of trust may fail to set seed, the necessity of investment in relationships, the microcultures (in the symbolic interactionalist sense) of worker communities fail to develop. Flux undermines the formation of new micro communities-​in-​difference. “Easy” relationships gel more quickly—​relations with “those like me” are safe, quick, and familiar. Moreover, the conditions of insecure work sow resentment and competition between coworkers who are culturally or racially different—​and in these circumstances, stigmatized “ethnoracial” difference starts to “stick” to the temporary migrant worker in the stigmatized identity category. If ethnographic work on everyday multiculturalism is interested in situated spaces of encounter, it must also always be remembered that situated spaces are not disconnected from one another. They connect spatially, by way of social networks, or the experiences in one shape the experiences in the other. Temporary legal status patterns social relations in workplaces which in turn shape situations of encounter outside of work. For example, legal status and work has impacts beyond the workplace. The long intense or “unsociable” hours (or both, including unstable and rotating work shifts, that characterize the employment niches of many low-​wage temporary migrant workers also undermine their potential to join community neighborhood activities, such as organized sports, clubs, regular meetups, and so on. None of these are the kinds of affective conditions that underpin “convivial” communities in diversity. Developing friendship and community ties across difference takes time and work; it takes “convivial labor,” defined as the enacted, negotiated, practiced, and cumulative labor that goes into provisionally successful situations of lived difference (Wise 2016b, 482; see also Wise 2016a; Wise and Noble 2016, 482; Wessendorf 2014). For both the temporary worker and the “local,” the impetus to invest time in developing friendships and relationships diminishes because of time pressures arising from the work, from the “churn” of insecure work, from the mutual awareness that a migrant worker is likely to be just “passing through.” Taking another tack, migration-​related debt also casts a long temporal shadow. Debt bondage tends to be linked to migrant workers taking on extra hours, taking fewer risks in standing up for rights and entitlements

Superdiversity and the Everyday     427 (e.g., joining a union, standing alongside work colleagues), a tendency to remain “in the shadows” and “out of trouble” (Wise 2016b). In the case of many international student workers in Australia, especially from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and some from China—​taking on high levels of debt for international student fees reduces their opportunities to socialize with local students because they need to work long hours, often in the shadow or precarious cash economy (Robertson 2021). There are, though, emergent social solidarities among these precarious workers of diverse backgrounds (see Perry 2018), as is evident in the growing activism among food-​delivery riders. Consider, too, the consequences of temporariness on urban citizenship. Although some multicultural theorists have suggested that the term “urban citizenship” is a more salient means of conceptualizing the inclusion of temporary migrants who fall outside the citizenship bounds of the multicultural nation state (see Kymlicka 2017; Teo 2021), it is less clear to what extent urban planners respond to the needs of the temporary urban citizens in our cities and neighborhoods. If at the progressive edges, the planning and diversity literature focuses on the right to the city, recognition, encounter, and spatial justice (cf. Fincher et al. 2019), many factors “sort” temporary migrants into the shadows of our cities. In some places, such as Singapore, Dubai, and Hong Kong, planners are focused on keeping temporary workers away from the populace through urban design and regulation. In Sydney, the intersection between education, migration, and planning policy has radically reshaped the built environment and patterns of residence and ethnic clustering over the last decade. The Australian international student market is a major contributor to GDP, second only to the mining industry. As such, successive governments, at both the state and federal levels, have embedded an intersecting mix of policies to ensure Australia’s competitive advantage in the global quest to attract students. At the federal level, immigration policy includes allowing students work rights (up to 20 hours) and their accompanying spouses unlimited work entitlements. After graduation, a series of temporary graduate work visas are available, a couple of which offer those eligible a path to permanent residency through employer sponsorship. Foreign direct investment rules allow temporary migrants to purchase newly built housing, though not existing housing stock. This in turn props up the construction industry, another major contributor to the economy (and also highly reliant on temporary migrant workers). At the state level, planning laws have been passed to fast-​track the development of high-​rise buildings to service this demand in and around university precincts, and in the feeder suburbs near public transport hubs, including Macquarie Park, Rhodes, Chippendale and Redfern, Parramatta, Kensington, and Chatswood. Until the early 2000s, Sydney’s urban multiculture was spread out, and most multicultural suburbs were what we would describe as “superdiverse,” settling many groups from many places who had arrived via a range of migration channels. A profound consequence of the intersection between Australia’s international student market and the investment and urban planning policies just described has been the rapid formation of new high-​density precincts and suburbs that house people from very few backgrounds. For example, Sydney’s inner-​city Rhodes suburb, a former brownfields site, which is on the train line to two universities, has

428   Amanda Wise been completely redeveloped with new high rises, and the demographic profile of the suburb is striking: 47 percent of residents are Chinese-born, and the balance is largely Korean- or Indian-born. This is a starkly different profile from Sydney’s “traditional” superdiverse arrival suburbs, which are home to many ancestries, including many micro communities, and a mix of long-​settled and recent migrants. These developments have also coincided with the conversative state-​government’s agenda of privatizing public housing, and large-​scale program of demolishing old public-​housing estates and replacing them with “mixed-​use” private high-​rise developments that set aside a portion of apartments for social housing (usually about 20%). One such development is underway near Macquarie University, and there are two others in inner Sydney’s Waterloo and Redfern, also near two major universities. The Waterloo and Redfern developments are significant as long-​standing homes to Sydney’s Aboriginal community; Redfern, in particular, is a historically significant site of Indigenous activism (see Holton and Mouat 2020). This has produced significant tensions where race, class, indigeneity, gentrification, and student migration intersect. While this discussion may sound very much removed from “everyday multiculturalism” in the way it is colloquially understood, it has important consequences as these macro developments shape opportunity structures for convivial encounter, social relations, and the formation of communities-​in-​difference. Such developments are often places of residential churn. They produce new forms of racial segregation and juxtapose new forms of wealth with old forms of disadvantage, patterning new forms of racialized advantage and disadvantage. They shape who is likely to encounter whom in the “neighborhood,” and on what terms. Outside the major cities, the impacts are just as profound. There are a number of temporary visas that offer a pathway to permanent residency if the applicant can show several years of working in living in a designated regional area or areas. For example, the New South Wales regional towns Young and Griffith have labor shortages in local abattoirs, chicken-​processing factories, and fruit picking. They have therefore attracted many of the more precarious temporary migrants, refugees, seasonal workers, working holiday makers, and lower-​skilled temporary migrant workers. This produces visible labor market niches. They often live in crowded shared housing (with landlord exploitation). Stigmatization on the basis of visible difference is exacerbated because temporary workers are “grouped” in employer-​arranged housing and in the workplaces. Yet, as some of the recent research on arrival infrastructures (Meeus et al. 2019; Wessendorf 2021) and established literature on social infrastructures shows (Klinenberg 2018; Latham and Layton 2019), a well-​provisioned urban commons can loosen some of these sharper divides. These include public libraries (Iveson and Fincher 2011; Williamson 2020), lively multicultural shopping precincts, spaces for informal sport activities (Aquino et al. 2020; Jackson 2020), public parks (Neal et al. 2017), even the humble park bench (Rishbeth and Rogaly 2018). Though these spaces hold much promise, they are also increasingly subject to the vagaries of wider forces, especially patterns of neoliberal governance that produce uneven access due to the increasing

Superdiversity and the Everyday     429 privatization of public facilities, the emergence of “ticketed” public spaces such as swimming pools, and booked basketball courts, and leisure centers, malls replacing high street strip shopping, and so forth.

Conclusions To summarize, there are three core dynamics at work in the situations of everyday multiculturalism described here: the first is the question of duration and temporariness, the second is the question of urban environment; and the third has to do with the sorting forces of neoliberalism and global capital. In all our work, a core feature of convivial multiculture has been the evidence of urban learning across difference, but this rests on duration. Learning across difference takes time, familiarity, and repeated encounters. Wider forces, be they in urban development or neoliberal workplaces, work at every level to keep people sorted, segregated, apart, and “churning” through. The terms of encounter are mostly unequal. In places like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, formal multiculturalism is ultimately about social justice and the reconfiguration of nation and citizenship. As argued earlier, ethe concept of “everyday multiculturalism” is not set up in opposition to the normative concepts of “multiculturalism” that are focused on rights claims within the national context. In this ideal sense, a “multicultural citizen” reframes the nation and its terms of belonging. Outside the rights and status conferred by formal citizenship, the national relationship to temporary migrants remains purely instrumental. Temporary migrants will always exist in the realm of the tolerated, accepted, or perhaps welcomed, for “their contributions” as students, workers, flexible labor to the national economy. This places them in a radically powerless position as precarious “guests” in relation to a national host that can fire and deport them at any time. This is a precarious and circumscribed form of multicultural belonging, however convivial the everyday experience of difference is. The variegated rights and entitlements of temporary legal status delimit making claims for social justice, those conferred by formal “multiculturalism” confer (see Kymlicka 2017). In knitting everyday multiculturalism through the superdiversity paradigm, everyday manifestations of power and inequality become obvious. Documenting these at the level of everyday life shows up relations of power, including those deeply embedded in racism. Their precarious relation to the nation manifests in “everyday multiculturalism” in urban segregation, segregation and precarity at work, and a tenuous position in the neighborhood. As AbdouMaliq Simone argues, “Practices of learning, resisting and re-​constituting, are precarious; they exist within and through the deep inequalities endemic to a capitalist order” (quoted in Hall 2017, 1570). In the midst of these inequalities and a precarious grip on urban citizenship, there are moments of encounter, relation, and solidarity across differences and urban learning, and new forms of community are evolving. Understanding these convivial modes of coexistence in wider context though, is an important part of the picture.

430   Amanda Wise

Notes 1. See Colombo (2015, 800–​824) and Verkuyten (2004, 53–​74). 2. See Colombo (2015) and Verkuyten (2004). 3. See Vertovec (2021) for his model of superdiversity which, as a mesolevel concept, is similar to this one.

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Chapter 29

Citizensh i p a nd Stat elessness t h rou g h a Superdiversi t y L e ns Julija Sardelić

Introduction In everyday debates, citizenship and statelessness are usually understood as opposite legal statuses. This understanding was cemented by United Nations international treaties and other legal documents after World War II. Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) defined citizenship as an unalienable human right: “(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality” (UN 1948).1 Citizenship as a legal status “denotes formal state membership and rules to access it,” and in terms of rights, it defines “the formal capacities and immunities connected to such status” (Joppke 2007, 38), on one hand. On the other hand, in the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, a stateless individual is defined as a “person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law” (UN 1954) and without a “right to have rights” (Arendt 1973, 279). In this respect, if citizenship represents connection to a state that grants certain rights, statelessness would mean the absence of this connection to any state. However, citizenship scholarship has shown that having citizenship status does not necessarily guarantee access to rights. Similarly, more recent academic debates have demonstrated that statelessness does not necessarily mean the complete absence of rights. Both types of research highlighted that there are myriad “in-​between” and precarious legal statuses (Lori 2017; Nyers 2019; see also Cohen 2009) that are often also connected to diversity of citizenry. Many policy papers and some scholarly discussion have highlighted ethnic discrimination as a key factor leading to difference in accessing citizenship rights and citizenship status itself. However, several of these policy papers

436   Julija Sardelić failed to reflect the importance of other factors that contribute to discrimination in connection with citizenship and statelessness. The chapter aims to show that the realities of hindered access to citizenship and the accompanied rights cannot be reduced solely to the perspective of ethnicity, but need to consider the complexities of the power relations that surround it. The chapter takes a superdiversity approach (Vertovec 2007) to citizenship and statelessness analysis to unravel some of those complexities. My argument is twofold: first, the understanding of citizenship and statelessness as merely two diametrically opposed legal statuses flattens the complex and multilayered realities in which statelessness and citizenship exist; second, superdiversity brings an important perspective to studying the citizenship-​statelessness dichotomy. I will highlight “topologies of citizenship” (Hepworth 2014) and of statelessness to show how applying the superdiversity lens demonstrates that these topologies are not merely based on having more ethnicities and ethnic discrimination (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Vertovec 2019). Instead, I consider how examining topologies through a superdiversity lens highlights the myriad legal status positionalities (Meissner 2017) along the statelessness/​citizenship nexus, which show how states imagine migration, and not just actual migration patterns. Both are shaped through the power relations that states use when positioning individuals within multilayered citizenship and statelessness topologies. First I draw the connection between citizenship topology and superdiversity. Then, I implement this approach when discussing the examples in which citizenship as a legal status is decoupled from the rights usually seen as derived from that status. Here, I particularly look at the “right to stay” and a “right to return” to a country of citizenship. Third, I explore a broad spectrum of statelessness positions and their relationship to the Arendtian “right to have rights.” Citizenship is not necessarily the unconditional “right to have rights,” just as statelessness is not necessarily a lack of that right. I show how the degrees of citizenship and statelessness are dependent on several intertwined factors besides ethnicity, most notably intertwined inequalities coming from the power relations set by the states.

Superdiversity Approach to Topologies of Citizenship and Statelessness Several scholars have pointed out that the dichotomy between citizenship/​rights and statelessness/​rightlessness do not elegantly overlap (Sigona 2015) but show more complex and multilayered realities that could be described as “topologies of citizenship”: “A topological approach emphasizes the proliferation of inside-​out and outside-​in positions that are produced through the act of delimiting the border. Although borders are used to indicate a clear division between two states or spaces, the practice of defining that border actually results in numerous, seemingly paradoxical positions that may, simultaneously,

Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens    437 be both included within and excluded from the political community” (Hepworth 2014, 112). The traditional understandings of citizenship, such as the one developed by T. H. Marshall (1950), contained citizenship within the borders of one state and largely failed to encapsulate the position of migrants and noncitizens, on one hand, “It is widely acknowledged that the classic (albeit Anglocentric) account of social citizenship offered by T.H. Marshall does not align with the situation of migrants for whom civil and socio-​ economic rights typically precede political rights” (Owen 2017, 258). Marshall also did not discuss the global embeddedness of citizenship and connected power relations, especially with respect to the British Empire at the time and the experience of Indigenous people who were not accorded equal rights in the settler colonial states that redrew the borders of their lands (Walter 2014; Harrington 2014; see also Spoonley, this volume). On the other hand, the topological approach, which stemmed from global citizenship studies (Isin and Nyers 2014), emphasized the importance of a border as a reference point for the creation of multitudes of citizenship positions. The topological approach also considers other factors that contribute to the citizenship multitude and look at the ruptures “within and beyond citizenship” (Gonzales and Sigona 2017). Besides the spatial dimension, it also considers the multitude of citizenship positions within a polity that go beyond taking the White working-​class male as a norm, a criticism of Marshall’s understanding of social citizenship (Lister 1997). The topological approach as suggested by Hepworth in many respects coincides with the superdiversity approach, especially when multiple different factors are being considered, and how they intertwined to create the plethora of legal status positionalities (Meissner 2017), including citizenship and statelessness statuses. A few scholars have directly explored what superdiversity represents for the study of citizenship (Blommaert 2013; Mepschen 2019); however, less scholarly attention has been given to direct application of the superdiversity approach to the dichotomies between citizenship/​rights and statelessness/​rightlessness. More recent scholarship on citizenship (e.g., Gonzales and Sigona 2017; Nyers 2019) and statelessness (e.g., Bloom, Tonkiss, and Cole 2017; Lawrance and Stevens 2017) has shown how to understand these two concepts in “a society that is getting increasingly complex, composite, layered and unequal” (Sigona 2013). The work of number of citizenship scholars in the last decades also highlights the importance of understanding citizenship in an ever-​changing world, particularly one shaped by human migration (Bosniak 2008; Soysal 2007; Bauböck 2010; Shaw 2020). Recently, there was a significant turn in citizenship studies as it became more intertwined with migration studies and questions of transnationalism: “Migration scholarship has shown that the identities, rights and practices associated with being a citizen can be at odds with formal citizenship status, and that the entitlements conferred by citizenship can be obtained through claims to membership that supersede the nation state . . . In an increasingly mobile world, migration muddles the distinction between insider and outsider and unsettles consolidated categories of analysis of citizenship and alienage” (Barrett and Sigona 2014, 286). Among other things, citizenship scholarship has also moved beyond a tridimensional understanding of citizenship in terms of “status,

438   Julija Sardelić rights and belonging” (Joppke 2007) and toward the envisioning of citizenship as an activist battleground, where this understanding is contested (Isin 2009; Sigona 2015). Some scholarship has shown that even individuals possessing formal citizenship status are in certain situations only “semi-​citizens” because their particular citizenship status does not grant them access the taken-​for-​granted rights citizenship usually confers (Cohen 2009). This is not necessarily connected with migration status or ethnicity, but could be connected to age (e.g., children) and sexual orientation (e.g., LGBTQ). However, this is always due to inequalities and power relations. An intersectional approach to citizenship has shown the cavities within the access to rights based on the intersection of “gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability” (Yuval-​Davis 2007, 582). Here I show a direct approach to citizenship (Vertovec 2019, 126), which understands superdiversity as distinguished from intersectionality by its focus: “The concept of superdiversity does not challenge anything about theories of intersectionality in this sense; rather, the former is concerned with different categories altogether, most importantly nationality/​country of origin/​ethnicity, migration channel/​legal status” (Meisner and Vertovec 2015, 545). What I add to the superdiversity mix is the notion that in certain circumstances some people may be defined as postmigrant citizens even though they have not had a migration experience (because their parents were migrants). Other citizens might not have any migrant background, not even on the intergenerational continuum (for centuries), yet states decide to construct and reimagine them as migrants to create inequality and, subsequently, exclusion. Such reimagining of migration is often done in the context of stripping people’s citizenship rights or revoking their citizenship status.

“Right to Return” and “Right to Stay”: Cornerstones of Citizenship? While the scope of citizenship rights varies from context to context, certain rights until recently seemed unalienable and independent of context because they were enshrined in international law. Based on international treaties, citizenship was understood as a social contract between an individual and a state that gave the individual the right to be present in the territory of the state. Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” (UN 1948). According to this understanding, citizenship should be a basis for the “right to return” to and the “right to stay” in the country where an individual is a citizen. However, applying a superdiversity lens shows the multilayered nature of citizenship statuses and that not even these two rights are absolute. Most countries follow a principle based on the 1954 Statelessness Convention that only naturalized and dual citizens can be “irregularized” (Nyers 2019) and denied the right to return to their country. In some cases, former citizens have been stripped of their citizenship status and have neither the “right to return” nor the “right to stay.” Such citizenship stripping is not based only on

Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens    439 gender, class, and race but also on “national origin and mode of citizenship acquisition” (Gibney 2019, 2551) and can therefore be analyzed through a superdiversity lens. For example, according to the 1981 British Citizenship Act (sec. 40, 4A) only citizens who had acquired British citizenship by naturalization can be stripped of their citizenship, and in cases where there is a reason to believe that this person could acquire citizenship of another country. However, in certain cases (especially, those involving security concerns and alleged terrorism), states turn a blind eye to their own rules. For example, Shamima Begum, a British-​born teenager who left United Kingdom to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and did not have any other citizenship, was stripped of her British citizenship and would not be allowed back to the United Kingdom after ISIS has been defeated. As Devyani Prabhat (2019) highlighted, in principle it is only naturalized citizens who can be stripped of citizenship and this only applies to citizens who have a dual citizenship: yet it is less likely that a dual Canadian-​British citizen would be stripped of any of her citizenships. Furthermore, the case of Shamima Begum shows that even a natural-​born citizen can be stripped of her citizenship. The British authorities presumed that she also had Bangladeshi citizenship (which Bangladeshi authorities denied). By contrast, her husband, Yago Riedijk, a Dutch citizen who joined ISIS as a foreign fighter, could return to the Netherlands but would have to face criminal charges. The difference between Shamima Begum and Yago Riedijk was in how their countries of citizenship perceived them. Yago Riedijk was seen by the Dutch government as a “true” but troubled national citizen; Shamima Begum, however, was perceived as foreign even though she was a natural-​born UK citizen. This is a matter not simply of ethnicity but of who is perceived as belonging “to the soil” (Mepschen 2019, 75), which evidently not all natural-​ born citizens are. While certain ethnic groups would be perceived as belonging “to the soil” (even when they are minorities and even migrants), others are be more likely to be categorized as “allochthones” even if they are natural-​born citizens. Begum’s case is paradigmatic because it shows that even a natural-​born citizen can be made stateless. In many other cases, individuals who were allegedly part of ISIS were stripped of their arguably primary citizenship without a trial if they had dual citizenship. In February 2021, this happened to a woman who had reportedly traveled to Syria on her Australian passport to join ISIS. Before this, she had lived most of her life in Australia, but was born in New Zealand and also had New Zealand citizenship. When the Turkish authorities alerted Australia’s and New Zealand’s governments that the woman had irregularly crossed the border between Syria and Turkey after fleeing a failed ISIS, Australia stripped her of her citizenship without a trial, causing a diplomatic spat between Australia and New Zealand (BBC 2021). Such cases do not only happen to individuals who are reportedly connected to ISIS. In 2017, South Africa stripped the citizenship of White supremacist Janusz Waluś, who was Polish by birth and also possessed Polish citizenship. Waluś murdered the anti-​ apartheid activist Chris Hani in 1993, was tried for his crime, and sentenced to prison for life. In addition, South Africa revoked his citizenship (Olewe 2020). The main difference between his case and those of the individuals connected to ISIS was that Waluś’s citizenship was stripped after a trial; the latter, without a trial. Begum was even forbidden

440   Julija Sardelić by the UK Supreme Court to return to the UK to challenge the revocation her citizenship (Casciani 2021). All these cases show how different factors besides ethnicity determine who will retain the “right to stay” and “right to return” and the modes in which these rights are lost by citizenship stripping. These factors can only be examined as intertwined in specific contextual power relations. The other question raised in relation to the citizenship social contract is that of deportation. A citizen cannot be deported from his or her own country. However, in his book on irregular citizenship, Peter Nyers (2019) discussed a number of possible scenarios under which an unwanted citizen could be deported from her own country, on one hand. On the other hand, in two 2020 High Court Cases Love, Thoms v. Commonwealth of Australia most of the justices decided that Indigenous Australians cannot be deported from Australian territory even in cases where they did not have citizenship (Arcioni and Thwaites 2020). Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms were born to Australian citizens, who belonged to Aboriginal communities. Love was born in Papua New Guinea (after it had gained independence); and Thoms, in New Zealand. Both moved to Australia at a young age and lived there as Australian residents but did not naturalize as citizens. Both were convicted of crimes and received sentences of longer than twelve months, and the government ordered their deportation to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. However, in February 2020, the Australian High Court decided that despite not having Australian citizenship, Love and Thoms could not be categorized as aliens because of their Indigenous connection to Australian territory. They were therefore deemed non-​ alien non-​citizen in Australia (Arcioni and Thwaites 2020), which created a new category within citizenship topologies. The High Court’s decision showed that the “right to stay” can be much broader than the right given only to a citizen and also that “alien” and “citizen” are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories: “The minority concluded that the constitutional status was determined by statutory citizenship, such that alien is the antonym of citizen. The majority position was that the relationship between statutory and constitutional membership is looser, such that one can be both a non-​citizen and a non-​alien, i.e., outside statutory membership but inside constitutional membership. The majority held that Aboriginal Australians belong to Australia in a way that demands and has constitutional recognition, that precludes their being aliens, and therefore precludes deportation” (Arcioni and Thwaites 2020, 69). The High Court identified Love and Thoms as being Aboriginal Australians based on three criteria: “self-​identification, recognition by the relevant Aboriginal community, and descent” (69). One could be an immigrant and a noncitizen, but still have the right to unconditional stay that had been previously understood as an unalienable right only of citizens. However, most of the High Court judges also concluded: “Members of the majority stated that Aboriginality was not an ineradicable status. It could be renounced, or potentially lost through prolonged residence outside of Australia” (69). Therefore, the outcome of these court cases might have been different, if the two individuals in questions had not been physically present in Australia at the time of the trial. The cases of Love and Thoms vs. the Commonwealth of Australia showed that in a colonial settler society, belonging to an Indigenous group (as long as one is present in

Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens    441 the territory) can redress citizenship as a colonial institution (O’Sullivan 2019). In this case, the precolonial connection to the territory was as important as citizenship in determining who had the right to stay. Although in a settler colonial society such a connection (not simply ethnicity) to territory can address previous injustices, denying the unalienable right to return or stay in the postimperial context in the United Kingdom denies the realities of colonialism. Besides the Shamima Begum case, other examples are found in the Windrush generation. Coming from the Caribbean as invited workers by the post–​World War II UK government, the British subjects defined by the 1948 UK Citizenship Law, had lived in the United Kingdom for decades when their position vis-​ à-​vis UK citizenship changed with the new 1981 Citizenship Law “turning citizens into migrants” (Bhambra 2018). The individuals from the Windrush Generation had traveled from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom not as international migrants but as citizens of the British Empire (which had different degrees of citizenship). After their status in the United Kingdom changed, the Windrush generation kept the “leave to remain in the UK” (Tonkiss 2018). However, as Yeo et al. (2019, 4) point out, the UK policymakers decided to take a “declaratory” approach, which meant “to confer residence rights on existing residents automatically, by operation of law.” Such approach had the advantage of ensuring that no eligible person lost their legal right of residence and that no one was rendered illegal. However, Yeo et al. (2019) add, it also meant that many affected residents did not acquire proof of their rights and, when later on were faced with the UK government’s racialized “hostile environment” policy and its stringent web of bureaucratic checks, they were unable to prove their lawful residence. This again raises questions about the underlying power relations according to which different countries operate to redefine some citizens as migrants and take away their right to stay. The Windrush scandal, as it is known, casts a shadow of doubt that citizenship necessarily offers protection against deportation and that rights are in general guaranteed to all citizens equally. However, framing this discussion only in terms of ethnicity is both too broad and too narrow. Although ethnic discrimination plays a role, it is a question of how states explicitly or implicitly imagine their citizenry that defines whose rights are guaranteed and whose are not. In the next section, I will make a similar argument related to statelessness status.

“The Right to Have Rights”? Statelessness, Minorities and (Re)Imagining Migration As noted earlier, just as there is an assumption that citizenship always comes with certain inalienable rights, there is an assumption that statelessness means a total lack of such rights. Furthermore, recent policy papers (UNHCR 2017) have connected statelessness to different minority positions, arguing that 75 percent of individuals who end

442   Julija Sardelić up stateless belong to ethnic or religious minority groups. The earlier UN Global Action Plan to End Statelessness (2014–​2024) also iterated this claim: Discrimination based on ethnicity, race, religion, language or disability is a recurrent cause of statelessness. In fact, the majority of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups. Instances of denial, loss and deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds leading to statelessness continue to occur in a range of countries. These include situations of mass deprivation of nationality on the grounds of ethnicity or race during recent decades. (UNHCR, 2014, 16)

I argue that such statements need to be unpacked. First, not every individual with an (ethnic) minority background is vulnerable to statelessness; only certain members of minority groups end up stateless. Second, not in all situations of statelessness are individuals deprived of all rights in what I call “total infringement of citizenship” (Sardelić 2021). The most extensively documented case of stateless minorities in Europe is that of so-​called Russian speakers in the Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. The 2019 UNHCR Global Trends of Forced Displacement documented that there are still 75,599 stateless individuals in Estonia and 216,851 in Latvia (UNHCR 2018, 74). Technically not citizens of any state, these noncitizens in Latvia and Estonia fit the statelessness definition of the 1954 Statelessness Convention. However, the report added this footnote to the statelessness numbers in Estonia: “Almost all people recorded as being stateless have permanent residence and enjoy more rights than foreseen in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons” (UNHCR 2018, 69). Regarding the number of stateless people in Latvia, the report noted: With respect to persons under UNHCR’s statelessness mandate, this figure includes persons of concern covered by two separate Latvian laws. 169 persons fall under the Republic of Latvia’s Law on Stateless Persons of 17 February 2004. 216,682 of the persons fall under Latvia’s 25 April 1995 Law on the Status of those Former USSR Citizens who are not Citizens of Latvia or Any Other State (‘Non-​citizens’). In the specific context of Latvia, the ‘Non-​citizens’ enjoy the right to reside in Latvia ex lege and a set of rights and obligations generally beyond the rights prescribed by the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, including protection from removal, and as such the “Non-​citizens” may currently be considered persons to whom the Convention does not apply in accordance with Article 1.2(ii). (UNHCR 2018, 77)

Looking at the history of how the statelessness of Russian-​speaking minorities (who belong to multitude of different post-​Soviet ethnicities, not only Russian) in Estonia and Latvia was constructed, we see certain parallels with the Windrush generation. As with the Windrush generation in the United Kingdom, these Russian-​speaking minorities did not arrive in Estonia and Latvia as international migrants. They were primarily

Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens    443 internal labor migrants inside the borders of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent states of Estonia and Latvia declared that the Soviet Union had occupied their territories, and that they were now simply reinstating their previous independence. This meant that anyone who was a citizen before June 16, 1940 (and their descendants), continued to be a citizen after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others had to go through a process of naturalization that included a Latvian and Estonian language test. Most of the internal migrants within the Soviet Union could speak the common lingua franca, Russian, but not the local languages, which excluded them from citizenship. In the radical political discourse, previous fellow citizens were now understood as illegal migrants: “During the autumn/​winter of 1991–​92, some Estonian politicians including a number of representatives within the congress of Estonia, argued that all those who entered Estonia after 16 June 1940, did so illegally and therefore have no automatic right to citizenship” (Sejmonov, Karzetskaja, and Ezhova 2015, 1). Nevertheless, in the following year, both Estonia and Latvia, also with the pressures of European Union conditionality (Kochenov and Dimitrovs 2016), developed a substantive set of rights for their noncitizens. Although they clearly lacked political rights, the noncitizens of Latvia and Estonia had a broad range of social and economic rights, as well as the right to return to the territory of both states and the right not to be deported. They also have the right to visa-​free travel to the Russian Federation, which other EU citizens do not possess (Ivļevs and King 2012, 2). Some scholars have claimed that we should not consider Baltic “noncitizens” to be stateless, given the broad scope of rights they enjoy (Kochenov and Dimitrovs 2016). Others argue that international policy concerning statelessness should focus more on providing rights for stateless populations than on eradicating statelessness (Swider 2017). The case of Estonia and Latvia shows that the link between statelessness and rightlessness is not as straightforward as may previously have been claimed. The discrimination that Russian-​speaking minorities still face in the two Baltic states is not simply based on ethnicity because the so-​called Russian speakers were not all of “Russian ethnicity,” but were Soviet internal migrants. This discrimination is based on the reconstructed narrative of belonging that retroactively positioned former fellow co-​ citizens as “illegal migrants.” As I have argued previously (Sardelić 2021), many individuals became stateless in a reinterpretation of state policies, which meant that they went from previously being citizens to being “illegal migrants.” This also happened in the case of Dominican citizens of Haitian descent. Haitians have been crossing the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic as labor migrants since the 1920s. Even when the border crossing was not recorded, their children born in the Dominican Republic had an automatic right to Dominican citizenship based on the jus soli principle. In 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic decided that the 1929 Citizenship Act (and its jus soli principle) does not apply to people who were born in the Dominican Republic while “in transit” (Belton 2015; Hayes de Kalaf 2019), which meant that around 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactively lost their citizenship with its accompanying

444   Julija Sardelić rights (IACHR 2015, 21). In another postcolonial context, in Myanmar, after the re-​ enactment of the 1982 Citizenship Law, Rohingya, who were initially considered to be one of the national races, were reinterpreted as “irregular migrants” from Bangladesh (Parashar and Alam 2018). It was not simply because of the legislation that the Rohingya minority was no longer recognized as part of Myanmar. It was rather the direct action of the government officials who refused to register Rohingya as citizens that made them stateless (Kyaw 2017; Cheesman 2017). In both cases, the states made these populations stateless and took away the rights they would previously have had in their territories. While the total infringement of citizenship was based on racial discrimination, there were also other factors that made revocation of citizenship possible. That is the shifting in understanding of what legal statuses these minorities possess. On the other side of the statelessness spectrum, we have occurrences of statelessness where states recognize neither citizen nor stateless status, and hence do not accord the individuals who are in this limbo protections that would arise from either of these statuses. However, even when states do not accord rights, individuals faced with “everyday statelessness” (Sigona 2015) are not merely passive observers but claim rights through alternative channels that circumvent the state. Many Romani minorities in Italy (Sigona 2015) and in the former Yugoslav states (Sardelić 2015) have been caught in the circle of so-​called administrative statelessness (Owen 2018), meaning that their statelessness came about from the lack of documents proving either their citizenship or statelessness and complicated statelessness determination procedures. However, not all Roma ended up stateless in both contexts. The Romani population in Italy has been diverse, including individuals (1) who have Italian citizenship, (2) who have fled to Italy because of the wars in Yugoslavia, and (3) who possess the EU citizenship of another member state, notably Romania (Sigona 2015, 276). It is predominantly the descendants of Romani forced migrants from the conflict-​ridden Yugoslavia who are faced with “everyday statelessness” in Italy, especially those whose identity documents were destroyed at register offices in Yugoslavia during the war. However, as Sigona (2015) showed, stateless individuals in Italy actively respond to their position and claim rights through other non-​state channels, for example, different social or charitable networks. Similarly, as in Italy, a number of Romani individuals ended up as unrecognized stateless people after the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia (Sardelić 2015). Ethnic discrimination played a role in who ended up as stateless in the former Yugoslav states, but there were also other factors that contributed to it. After the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the newly established states established the legal continuity of citizenship: If a person had republican citizenship of one Yugoslav republic, they would automatically have citizenship in a newly established state. However, this was not as clear for individuals who crossed the internal Yugoslav borders and had a republican citizenship of one state but lived in another. Furthermore, Roma who ended up stateless had myriad other legal statuses: In some cases, they were classified as refugees, and in others as internally displaced people. The lack of documents that would prove citizenship was also connected to their limited access to rights such as the right to education, employment, and healthcare. However, UNHCR in Bosnia noted practices that stateless Roma used

Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens    445 to circumvent their hindered access to rights. For example, women who, due to their statelessness status, could not formally access healthcare would borrow healthcare cards from other women: This would give them access to the healthcare system the state did allow them to access (Sardelić 2017).

Conclusion Applying the lens of superdiversity to the dichotomy of citizenship and statelessness can reveal how neither citizenship nor statelessness are uniform legal statuses, but myriad positionalities with different sets of rights ascribed to them or taken away from them. The cases discussed in this chapter show that looking at the dissociation of rights from citizenship and also statelessness cannot be only attributed to ethnic discrimination, as has previously been the predominant explanation. We also need to consider other factors that contribute to this dissociation. These factors can be contemplated as a complex and multilayered superdiverse reality based on state-​subject power relations interacting with different socioeconomic and historical factors. The chapter also showed that statelessness does not necessarily go hand in hand with rightlessness, but again, represents myriad positionalities. In some cases, states grant a broad scope of rights to stateless people in their territory; in others, states diminish all rights and create “total infringement of citizenship” (Sardelić 2021, 102).

Note 1. In everyday language, nationality and citizenship are used interchangeably. This chapter acknowledges that the scholarly literature shows that there are nuances in the meanings of citizenship and nationality (see Isin 2012). Exploring these nuances is, however, beyond scope of this chapter. Following Isin’s understanding (2012) of the difference between nationality and citizenship, I opt to use citizenship as the main term because this decouples it from the implications of a nation as its foundation. However, many of the primary documents that I refer to use the term nationality instead of citizenship. Without debating why it should or shouldn’t be the case, I will use nationality as a synonym for citizenship in those cases.

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Chapter 30

Di versit y M ac h i ne s Urban Popular Economies and Territories of Operation AbdouMaliq Simone

Introduction: Dispersed Urban Life Across many massive urban regions of the Global South there has been a marked shift in both the spatial positioning and sociopolitical characteristics of what I have a called an urban majority (Simone and Rao 2012). Although it roughly corresponds to the intertwining of poor, working, and lower-​middle-​class residents, the term referred less to specific identities than to a mathematics of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation, or proliferate as momentary occupancies in short-​lived situations, making up a kind of algorithmic process. Such a process continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. These correspond to the different manifestations of superdiversity (Meissner and Vertovec 2015), which emphasizes looking beyond social composition to composing practices. I take this up here as a matter of diversity machines that instrumentalize multiplying points of intersection among people, materials, and places. Here, diversity, far from simply reflecting the characteristics of urban social fields, becomes a key element in the production of urban economies for the majority. Here, different statuses of labor, new and recycled materials, diverging policies and legalities, as well as forms of care and social reproduction, are brought together in varying proportions to generate multiple forms of work and markets. The urban majority was never a static entity, never a class-​in-​the-​making, never so much a sociological or political entity as a manifestation of the possibilities and affordances urbanization “lends” to inhabitants bearing the structural onus of having to largely make “their own way” in urban life. It pointed to a situation where, even when states provided the basic conditions for livelihood and residence—​land, shelter, public

450   AbdouMaliq Simone employment, support for private enterprise—​these conditions were usually insufficient for making a life worth living. While the poor, working, and lower middle classes had different kinds of access to resources and opportunities, each had to take matters into their own hands in such a way that numerous arrangements had to be made to cross class divides in order for everyone to sustain and reproduce viable livelihoods. It is these processes and arrangements, then, that made up our notion of the urban majority. Today, the consolidation of such practices within discernable administrative districts or long-​honed neighborhoods is waning because many residents, particularly those with either some savings or access to capital, move toward the urban peripheries, looking to acquire fungible assets and more affordable everyday life amenities. Former residencies in urban cores and near-​suburbs have been subjected to maximized land-​ valuation strategies, forced displacement, and the heightened labor intensity of managing local social conditions. While urban life in general has been subjected to greater degrees of individualization and self-​responsibility, chipping away at the collective efforts that have characterized the ways of doing things for urban majorities, there is still the need to find ways for residents to operate in concert. The strategies of accumulation, livelihood, and household organization may have grown more particular, but reliance on steady, waged work has not expanded sufficiently to obviate the need for everyday collective action. Here, the resonance with superdiversity is particularly important because collective action increasingly depends on a coordination and melding of different agendas, actors, and ways of doing things. Urban majorities have also been subject to more intense levels of extraction. The very cooperativeness of social relations, the skill making and repairing things, the freewheeling give and take among different kinds of actors all become resources for states and other institutions that are attempting to cut costs, demonstrate efficiency and smartness, shed their responsibility to guarantee social welfare, and, in general, to find ways to profit from creativities from below (Gago 2017). As the development priorities of urban cores emphasize logistical hubs, transport relays, financial and service centers, and upscale leisure and consumption, skewed heavily on inward foreign investment, majority populations find themselves increasingly displaceable, if not expendable, and the objects through which states and other regulatory apparatuses demonstrate their capacity to control, measure, and contain (Garmany and Richmond 2020; Ortega 2020). Connecting to these logistical apparatuses, Meissner’s (2017) work on the construction of legal diversities emphasizes how migration control attempts to order the dispositions of complex phenomena seemingly unamenable to predictable outcomes. The argument I seek to make here concerns the ways in which diversity as a resource is constructed by urban popular economies as a means of constituting possibilities of livelihood and social reproduction in the interstices of straddling apparently contradictory logics of accumulation (Saiag 2011, 2020). Not outside capitalist logics, not beyond the reach of extractivism, not inside any coherent frameworks of tradition or even makeshift improvisation, urban majorities, nevertheless, generate spaces of relative autonomy by diversifying the “points of contact” where disparate logics intersect (Sarria Icaza and Tiriba 2006; Gaiger 2019). As such, popular economies come to embody

Diversity Machines   451 diversity, not only through a plurality of different identities and practices, but by consistently alternating the proportionalities of the structural forces with which they contend (Tassi et al. 2012; Amougou 2018). As residents find themselves distributing their households across multiple geographies within urban regions, increasingly hedging their bets on how to deploy their available income and maximizing their circulation through different forms of livelihood across different parts of the city, their rootedness in particular places becomes more tentative; they seek to configure territories of operation through which they not only move and attempt to sustain themselves, but where forms of affiliation and cooperation take shape and particular statuses, identities, and functions are aligned in ways that do not line up with the sense of these neighborhoods or communities (Caldeira 2017; Simone 2020). From the outset, the superdiversity literature has pointed to the “multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how, and with whom people live” (Vertovec 2007, 1025). In other words, a terrain of being in common, of being connected in the pursuit of livelihood, social support, mutual care, and shared activity is forged across different places but maintains a sense of felt coherence. The critical aspect of putting together such territories is that it entails a multiplication of positions through which various lines of articulation are attempted (Clare 2019). It is not just that common membership in a church or mosque may draw people from various geographies and walks of life; rather, the church acts as a locus to connect other aspects of the lives of its members, drawing cross-​cutting connections with unions, women’s groupings, savings clubs, or recreation centers—​where each entity acts as a crossroads for the multiple memberships and affiliations of the participants in these entities. The urban popular economy is thus a social economy of articulation—​of ways in which the multiple positions that any household might have are drawn together in varying degrees of mutual implication. Those who sell household goods in one line of a market may join a common church also attended by union members whose work is cleaning municipal offices, who, in turn, order supplies from this market line, which is also involved in a cooperative housing savings group that is sponsored by still another church somewhere else, and so forth.

On Territories of Operation In cities and urban regions across the world various forms of collective organization have shaped particular territories of operation. In other words, urban majorities across the disparate terrains of the Global South have used specific locations, infrastructures, histories, and material and social resources to carve out spaces that are supportive of their values and aspirations for the promise of a better life (Benjamin 2008; Chattopadhyay 2012; Lombard 2014; Lindell 2019). These territories are platforms of not only survival but also shared imaginations of justice, equanimity, and flourishing

452   AbdouMaliq Simone (Escobar 2016). All territories are forged from negotiations, practices, and instruments that are always problematic, sometimes contradictory, and which reflect a politics that entails messy compromises, settlements, and unequal distributions of power. No matter the aspiration, no matter the integrity of the collective spirit, urban matters are complicated mixtures of the discrepant (Halvorsen 2019). What I then call urban popular economies are particular manifestations of these mixtures. They are efforts on the part of collectives to consolidate lives they deem worth living according to common sentiments of fairness and egalitarian possibility, but which also require the organization of effort, production, and allocation that may not always embody these sentiments. Territories of operation are political, economic, technical, infrastructural, and social constructions that are not seamless, that entail many different kinds of frictions and settlements, but aim for continuous transformation. How to work; how to organize living spaces; how to constitute households; how to treat neighbors and strangers; how to value people’s time and initiatives; how to use, share, and navigate everyday spaces; how to confront new forms of value extraction—​these are all aspects of the consideration of popular economy as it maintains the basic underpinnings of the territory in which these considerations and practices take place (Ciccariello-​Maher 2013; Senorans 2020). Residents of cities across the Global South live in environments that are replete with different land statuses; regulatory frameworks; histories of economic specialization; and repositories of cultural memory, behavioral styles, and social arrangements. Urban popular economies, as means of configuring territories of operation, entail how the various components of an “archive” are pieced together, interrelated, to produce specific dispositions of mobility, access to resources, and opportunities. It is a move toward an expanded diversification of the possibilities of accumulation, social reproduction, and livelihood formation based on a concerted “looking out for diversities” incumbent upon multiplying the points of contact on the part of individuals and households (Lemaître and Helmsing 2012; Nelms 2015; Gago 2018). Instead of social relations based primarily on establishing what persons have in common, this is supplemented by attention to the differences to highlight that the assumptions any given individual and household might make about the factors, rules, and actors that play a dominant role in determining their conditions may be significantly different for others. Taking these differences into consideration might then amplify the overarching diversity of the things, forces, institutions, regulations, and places lending shape to the city; and finding ways to interrelate such discrepancies might produce different everyday life scenarios (Le Polain and Nyssens 2013; Dürr and Müller 2019; Fernández-​Álvarez, and María Inés. 2020). This doesn’t mean that macrostructural forces of law, investment, government policies, and social inclinations do not play an overarching role in shaping everyday life in urban regions. But consider the ways in which these regions are multiply exposed to a wider range of financial, logistical, and cultural flows at a global scale and an intensified particularization of individual sentiment and practice from below. As such, on built environments, spatial arrangements, and economic and administrative functions

Diversity Machines   453 must mediate and provisionally resolve a multiplicity of often contradictory or, at least, not easily synthesizable forces from both above and below. Because urban regulatory environments are replete with exceptions, loopholes, and temporal qualifications, popular economies are aimed at straddling the divide between apparent compliance with or subsumption under normative frameworks of operation and, at the same time, standing aside and reserving something not quite “on the books.” For example, the vast networks of textile production in Jakarta on the one hand reflect the decentralization of large-​scale factory production into hundreds of small units, each working on aa specific aspect of clothing production—​from cutting, patterning, sewing, stitching, sewing on buttons, designing—​all vertically integrated into a few large corporate structures. But a substantial lateral chain of production and marketing from these same units has also been developed over time through intersecting memberships in religious and women’s associations, impromptu popular markets, unions in the ports, and eating places where truckers congregate. These have all in their own ways paid attention to how various loopholes, tenancies, friendship networks, land statuses, and ethnicities could be capitalized on, not only to supplement the incomes of the players involved, but also to create an infrastructure of transactions that can be mobilized to influence political authorities, invest in affordable housing, and improve urban services. The struggle for improved livelihoods and quality of life is thus a struggle to put together territories in which those lives might operate. States have long attempted to define those territories—​from deciding the status of and who has access to land, housing, and work to the responsibilities and rights of citizens to a wide range of regulatory frameworks dictating where and how people reside and work. At the same time, states have been party to implicit social compacts that allow majority “migrant” populations to inhabit cities, largely fending for themselves in ways that depended on the circumventing legalities and the ambiguities of regulatory systems, so long as they did not constitute an existential political threat—​occasional riots, incivility allowed. These majority populations have provided essential goods and services to the larger city—​a capacity that derives from their own figuring and ways of doing things. Here, Suzanne Hall’s work on the reciprocal formations of urban streets and diasporic economies in the United Kingdom demonstrates the inventiveness of migrant economies, as well as the ways in which the Southern urban majorities exceed their framing through only geographic considerations (Hall 2021). Many facets of this tacit compact were being dissolved prior to the pandemic—​as regimes demonstrate their creditworthiness by clearing spaces of unruly populations thought to deter investment in the logistical infrastructures that capitalize on interconnections of land and productive capacity at regional and global levels—​that is, transport hubs and networks, storage and port facilities, export processing zones, administrative districts, and high-​end zones of elite and internationalized consumption. What will likely emerge is an acceleration of this process in the name of securing health, even as economic hardships may reinforce the need for a broad range of popular economic practices.

454   AbdouMaliq Simone

Dimensions of the Struggle for Territory A key question, then, centers on the nature of the struggles for territory that will ensue in efforts to de-​densify designated insalubrious spaces, to further displace majority populations to the peripheries of urban regions, disinvest from the social welfare of urban core poor and working-​class populations, to racialize those who deserve recognition and support. How will certain spaces and practices be deemed insalubrious and thus delegitimated? In all the work of ordering, cleaning, cooking, caring, and policing that will have to take place for middle class and elite consumption, and also undoubtedly be dangerous in viral terms, what justifications will be made to control popular processes that rely on similar kinds of labor? Within the ambit of popular economies there already are apparent multiple trajectories through which these questions are being addressed. In other words, the question is how urban popular economy manifests itself through different problematics and facets of urban life. An economy contingent on the intentional production and deployment of diversity must, in turn, be adept at managing the diverse ramifications such deployment generates.

Composing a Commons If diversification—​of contacts, materials, and dispositions—​is key to the forging of territories of operation, what nevertheless remain are questions of the glue that holds diverse actors together in such pursuits. If an underlying ethos of popular economy, at its most minimal conceptualization, concerns who “we” understand ourselves to be in common, what kinds of work are entailed in substantiating that “we”; how do the dynamics of work—​its compositions, power arrangements, forms of valuation—​shape particular instantiations of that collective “we?” How are specific struggles for the recognition of particular collectivities expressions of collectivity itself; that is, is it possible to differentiate the coherence of the collective from the struggles—​the political effort—​necessary to establish it? Here, examples from Latin America and Argentina may prove useful in that they point, not to some overarching social movement that collapses the possibilities of a collective “we,” but in the alternating expressions of a multiplicity of formations at different times (Castronovo 2018, 2019; Felder and Patroni 2018; Filho et al. 2018). Sometimes, issues that are particularly pertinent to migrants will be at the fore—​questions of access to basic rights related to residency or exploitation. At other times, various cultural organizations will be assembled to express the concerns of indigeneity and the preservation of national heritage. Such is the case in Acosta Garcia’s work in Guadalajara (2019, and this volume), where, in what he calls “discreet diversity,” long-​standing configurations are drawn on in order to consolidate political sentiment and action. At other moments,

Diversity Machines   455 members of the wide popular-​education sector will demonstrate to advance their claims for extending legitimacy and resources to educational institutions that go beyond recognized schooling; and at still other times, unions of popular economy workers themselves, from different sectors and trades, use the performance of public demonstration itself to call the unions into being. Here, multiple memberships cross these different formations, drawing on the different roles and positions individuals play, in order to give voice to territories that are essentially multifaceted, where individuals are simultaneously mothers, fathers, workers, teachers, students, and members of specific religious, racial, and ethnic groups. This is fundamentally about how to speak in many different names, to operate under many different auspices as a means of creating a sufficient space for what it means to be an urban resident.

Domestic Territories If territories are not simply geographical or administrative, but reflect the coordinated instrumentalities of care—​who we are caring for and where—​is the household the only emplacement of care? How can care be distributed across more dispersed social arrangements? How is it that in cities, which generate a wide range of infrastructures of care, living arrangements, and modalities of social reproduction sometimes fall back on models of heteronormative households and extended kinship systems during crises, such as the recent pandemic? The 2020 Covid-​19 pandemic has reiterated the ways in many districts of the urban South, far from functioning as “organic communities,” are rather provisional arrangements of different fragments of extended families, invented kin, groups of workers in a common industry or collections of short-​term boarders. There is certainly nothing new in this unruliness and the often haphazard and transgressive ways through which household “units” are forged. It is rather the persistence of the modernist dream that imaginarily segments populations into cohesive familial, usually heteronormative units and that mistakes the composition on the ground (Hillenkamp 2015). This is not to deny the persistence and salience of such familial units; it is only to point out that they do not embody a “majority.” That said, it is important to always recognize the ongoing and difficult roles women play in the maintenance of households and the process of social reproduction (Hill 2010). The deployment of lockdown rules has taken a particularly high toll on women, from massive increases in domestic abuse to the toxic physical and psychological conditions they experience because they are largely in charge of keeping children and older persons at home. In many urban settings, limited household savings means that many households are dissolved as members retreat back to other places of origin—​as witnessed by the mass fugitivity of low-​paid industrial and service workers in India. Both the common and differentiated ways in which different elements of the urban majority have experienced the pandemic and ramifying economic and social challenges

456   AbdouMaliq Simone disentangles many mutual arrangements and reveals a broad range of fragilities that cannot be compensated by the collaborative actions of the majority itself. Particularly important here is how attention to the political dimension of reproductive labor is producing/​disputing a vocabulary about “essential” work (Verschuur et al. 2020). As Because violence remains a critical grammar in the functioning of domestic territories, it is important to understand what is relegated simply a domestic violence as a form of political violence, thus opening up the “domestic” onto a wider range of considerations. These issues are taken up by Paolo Boccagni and Brenda Yeoh in this volume.

Popular Institutions Collective efforts that are based on diverse entities, practices, and actors, which reciprocally fold each other into their own logics, face challenges with respect to the expectation on the part of collectives that these efforts might institutionalize their collaborations over the long run. The question is how such collaboration might endure with or without the ambit of institutions that would serve to rationalize the details of reciprocity and mutual responsibility. Given the provisional character of self-​ organization, even in long-​term initiatives, what would constitute potentially viable infrastructures for institutionalizing emergent popular collective efforts? If collectives are created through struggle and the provision of care, and, if their modalities of operation are often provisional because of how they are situated in larger contexts of power, what are the strategic practices and political economic consideration necessary to consolidate collective efforts beyond preoccupation with their own inventiveness and precarity? (Azzelini 2016). While social movements remain mobilized to address specific matters of concern—​ around issues of policing and economic precarity, for example—​the various organizational manifestations of urban popular economy have tended more to prefigure possible modes of institutionalization, as if in prolonged rehearsals rather than consolidation (Larrabure 2013; Gaiger 2019). In many respects, this reflects the assessment of many activists, workers, entrepreneurs, and educators that the position of popular economy as an interlocutor among capitalist and noncapitalist modes of accumulation, as a locus of strategic unsettlement, means that its aim is to simultaneously carve out spaces of autonomous functioning, which will allow for the self-​valorization of inventive social collaborations and encroach on the functioning of existing institutions. Here, the dual intent means that though popular economies will produce their own unions, schools, housing cooperatives, and factories, they will also act as platforms to intrude upon various aspects of the formal economy and governance. As such, the institutional forms of these autonomies are always being recalibrated to deal with new situations, as well as to build in sufficient flexibility to participate in changing networked arrangements among specific place-​based organizations, work sectors, civil society organizations, and local and municipal governments (Hull and James 2012; Ruggeri and Vieta 2015; Vieta 2018).

Diversity Machines   457

Technologies of Urban Governance During the pandemic, states have found new legitimation, even urgency, to further develop and deploy tools of surveillance and registration. In cities with tightly structured mechanisms of registration at local and national levels, the suite of structural and population shifts has, over the years, revealed significant holes in these apparatuses of accountability. Although the rights and benefits of citizenship were frequently predicated on registration, many residents preferred to exist without these rights and benefits as a means of inserting themselves into spaces while minimizing accountability. The pandemic has clearly altered this situation by making access to tenure, services, and rights contingent on continuously updated accountability. New criteria of eligibility are likely to be rolled out, and already individuals and districts in many cities are being measured and recorded according to their degree of compliance with state-​mandated restrictions. Although health has long been a key instrument used to judge the worthiness of particular residents and residential situations, and thus their eligibility for specific rights of emplacement and decision-​making, the algorithmic logics that currently inform technical assessment instruments emphasize the interoperability of multiple data sets and are thus capable of assigning more specific valuations to individual and household behaviors, measuring prospective vulnerabilities to a host of situations, and placing additional onus on individuated protocols of “normative performance” (Bigo et al. 2020; Leese 2020). Decisions, questions of value, negotiations about valuable demeanors and practices, which were the purviews of everyday, face-​to-​face social negotiations, are increasingly becoming matters of statistically mediated probabilities and individual “scores” derived from the continuous running of different correlations among variables. For example, migration, instead of reflecting a constantly oscillating and autonomous process of difference-​making, is increasingly marketized according to corporate logics about which differentiations count (Taylor and Meissner 2020). Pandemic conditions may have necessitated the formation of new social solidarities, but these arrangements then intersect with an enlarged mode of governmentality based on disattending to and, at work, actively fragmenting these very solidarities. Within the enhanced visibilities that exigencies for surveillance bring, it is reasonable to anticipate an enlarged stratum of underground operations as subaltern experimentation attempts to circumvent detection, opening up a new and potentially more dangerous modality of popular economy. Here, the substantially reduced operating budgets of states and civil sectors may curtail the speed and breadth of the spatial restructuring that was underway before the pandemic set in. But states, developers, and investors will also be financially compelled, given present exposures, debt financing, and contractual commitments, to keep a certain momentum going. Because states have proven their creditworthiness in part through a highly visible and punitive disciplining of urban majority populations—​bringing larger numbers into formal credit systems and demonstrating the ability to shift populations around—​local urban “growth coalitions” may become more brutal in attempts to press

458   AbdouMaliq Simone their authority, even when they have little capacity to develop and act on any long-​range plans (Tadiar 2022). All of these moves toward greater formalization, calculation, and surveillance significantly affect the kinds of diversities that popular economy draws on to produce, in turn, a diversity of dispositions for livelihood creation and social reproduction. Even if a diversity of land statuses, licensing procedures, policing apparatuses, and applications of rules persist, governments’ efforts to make these diversities interoperable—​interrelatable within a single logic of evaluation—​as part of their legitimate ambit of rule may tend to criminalize popular economies and drive them underground.

The Multiplication of Temporalities The material economies of urban life are often assumed to adhere to linear trajectories of progressive development—​that is, of continuous improvement and stability. But if provisioning—​food, water, sanitation, housing—​is largely autogenerated and makeshift, the temporalities of material form oscillate, reverse, and are subject to ambiguous dispositions of whether they “work” or not. How, then, does popular economy intersect with temporalities where outcomes are not always subject to clear demonstrations of accumulation or dispossession, where the nature of the social demand wavers between inclusion in normative structures of well-​being and exemption from demonstrations of normative well-​being. How do the popular ecologies in those urban spaces produce different notions of social wealth (Fernández Álvarez 2018)? Perhaps one of the clearest attainments of popular economies is the way it has fostered and transmitted particular ideas and ethics about what constitutes a life worth living. By emphasizing and materializing the importance of diversity as a resource—​ the ways in which differentially positioned residents facing various difficulties and opportunities offer something concrete to the aspirations and practices of individuals and households—​it has enabled residents to discover that they are more than they had thought they were. They can discover themselves as manifesting a wide range of roles that an expanding set of networked relationships avails them of. What ensues are more textured forms of solidarity, which exceed merely the enhanced tolerance of difference to become a familiar practice of making those differences count for something, both in terms of the individual’s personal objectives and in the sense of instilling the confidence that what one does is a potential resource for others (Stavrides 2014; Calvo et al. 2020). Intensely precarious situations may remain; economies may contract, plunging wage levels and job security; governments may become more restrictive and heavy-​handed, yet popular economies have become continuous rehearsals for both resilience and struggle. Residents not only dance around deleterious conditions or become tactful recipients of impositions but find ways to continuously push back and work the system, while remaining cognizant of the limited horizons and the proliferating dependencies on technologies of rule.

Diversity Machines   459

Land as an Active Space Popular economies have enabled thinking about land beyond its status as terra firma, property, or financial asset. Rather, land is the materialization of the settling of heterogeneous inhabitants, spatial linkages, surplus value, and tenure (Ghertner 2020). It raises the question about how it might it be possible to value urban land in a different way? How different operative notions of property are at stake? What kind of entanglements with transnational dynamics are reshaping the politics of land? As emphasized throughout this chapter, the proliferation of diversities and the elaboration of infrastructures of alternative material articulation seem to be a key defining feature of popular economies. This can be seen in the challenges presented by a multiplicity of land tenures, which continue to constitute the underpinning logic of so-​called informal land markets, and entail shifting relationships between the legal and illegal, histories of dispossession and infrastructural reorganization, variegated forms of production and reproduction, shifting articulations with emergent and increasingly mobile class, racial, and gendered populations, as well as new forms of both extractivism and autoconstruction (Herlambang et al. 2019; Wiig and Silver 2019). Again, the domain of popular economy is precisely located in the interstices of contradictions and antagonisms that have no clear disposition, are always being worked out, as the tensions among these disparate features complicate what is meant by dispossession and commodification (Byrd et al. 2018; Valdivia 2018). Here, too, the unfolding of inhabitation as it relates to how and under what conditions concrete settlements are availed to different segments of majority populations are embedded in different kinds of collective relations, which necessitate careful consideration of what is meant by “security” of tenure and access to “housing.” While tenure might operate as a crystallization of a particular sociality, the specificities of tenure may often occlude how collective spaces of operation are constituted and protected (Steel et al. 2017). Instead of regarding the primacy of land politics as a relationship between household and territory, land is often lived as a collective space, conjoining different temporalities, despite the regimes of titling and property. Despite the clear and debilitative impact of more comprehensive forms of land surveyance, registration, regulation, and appropriation, these coexist with widespread and largely tacit forms of claim-​making and use that generate their own economies, precisely because the modalities of everyday exchange, reproduction, and sociality go beyond the household form, developing their own particular financial underpinnings and communicational circuits. Here, again, “working the diversities” generates its own diverse dispositions.

Conclusion Popular economies thus point to specific temporalities and rhythms that are expressed spatially through the changing dispositions of livelihood and territories of care. They

460   AbdouMaliq Simone are in a sense “diversity-​machines.” States and corporate apparatuses continue to colonize specific territories, settle questions as to who is eligible to inhabit what kinds of spaces and under what conditions, and to efface the traces of lower-​and working-​class majorities. But these efforts in large part remain unsettled. They remain unsettled in light of the tensions between visibility and invisibility—​that is, the imposition of colonial sensibilities that attribute the apparent absence of viable life from specific places as a means to “develop” them, the ongoing alternation between displacement and emplacement, as majorities find new vehicles to become visible in unprecedented ways, while restituting long-​honed practices and institutions of care through newly invented formats. Whatever then the predominant means of conceptualizing and appropriating space, these oscillations generate open-​ended forms that support and think specific places in different ways. Again, relations of visibility and invisibility are key. For, rendering visible the capacities and resourcefulness of the once invisible, the urban majority, threatens to make them responsible for their survival, which further marginalizes their presence, as it also constitutes an important opportunity of self-​valorization. Of becoming something specific, but not clearly translatable in any specific way; of becoming something more than they have recognized themselves to be.

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Chapter 31

Supe rdiversit y i n Set t l e r So ciet i e s Toward a Decolonial Superdiversity Paul Spoonley

Introduction One of the challenges of deploying superdiversity across multiple situations and historical trajectories is its transferability and applicability to these varying sites, ranging from the micro to the state (cf. Grillo, this volume). This chapter is primarily concerned with the production and reproduction of diversity in particular “nation-​states.” It explores the issues and challenges of applying a superdiversity lens to a group of settler states that (1) share a history of British colonization and its ongoing effects; (2) are home to a significant indigenous community, or nation, that occupied the territory prior to colonization; and (3) have contemporary regimes of migrant attraction and settlement as part of their project of modern “nation-​state” building.1 The states used to explore the question of applicability are Aotearoa/​New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Those who have been intimately involved in decolonization and decoloniality research would argue that superdiversity has been too influenced or committed to elements of modernity and universality that make it inappropriate when it comes to non-​Western contexts or to Western metropolitan contexts that involve the vestiges of colonial power relations, racialized constructions of identity, and marginalized immigrant-​descent or indigenous populations. Arising out of decolonization politics and conceptualizations, generally, and in relation to more appropriate forms of diversity recognition, questions of inclusion and social justice, and the particular rights and identities of the indigenous peoples of these particular states, there are elements that need to be addressed if superdiversity is to be used as a sensitizing and persuasive approach. The criticisms that have been voiced by those who speak from within the decoloniality tradition (here I have focused on writers from Southern theory and decoloniality) have

466   Paul Spoonley a point. I want to argue that a superdiversity approach can and should address the concerns raised. The historical trajectory of particular states, combined with the nature of contemporary capital accumulation and governance, produce different complexions and complex mixes of (super)diversity. It is critical to test whether superdiversity—​ here used as a broad description to signal the “increasing and intensifying complexities in social dynamics and configurations at neighbourhood, city, national and global levels” (Vertovec 2019, 135)—​has utility in different political and economic contexts, and to make allowances to ensure that elements are recognized and incorporated to expand this utility. The argument here is that a superdiversity lens is relevant to states experiencing debates about decolonization, in this case, certain settler states, but that this requires the explicit recognition of some key dynamics and the coproduction of appropriate conceptual, methodological, and political and policy frameworks. Ultimately, and to paraphrase Walter Mignolo (2011; he used the phrase in relation to cosmopolitanism), it is argued that it is possible to develop a “decolonial superdiversity,” one that considers imperial and colonial dynamics and provides an approach to superdiversity that reads into it the effects and possibilities associated with the colonization of territories and people.

Settler Colonialism A word about settler societies and what is—​and is not—​being addressed here. Settler societies and the colonialism that produced them encompass a wide range of formations and settings because European expansionism imposed new forms of colonization and exploitation on the non-​Western world, especially in a range of distinct forms since the 1500s. As Quijano (2007) notes, this “Eurocentered colonialism” established new forms of domination and resource control, including some that exploited and marginalized colonized peoples, and was continued through Western imperialism. There is a considerable literature on the nature and extent of settler colonialism, because interest in the subject has enjoyed something of a revival in recent decades (see Veracini [2007] for a review), especially given the debates about the nature and impacts of decolonization and postcolonialism on contemporary societies.2 The focus here is on the “colonies of settlement where a coherent cluster of British legal traditions was introduced” to establish “territorialized sovereign political order” (Veracini 2007), where the settlers were largely British (and French in the case of Canada), and where an indigenous population was colonized and marginalized, and a “nation-​state” was established via the ongoing arrival of European immigrants (see Spoonley 2015).3 This inevitably involves different historical stages and trajectories, but the three countries considered here all have a broadly similar trajectory, beginning with initial British (and French) colonization and indigenous dispossession, accompanied by racialized and discriminatory immigration policies—​the exclusion of “unacceptable others”—​that lasted well into the twentieth century and are ongoing

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    467 in many respects. The stages and components are more complex than is suggested here. Over the last fifty years, all three societies have expanded the definition of immigrant “acceptability” and experimented with new forms of diversity management and recognition. A new stage of settler society emerged in the second half of the twentieth century featuring explicit regimes of immigrant recruitment and approval (a “pick and choose” approach) that added considerably to societal diversity. This new phase included a range of new immigrant source countries or regions and a range of new visa categories (typically economically oriented and influenced by neoliberal politics). The result was that new legal and residency and citizenship categories emerged, along with new settlement trajectories and outcomes, some much more positive in outcome than others, and new management structures and approaches, including official policies of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, in these settings, “settler colonialism has been remarkably resistant to decolonisation” (Veracini 2007). This applies as much to the position faced by indigenous peoples and nations as to certain ethnic minority and immigrant groups. As Vertovec (2019, 126) notes in relation to superdiversity generally, this has contributed to “new patterns of inequality and prejudice . .‌., new forms of segregation, new experiences of space and ‘contact,’ new forms of cosmopolitanism and creolization.” The question considered here is how superdiversity contributes to an understanding of the societal and geographical particularities of the settler colonialism of certain states.

Decoloniality and the Critique of Superdiversity Superdiversity is among the latest theories of diaspora cultural identities from the Global North inspired by the failures and limitations of multiculturalist social policies of the twentieth century. —​Ndhlovu (2016, 28).

The question that concludes the previous section is prompted, in part, by the critiques of superdiversity offered by those who are interested in Southern theory and decoloniality (see Ndhlovu 2016). Decoloniality derives from the earlier work by activists and writers such as Fanon (1961) and Césaire (1956) and, more recently, by the work on coloniality (as the “invisible and constitutive side of modernity”; Mignolo 2007) by writers such as Quijano (see Salgado, Garcia-​Bravo and Benzi 2021) from the 1980s. As Mignolo (2007) notes: The concept of coloniality has opened up the re-​construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages—​. .‌. [and the] project of “desprendimiento” [cf. Quijano], of de-​coloniality

468   Paul Spoonley [or] the de-​ colonization of knowledge, of being—​ and consequently of political theory and political economy . .‌ . [This] introduces a fracture with both the Eurocentered project of post-​modernity and the project of post-​coloniality . .‌. [in order] to foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics.

The concern is that superdiversity as an approach imposes a Western worldview of identities that draws on discourses of universalism, modernity, and globalization (Ndhlovu 2016). Conversely, it is argued that there is too little acknowledgment of non-​Western modernities or coloniality. In particular, Ndhlovu (20016, 28) describes superdiversity as a “theory” that “tends to homogenize cultural and social groups and [results] in the uncritical embrace of elitist neoliberal conceptualizations of culture and identity.”4 It is argued that there is a tendency to romanticize difference and to underplay (or ignore) social and economic asymmetry and systems of power that maintain various forms of oppression, including those that are colonial in origin (Aptekar 2017). What is needed, argue those who advocate for Southern theory, is that the Global South and its systems of understanding and theorization be recognized and represented in intellectual and explanatory frameworks. It is argued that decoloniality (decolonial epistemology), which is central to Southern theory, helps challenge and displace the “monopoly and universalising tendencies of epistemologies from the Global North” (Ndhlovu 2016, 36). To paraphrase these critics, do approaches that utilize superdiversity represent European (Euro-​American)5 traditions of thought and politics to the exclusion, complete or partial, of non-​Western approaches? Are colonial systems of knowledge and power implicitly (or explicitly?) embodied in notions of superdiversity? In New Zealand/​Aotearoa, Canada, and Australia, these concerns and critiques are underscored by indigenous scholars who note the tendency for there to be a political and academic interest in immigrant/​minority ethnic diversity as separate from the issues associated with indigeneity and colonization; these different elements are treated as inherently separate despite both being subject to, and located within, the same territorial space (Kukutai and Rata 2018). These are all important considerations and should help orient those looking to understand the superdiversity of settler societies. To suggest that this is not happening is misleading, even if more could be done to incorporate decoloniality into superdiversity. For example, Meissner (2019) engages with some of these critics, while she joins with another author (Meissner and Heil 2020) to “deromanticize” immigrant integrationist approaches to ensure that superdiversity emphasizes “relational practices, power asymmetries, and materialities that enter into negotiations of difference.” (Also see Magazzini [2017] for an example of how to “deconstruct the mainstream” and incorporate a superdiversity that understands majorities as well as minorities). The task here is to continue and elaborate on this existing work and to provide an example of a decolonial superdiversity.

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    469

Settler Society Superdiversity What follows is an attempt to address the concerns raised above about the utility and relevance of superdiversity approaches when it comes to the issues inimical to colonial and settler societies or, at least, in relation to a specific group of them. I also offer some suggestions about the elements that need to be specifically addressed and incorporated.

Indigeneity in Settler Societies A critical and politically important element concerns the impacts of colonization on the peoples and nations that were already resident in a territory, for whom colonization continues to determine their socioeconomic position, discursive possibilities as “peoples,” and political influence and the exercise (or lack of it) of power. For the purposes of this discussion, the descriptor “indigenous” encompasses communities and nations who occupied territories prior to the arrival of European colonists (in the case of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the British and the French), and who now exist as “Fourth Nations,” a term used by a Canadian indigenous scholar, George Manuel, to refer to “indigenous communities within sovereign polities” (cf. Veracini 2007). Citizenship and inclusion for Fourth Nations in the “nation-​ state” has been, and remains, racialized and deeply problematic, both because members of indigenous communities who are seen as the “beneficiaries” of colonization (as a form of liberation—​religious, “civilizing,” economic—​from a “primitive past”) and as occupying a different category and positioning from those immigrants and ethnic minorities who are also racialized in these settler societies. As Quijano (2007) notes, European colonial domination and the exercise of power utilized “racial” social classifications that divided populations into racialized subjectivities and bodies.6 This remains a significant influence on the place of Fourth Nations, despite some discursive and constitutional shifts in the recognition of Fourth Nations in all three countries (cf. Veracini 2008). Indigenous subjectivities become critical to a contemporary understanding of a decolonial superdiversity in these settler colonial societies, in part to contest and to deconstruct options of a “normative Aboriginality” that continue to bind indigenous communities and actors to a restrictive categoric identity (Moore 2020). In explorations of a contemporary superdiversity, Anibal Quijano’s (2000) “coloniality of power” and the way colonialism has constructed identities, roles, and hierarchies might be useful place to start. This should be read alongside Meissner and Heil (2020, 2), who argue that too much of the literature continues to embody “integrationist” thinking and assumptions or the implicit or explicit reference to an “idealised cohesive past . .‌. or to a social imaginary in which stable social configurations are the pinnacle of living together.” Together, these contributions invite us to recognize the centrality of power relations and that the “tensions of living with difference” (Meissner and Heil 2020, 3) are

470   Paul Spoonley central to the complexities of diversity in settler societies. This opens up the possibilities for the “re-​construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities [and] subalternized knowledges and languages” (Mignolo 2007, 451). Despite these ongoing, typically patronizing subjectivities, combined with forms of cultural marginalization and socioeconomic deprivation, indigenous Fourth Nations have resisted and fought to achieve a degree of self-​determination in states such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If decolonization is defined as the ability to contest racialized subjectivities, to restore some cultural practices and languages in indigenous community spaces, as well as public ones, and to achieve a degree of self-​determination in key institutions (schooling, justice) or resource control and use, then all three countries have achieved a degree of decolonization. It is partial and incomplete—​and it often does not have much influence on major state institutions and policies. But both the nature of colonization and the impacts on Fourth Nations, and the attempts at decolonization, are an important component of a decolonial superdiversity. However, the discussion of colonization or decolonization and indigenous peoples tends to be isolated from the diversity discussion that concerns immigration and its consequences. In the New Zealand context, for example, there is Māori unease about high levels of immigration in recent decades for a range of reasons, including: The inevitability of losing “majority minority” status as Māori population growth fails to keep pace with Asian net migration; the implications of this demographic shift for Māori political power; perceived competition for jobs and cultural resources; and uncertainty over the status of the Treaty [of Waitangi, signed between Māori chiefs and British colonial authorities in 1840] and biculturalism [state policies that recognize Māori tino rangatiratanga or sovereignty]. (Kukutai and Rata 2018, 31)

Similar concerns are echoed in Canada and Australia (cf. the Mabo case in Australia), albeit voiced in different ways and in a specific language that reflects a local colonial trajectory. There are at least two consequences of these concerns and associated political positioning or narratives: one is that a dichotomy is constructed that pits the indigenous against immigrants in ways that allow a “divide and rule” governmentality; the second is the tendency to construct indigenous claims and identity, along with policies such as biculturalism that seek to explicitly recognize Fourth Nations (in New Zealand at least, although there are similar debates in Canada and Australia), as “overly oriented to the past” (Higgins 2018) and therefore to be dismissed. Further, there is a tendency to construct indigeneity as involving a more or less complete whole or the construction of a “category [of] . .‌ . intensely-​experienced ethnic groupness” which is then “institutionalised in policy, program and practice” (Moore 2020, 239). Often, for the ease of management, or as service clients of the state, indigenous communities are seen as a unity with shared characteristics. All of these dynamics need to be critically incorporated into a superdiversity frame as essential to any understanding of diversity recognition and “management” in settler societies. Moreover, there are political obligations.

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    471 Conceptual recognition that this is inimical to a decolonial superdiversity is part of what needs to occur; however, political transformation is essential if superdiversity scholars and practitioners are to have credibility with indigenous communities. In the same way that multiculturalism has been critiqued for being too closely associated with state and elite interests (cf. Ndhlovu 2016), the ongoing influence of colonialism in policies and institutional outcomes, or the limited forms of decoloniality, has created a sense of suspicion when it comes to many forms of conceptual understanding, superdiversity included. One option might be to involve indigenous scholars in the co-production of superdiversity approaches in ways that give them a powerful voice in intellectual and public debates and allow for Fourth Nation ambitions to be clearly articulated and supported.

Immigrant Acceptability The second component is the nature of active or a constructed citizenship that historically privileged those of the colonial power in terms of granting status and access to the resources of the settler societies discussed here (and elsewhere). This citizenship explicitly excluded (and excludes) those defined as a racial and problematic “other.” Notably, in all three countries, this excluded some European groups (Jews) and nearly anyone from Asia for much of the earlier phases of a colonial history. This began to change in the aftermath of World War II, but in reality, some of the highly discriminatory and more egregious elements did not change until the 1970s and 1980s—​or they continue into the present. By way of contrast, those migrants who came from the United Kingdom and Ireland were typically highly regarded as settlers. In national and everyday narratives and relationships, not all immigrants were regarded as equal. Because Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were colonized by the British and were part of an imperial project of displacement (of indigenous communities) and replacement (by British institutions and values), British migrants were both central to the colonization process and were treated as highly valued (and therefore superior) to nearly every other migrant. As Katie Higgins (2018) argues, British migrants were positioned as settler citizens, especially in “encounters with Māori, the country’s [New Zealand] indigenous peoples [or in relation to] exogenous peoples, a term [used by her] to refer to migrants and racialized citizens deemed ‘foreign.’ ” British settlers were not deemed “foreign” but as “natural” settlers and citizens in a British colony. A similar construction of privileged citizenship occurred in Australia and Canada. This positioning was reinforced by the fact that citizens of all three countries were simultaneously British subjects until well into the twentieth century. For example, though all three countries created their own citizenship after World War II (Canada in 1947, Australia and New Zealand in 1948), their citizens remained British subjects until the 1980s (legally, until 1982 in New Zealand, and 1984 in Canada and Australia). British citizens who were resident in these countries (but who were not citizens of those countries) could vote until the 1970s, a right that was denied other immigrant citizens.

472   Paul Spoonley This privileged citizenship then took on a different hue with the selective recruitment and approval of “economic migrants” in the late twentieth century, many of whom were now from Asia (still racialized in a popular sense, but now managed—​and still excluded—​by the state in rather different ways—​see material on probationary immigration in Canada, Ellermann and Gorokhovska [2019], or new forms of immigrant/​ citizenship discrimination, Ellermann [2020]). British and Irish immigrants were now treated much the same as others arriving to settle—​although they were still deemed different and often “more acceptable” in the public consciousness. Now a new phase emerged. The role of immigration in the building of a “nation-​state” continued but was influenced by neoliberal notions of who constituted a desirable immigrant and reinforced by deliberate processes of prioritized recruitment (Ramon and Downs 2020). Alongside this deliberate immigrant recruitment approach are also significant numbers of temporary immigrants who are on short-​term study or work visas, but have pathways to permanent residence subject to thresholds being met. It is noticeable that in these settler states, there are relatively high levels of acceptance that immigration is an important and largely positive part of the project of building a “nation-​state,” but there remain racialized preferences as to who is an “acceptable” immigrant, and therefore a potential citizen, and a complex array of settlement pathways and outcomes. There are explicit critiques of multiculturalism as a strategy for differential inclusion and recognition, as tokenistic with an overemphasis on culture and explicit links to nationality and nationhood (Magazzini 2017; Ndhlovu 2016). These settler states maintain highly structured and carefully managed systems of immigrant and refugee recruitment, which exist alongside various ongoing forms of racialization of these same immigrant communities or ethnic minorities, or both, by state institutions, private-​sector players, and hegemonic groups and agencies. These state-​sponsored forms of multiculturalism are worthy of critical acknowledgment, as are the particular forms of nationality and nationalism that are in play (Ndhlovu 2016). The particular nature of these managed forms of immigrant recruitment and settlement share certain similarities with other (non-settler) immigrant-​receiving societies, but there are also important differences: the role of immigration in a “nation” building project; a degree of acceptance that immigration and immigrants are central to economic success; the system of selecting and approving immigrants; and the mix of temporary and permanent migrants to produce a form of settler society that superdiversity requires giving attention to.

White Hegemony The third component that needs to be addressed by a decolonial superdiversity is the nature and power of hegemonic (“White”) groups. This is often missing in discussions of superdiversity as though a “minus one” definition of who is “ethnic” operates, implicitly or explicitly. As Higgins (2018) notes, in relation to Aotearoa/​New Zealand:

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    473 Although heritage is central to articulations of white settler identities, Pākehā,7 the dominant cultural group, are commonly narrated through a national and civilizational tense associated with progress and individual autonomy.

These “white racial formations” appear in tellings and retellings of a colonial past and the construction of a racialized vision of the future (Higgins 2018).8 These formations and categories are intimately involved in the practice of power and the ideological construction of diversity. And they need to be interrogated and explicitly named as a critical component of superdiversity. As hegemonic groups and elites, they create, determine, and manage key institutions and discourses—​and they are beneficiaries of these arrangements. They are key agents in contemporary superdiversity. As Meissner (2019) notes, the “whiteness of migration studies matters—​not the least because the field is political!” These identities and their influence have been problematized by some in settler states because of their dominance in the power relations of those societies and their role in the colonization of indigenous peoples. In the New Zealand context, they are given the Māori name of Pākehā (the dominant “White” or European-​origin group) and a form of decolonizing politics has developed that seeks to establish a partnership between (some) Pākehā and Māori, who, in these politics, are seen as tangata whenua (the original people of the land) who should be able to exercise tino rangatiratanga (rights to sovereignty). In the analysis of the new complexities (Vertovec 2019; see also Meissner 2019; Magazzini 2017) that characterize historical and contemporary superdiversity, the role and particularities of hegemonic groups are worthy of explicit inclusion. Two indigenous scholars from Aotearoa/​New Zealand, Tahu Kukutai and Arama Rata, remind Pākehā (the dominant “White” group) that their privilege is often not acknowledged: Less obvious than the negative impacts of colonisation are the privileges that it has afforded Pākehā New Zealanders, who live in a political, economic and social system that largely reflects their culture and values. This, in turn, has implications for how national identity, belonging and citizenship are represented to those seeking to make Aotearoa New Zealand home. (Kukutai and Rata 2018, 30)

The challenge, as Higgins (2018) observes, is to theorize “settler colonial landscapes and their multiple subjectivities beyond a white/​non-​white binary.” Moreover, indigenous values and institutional practices might suggest options for political transformation and inclusiveness more generally. As Moore (2020, 234) has argued in an Australian context: The Aboriginal [is seen] as one of many marginalized groups, albeit one that preceded and has been in a long and destructive relationship with the colonial state, but whose exemplification of the dilemmas of superdiversity and the delicacy needed to manage them may suggest productive policy directions.

474   Paul Spoonley I would quibble with the notion of “management” in this sentence, as though this implies a top-​down governmentality; I would rather employ the notion of co-production and the opportunities for an effective partnership, especially involving indigenous groups and nations and/​or racialized immigrant and minority ethnic groups, to explore alternative constructions and options. Inevitably, if Fourth Nations and racialized minority ethnic groups are involved, then a major task will be to incorporate a critical understanding of the exercise of power by White hegemonic groups in a decolonial superdiversity.

Managing Diversity: Multiculturalism One of the criticisms directed at those who use superdiversity is that it entails a degree of acceptance that diversity recognition—​notably, policies of multiculturalism (which have been part of state-​sponsored policies in Australia and Canada since the mid-​ 1970s)—​continue to marginalize minority ethnic and immigrant communities. (There is a parallel debate about the nature of multiculturalism and Fourth Nations). Ndhlovu (2016, 27) characterizes multiculturalism as, initially, a challenge to colonial systems of racial and ethnic hierarchization because it affirms the “values of equality, diversity and the respect and recognition of cultural difference.” However, Ndhlovu (2016, 29) goes on to argue that multiculturalism has failed to address underlying reasons for marginalization with the result that there has been a “persistence of racial hierarchies, inequalities and social stigmatization of indigenous and immigrant minorities.” This leads to further criticisms of superdiversity—​multiculturalism as a way of reinforcing “neoliberal modes of governmentality,” as a new form of tokenism and marginalization, or as overemphasizing on culture to the exclusion of structural factors (see Ndhlovu 2016, 30). He goes onto to explore the Australian experience and outcomes of multiculturalism and the way they are conflated with Australian nationhood and national identity. He asserts that the “deceitful and hypocritical nature of superdiversity is hidden behind the legislative formalisms that conceal the real intention of such policies—​which is exclusion” (Ndhlovu 2014, 34).9 This latter point might be true of some (narrow) interpretations of superdiversity, but it fails to acknowledge the critical and nuanced approaches to superdiversity that reflect exactly the points that Ndholvu wants attention paid to (see Vertovec 2019; Meissner and Heil 2020). As Meissner (2019) notes, in a critique of Ndholvu and others who mischaracterize current approaches to superdiversity, the points raised about differential access to resources, about the need to directly address “power, politics and policy” and recognizing “situational and contextual complexities” are—​or should be—​at the core of a superdiversity approach. Multiculturalism, as a form of management, has been extensively critiqued by those who are interested in superdiversity (see Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Moore 2020). It certainly deserves attention in relation to the settler societies discussed here, especially because various forms of official multiculturalism have been part of state policies in Canada and Australia since the 1970s. New Zealand opted for a rather different policy

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    475 approach, and since the 1980s, has privileged biculturalism as a way of recognizing (in a limited way) Māori as the indigenous peoples. In all three countries, there have been attempts at diversity recognition as part of an official suite of policies and as “managing down” with limited forms of consultation and power sharing. In all three countries, there are significant indigenous and ethnic social and economic divides that multiculturalism or biculturalism have failed to address. The policy frameworks of these settler societies are different from those of other superdiverse societies and are another expression of coloniality and—​to a limited degree—​decoloniality. To echo Magazzini (2017), it is important to shift the focus from minorities to majorities, to deconstruct the mainstream, and to critique “diversity management policies.”

A Reflexive Approach As a postscript to the foregoing discussion of elements that should be addressed when considering a decolonial superdiversity are two more issues worth discussing. One is the ongoing and intensifying structural inequalities that intersect with these elements. In situations of superdiversity, societal and economic inequality has escalated since the arrival of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and is deeply and structurally intertwined with the nature of superdiversity. The subsequent impacts of economic and health crises (global financial crises, Covid-​19) and the disruptive elements associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution have undermined fundamental well-​being and ontological security. This gives rise to what Back calls the “metropolitan paradox” (Back 1996, 3) in “which the most brutal forms of exclusion and hostility share space with the most intimate and meaningful forms of intercultural encounter” (Gidley 2019). Gidley refers to the “ambivalence of diversity” and notes that “class as much as ethnicity is a significant line of cleavage in the super-​diverse city.” The centrality and significance of these structural inequalities is, or should be, part of a superdiversity approach. Again, one of the concerns decolonial scholars raise is that these structural dimensions and the growing nature of inequality, and therefore of social injustice, are either omitted from superdiversity discussions or do not receive enough attention. In reality, there are plenty of examples in the superdiversity literature showing that such material inequalities and processes are, and should be, integral to an understanding complex and contemporary diversities (see Meissner and Vertovec 2015). For example, the focus on categories of identity, especially at the level of micropublics, should not divert attention from the structural inequalities that underpin and determine superdiversity. As Berg, Gidley, and Krausova (2019) note, superdiversity can be “co-​opted to a neo-​liberal vision if we do not insist on attention to the inequalities wired into the diverse metropolis.” While this is a reminder of the centrality of structural inequality to superdiversity approaches, it is not a substantive critique because such impacts and dynamics are addressed in the superdiversity literature. See Magazzini (2017) as one example.

476   Paul Spoonley There is also the somewhat awkward issue of co-​option of some of the elements of superdiversity to at once celebrate diversity (diversity boosterism) as an inevitably positive aspect of a community, city, or country and to develop strategies of governmentality in ways that benefit authorities and that manage diversity for hegemonic interests. Meissner and Vertovec (2015) acknowledge this in their discussion of superdiversity as a term that has practical or policy orientations. Some have shown how a noun such as “superdiverse” has come to exemplify Hackney in London, as one example, and then go on to critique researchers for being complicit in the process of creating, internalizing, and reproducing such descriptions to “shap[e]‌strategies for managing difference in municipalities” (Gidley 2019). Academic research and publications illustrate those attempts to “manage diversity.” The challenge is to provide the communities concerned with the means to critique and resist inappropriate (as defined by them) academic research and unsafe (again, as determined by those on the receiving end) policy developments and implementations. One strategy, as Gidley (2019) argues, is to adopt collaborative modes of inquiry. Certainly, in a New Zealand setting, if research involves diverse ethnic and immigrant groups, and especially the indigenous Māori, then research partnerships and effective collaboration with those groups is not simply an expectation; it is (or should be) a requirement (see Smith 1999). This is seldom an easy or comfortable task for researchers (Gidley [2019] acknowledges the humility required), but it certainly helps to address another concern of Southern theorists and others, that the colonized have a voice in these debates and contribute to a decolonial superdiversity.

Concluding Comments Despite the dismissal by some who argue that superdiversity is a homogenizing and Eurocentric approach to the nature of contemporary societies, I would argue that superdiversity can be—​and has been—​expanded to address the nature of these societies. In the case of the settler societies considered here, certain characteristics need to be considered in order to understand the nature of the complex diversity that has emerged—​notably, the place, agency, and marginalization of indigenous peoples and Fourth Nations; the deliberate policies of immigrant recruitment and the resulting politics of identity recognition and settlement; and the inclusion of an analysis of the nature and exercise of power of hegemonic “White” groups. Although not particular to settler societies, the nature of structural inequality and the particular forms of the “management” of diversity also deserve attention. Key questions concern the patterns of segregation and differential inclusion, the group and individual experiences of space and contact, and the politics and practices of identity, including historical and new forms of cosmopolitanism and creolization that occur in these settler societies (Vertovec 2019). Settler societies represent one particular expression of colonialism, along with the evolution and acceleration of diversity in its myriad forms and the intersection of this diversity with marginalization and structural inequality. This chapter confirms some of those

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    477 elements that need to be considered when the focus concerns settler societies and the possibility of a decolonial superdiversity. A particular dimension that is worth reiterating is the need to acknowledge that indigeneity and immigrant-​related diversity (cf. Higgins 2018) are interrelated and co-produced. Given the need to include questions—​political, methodological, discursive—​of White settler hegemony, there is also a need to address the implications of what Higgins (2018) refers to as “non-​normative alterities”—​notably, indigenous and exogenous (or immigrant) discursive labeling. This is not without challenges, especially given the tendency over a long period to construct narratives about entitlement, colonization, and acceptability (including in the migration research literature; see Meissner’s [2019] comments about the “whiteness” of migration studies) that tend to compartmentalize indigeneity and immigration/​immigrants, at least non-​British immigrants. Both are “othered” but in different ways and with often different conceptual and methodological frameworks. If superdiversity, as a sensitizing and orienting approach, includes the indigenous, the exogenous, and the hegemonic, then it would add considerably to the literature and, hopefully, to the subsequent transformational politics and policies that might emerge. Higgins (2018) describes the relational components of settler society as “messy and overlapping” with significant elements of ambiguity. That surely is what a superdiversity framework, here framed as a decolonial superdiversity, can and should address. Finally, one of Ndhlovu’s (2016) major criticisms (and following on from the point made above by Higgins) is the need to address and incorporate non-​Western worldviews, especially of identity, when it comes to historical and contemporary expressions of diversity and to critically dissect the influences and discourses that represent a universalized modernity. This is especially apt in a range of situations and contexts, none more so than the complex patterns and intersections of diversity that operate in settler societies. A decolonial superdiversity can, and should, do exactly this. But the same caution should be expressed when it comes to exploring the experiences and systems of diversity in Western settings that have been transformed by mobility and the migration of non-​ Western groups. Being more reflexive about the core assumptions and influences of superdiversity, especially if they reflect unhelpful and limiting forms of modernity and universality, and of engaging with those who would add a decoloniality perspective, is surely well within the skill sets of critical scholars and an obvious part of our remit.

Notes 1. Hyphenating the label of “nation” with state is highly problematic in this and other contexts because it invokes assumptions about what constitutes or what is desirable in that particular territory—​it is important to dehyphenate “nation” from the state. 2. The Black Lives Matter movement underscores this point. 3. To state the obvious, this excludes a large number of settler states that were not part of this British-​influenced and controlled imperial expansionism. 4. Note Vertovec’s (2019) argument that superdiversity is a “concept” and an “approach” to new migration patterns; he explicitly denies that it is a “theory.”

478   Paul Spoonley 5. Vickers (2019) points out that many of these terms (including “Anglo-​West,” “West,” “global North”) are vague and often center around notions of the “developed” and “developing world.” Who is included—​or excluded? It is an important point. 6. Higgins (2018) has an interesting argument about tense: indigenous groups [nations?] are positioned with a territorial claim located in the past, whereas “racialized/migrant groups” concern the future. 7. Pākehā is a Māori term for those who form part of the White-​majority group but who have values and practices they formed as members of a hegemonic group. During the 1980s, the term was defined by scholars such as King (1985) as having political obligations: of seeing Māori as partners; as recognizing and supporting Māori political and cultural ambitions, and as being sensitive to those things that concern Māori, such as the pronunciation of the Māori language or even being able to speak it. 8. Higgins (2018) invokes the Gilroy (2004) notion of postcolonial melancholia—​a stress on racial difference, an amnesia about colonialism and a “harking back to the era after the second World War and before mass migration,” in this case to the UK, that occurred subsequently. This same postcolonial melancholia could be deployed in settler colonies, with slightly different historical references. 9. Ndhlovu (2016, 34–​35) also argues that superdiversity does not describe anything that is new—​that migration and mobility have existed since premodern times. This misrepresents the approach of many of those who have argued that the complexity of contemporary mobility and interaction is such that it deserves new forms of conceptual and empirical investigation (see Vertovec 2019; Meissner and Vertovec 2015).

References Aptekar, Sofya. 2017. “Super-​Diversity as a Methodological Lens: Re-​Centring Power and Inequality.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 53–​70. https://​www.tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​abs /​10.1080/​01419​870.2017.1406​124. Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racism and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. Berg, Mette Louise, Ben Gidley, and Anna Krausova. 2019. “Welfare Micropublics and Inequality: Urban Super-​Diversity in a Time of Austerity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (15): 2723–​2742. https://​www.tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​01419​870.2018.1557​728. Césaire, Aimé. 1956. Discourses sur le Colonialism. Paris: Présence Africains. Ellermann, Antje. 2020. “Discrimination in Migration and Citizenship.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (12): 2463–​2479. https://​www.tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​full/​10.1080 /​13691​83X.2018.1561​053. Ellermann, Antje, and Yana Gorokhovska. 2019. “The Impermanence of Permanence: The Rise of Probationary Immigration in Canada.” International Migration 58 (6). https://​online​libr​ary .wiley.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1111/​imig.12645. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Gidley, Ben. 2019. “Researching the Ordinary.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (3): 402–​408. https://​tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​full/​10.1080/​01419​870.2019.1536​274?src=​rec​sys. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Superdiversity in Settler Societies    479 Higgins, Katie. 2018. “Tense and the Other: Temporality and Urban Multiculture in Auckland Aotearoa New Zealand.” Transactions 44 (1). https://​doi.org/​10.111/​tran.12257. King, Michael. 1985. Being Pākehā. Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin. Kukutai, Tahu, and Arama Rata. 2018. “From Mainstream to Manaaki: Indigenising Our Approach to Immigration.” In Fair Borders? Migration Policy in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by David Hall, 26–​44. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books. https://​doi .org/​10.7810/​978094​7518​851. Magazzini, Tina. 2017. “Making the Most of Super-​Diversity: Notes on the Potential of a New Approach.” Policy & Politics 45 (4): 527–​545. https://​www.ing​enta​conn​ect.com/​con​tent​one /​tpp/​pap/​2017/​00000​045/​00000​004/​art00​004. Meissner, Fran. 2019. “Of Straw Figures and Multi-​stakeholder Monitoring: A Response to Willem Schinkel.” Comparative Migration Studies 7 (18). https://​comp​arat​ivem​igra​tion​stud​ies .sprin​gero​pen.com/​artic​les/​10.1186/​s40​878-​019-​0121-​y. Meissner, Fran, and Steven Vertovec. 2015. “Comparing Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–​555. https://​www.tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​01419​870.2015.980​295. Meissner, Fran, and Tilmann Heil. 2020. “Deromanticising Integration: On the Importance of Convivial Disintegration.” Migration Studies 9 (3): 1–​19. https://​acade​mic.oup.com/​migrat​ion /​adva​nce-​arti​cle/​doi/​10.1093/​migrat​ion/​mnz​056/​5735​573?login=​true. Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality.” Cultural Studies 21: 449–​514. https://​doi.org/​10.1080 /​095023​8060​1162​647. Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. “Border Thinking, Decolonial Cosmopolitanism and Dialogues among Civilisations.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, edited by M. Roviso and M. Nowicka, 329–​348. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Moore, Terry. 2020. “Governing Superdiversity: Learning from the Aboriginal Australian Case.” Social Identities 26 (2): 233–​249. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13504​630.2020.1752​168. Ndhlovu, Finex. 2014. Becoming a Diaspora in Australia: Language, Culture, Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The page reference is p. 15. Ndhlovu, Finex. 2016. “A Decolonial Critique of Diaspora Identity Theories and the Notion of Superdiversity.” Diaspora Studies 9 (1): 28–​ 40. https://​doi.org.10.1080/​09739​572 .2015.1088​612. Quijano, Aníbel. 2000. “The Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views From the South (3): 533–​580. https://​muse.jhu.edu/​arti​cle/​23906. Quijano, Aníbel. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity and Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–​3): 168–​178. https://​www.tand​fonl​ine.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​095023​8060​1164​353?jour​nalC​ode=​rcu​s20. Ramon, Cristobal, and Angelina Downs. 2020. Immigration Systems in Transition: Lessons for the U.S. Immigration Reforms from Australia and Canada. Report of the Bipartisan Policy Center, Washington, DC. Salgado, José Guadalupe Gandarilla, Maria Haydeé Garcia-​Bravo, and Benzi, Daniele. 2021. “Two Decades of Aníbal Quijano’s Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Internacional 43(1) : 199–​222. http://​doi.org/​10.1590/​S0102-​8529.201943​0100​009 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed Books. Spoonley, Paul. 2015. “New Diversity, Old Anxieties in New Zealand: The Complex Identity Politics and Engagement of a Settler Society.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 650–​661. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​0149​870.2015.980​292.

480   Paul Spoonley Veracini, Lorenzo. 2007. “Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation.” Borderlands 6 (2): https://​ro.uow.au/​ihapap​ers/​1337. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2008. “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29 (4): 363–​379. https://​www.tand​fonl​ ine.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1080/​072568​6080​2372​246. Vertovec, Steven. 2019. “Talking around Super-​Diversity.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 125–​139. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01419​870.2017.1406​128. Vertovec, Steven, and Susanne Wessendorf, eds. 2010. The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Vickers, Edward. 2019. “Critiquing Coloniality, ‘Epistemic Violence’ and Western Hegemony in Comparative Education: The Dangers of Ahistoricism and Positionality.” Comparative Education 56 (2): 165–​189.

Chapter 32

Afterword Superdiversity Futures Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec

The chapters of this handbook have showcased a range of perspectives on superdiversity and its uses and demonstrated that the adoption of a superdiversity lens has spurred thinking around complex social transformations. Further, they point to existing research questions and to ways to move superdiversity research forward. Here, we want to add to those discussions our own views about where superdiversity is heading, how it speaks to broader debates in the social sciences, and what omissions there are in this book. This stock-​taking exercise occurs in a time of powerful global social, political, and economic shifts. Events such as the global Covid-​19 pandemic and the unfolding climate and environmental crisis are profoundly impacting the dynamics of international and internal migration, as well as how migration is regulated locally, nationally, and internationally, in turn affecting processes of sociodemographic diversification. The superdiversity research lens will not remain unaffected by this.

Chapters That You Will Not Find in This Collection (but Probably Should) When we set out to map the developments in research focusing on and utilizing a superdiversity lens, we were aware of the challenges of capturing what is a dynamic and expanding field.—Relating to migration, diversification, and social difference, the field of superdiversity borders on, and at times overlaps with, key concepts and debates in the social sciences and is constructed around a term whose meaning and uses are themselves objects of scholarly debate, contestation, revision, interpretation, and appropriation.

482    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec It is in the nature of handbooks to strive to be as inclusive and thorough as possible in portraying the state-​of-​the-​art in a particular field. Yet a single volume can rarely claim to be a complete collection that covers a topic in all its facets, and neither can ours. We wish to flag just a few of the chapters you probably should but will not find in this book. What follows will remain an incomplete list of important superdiversity topics, yet we identify a few to at least point readers toward the relevant ideas and resources. In tracing these missing chapters, we will follow the book’s logic. We start with Disciplinary Developments and then consider different thematic and empirical blind spots. Superdiversity offers a research lens that allows and even encourages cross-​ fertilization and the transgression of disciplinary boundaries, inviting interdisciplinary collaborations and challenging taken-​for-​granted disciplinary truths. Superdiversity has been adopted in more disciplines than we included in Part I. Indeed, in the social sciences alone, the notion has been invoked in research being done in business studies (Ram et al. 2013), education (Hawkey 2012), sport and nutrition studies (Dagkas and Curry 2018; Babakus and Thompson 2012), psychology, and landscape studies (Rishbeth and Powell 2013). We incorporated chapters on disciplines such as anthropology and human geography, but many readers may have expected a chapter tracing superdiversity within sociology. Sociological thinking is central to considering the complex social transformations that go hand in hand with migration (see Bradby et al. 2017; López Peláez, Álvarez-​Pérez, and Harris 2022). Kirwan (2021) recently noted how sociological thinking can help us apply superdiversity thinking beyond migration studies. Various aspects of sociological approaches are enshrined throughout the chapters. The reader interested in sociological writing will thus find ample reference points and ideas for moving superdiversity forward in this field. To highlight just a few contributors who were trained as, or who work as, sociologists, readers can look at the chapters by Kathiravelu, Geldof, Garner, Lessard-Phillips and Fajth or Neal and Cochrane. Demography is another discipline that is highly relevant to superdiversity. Across the globe, demographic changes such as population aging are powerfully underway. The changes will significantly impact global migration patterns, not least because demographics are intertwined with labor markets and, increasingly, with climate change (Hugo 2011). Accordingly, we offered chapters that combine thinking along demographic lines with the availability of statistics or the economics of superdiversity (see Aspinall’s and Nathan’s chapters; and Simon 2012). Certainly, more work is needed in this realm because we are facing both rapid social changes and complex demographic transformations (Tach et al. 2019). The list of “missing” disciplines could surely continue. A few of the chapters in Methodological Reflections nod to visual tools for making sense of superdiversity (e.g., Negrón’s chapter). Had there been more space, a separate and dedicated chapter on visualizing superdiversity would have provided food for thought. Some of the early studies of superdiversity took a strong interest in different visual representations of diversity. One of the volume editors, in her early work, used heatmaps to explore how a relational understanding of superdiversity could be represented visually (Meissner 2016). Suzanne Hall (2013), in her explorations of superdiverse streets, sketches shop floor plans and interconnected world maps to

Afterword   483 highlight some of the concurrent microspatial and transnational interconnections that superdiversity entails. Many other efforts have been made to explore visualization for explaining and making complex social transformations graspable. Indeed, the reader will find a rich resource in the expansive online interactive superdiversity visualizations prepared for Vancouver, Sydney, and New York by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethics Diversity.1 These are useful tools not only for thinking about superdiversity but also for teaching it and introducing the concept to nonacademic audiences. In the section on different Spaces and Scales, one omission is a focus on the cultural sphere, where superdiversity has the effect of amalgamating rather than amplifying differences (Martiniello 2018, 2022). As spaces of encounters, the arts, sports, and many NGO and volunteer settings explore pertinent questions about processes of difference-​ making (Rosbrook-​Thompson 2018; Lehner et al. 2021). It is also notable that the production and performance of popular cultural events are increasingly transnational and, at the same time, grounded in highly localized contexts. In that sense, there is still work to be done to understand how processes commonly linked to superdiversity play out in such arenas. When it comes to Power and Politics, one missing chapter would take on the question of queering superdiversity. While we have highlighted how superdiversity is both not the same thing as intersectionality (it is more interested in the societal and spatial processes of sociodemographic transformation driven by migration) and yet is methodologically aligned with intersectionality thinking (in encouraging multicategorical analysis), there is a gap in exploring how ideas about queering may advance superdiversity thinking. Insofar as superdiversity is tightly linked with questions of legal-​status diversity (Meissner 2017), there is important work to be done about how sexuality becomes regulated through status differences (see Mai et al. 2021). Another potentially productive approach could be using queer theory to question static categories of difference as a hallmark of diversification. Just as superdiversity is not (only) about an increasing and increasingly differentiated number of categories of difference, queering is not about a proliferation of distinct sexual orientations but, rather, the critical contestation of normativities (Browne 2006). In this sense, a project of queering superdiversity would be particularly useful to engage with the politics of complex social transformations. Still to be written remains a chapter that locates and interrogates the usefulness of the superdiversity concept in global contexts characterized by powerful ethnic or religious majorities, or “mainstreams”; assimilationist policies; anti-​immigrant sentiments; and entrenched social inequalities. These kinds of contexts and conditions are significant features of the political entanglements of migration and displacement, poverty, and climate change that will surely be shifting and layering new configurations of diversity in societies worldwide. This might happen in ways that challenge or realign our thinking about superdiversity as it has been studied in global cities like London. Raúl Acosta’s chapter usefully looked at what it means to translate superdiversity into enactments of diversity in Mexico City. In the last section of the collection, Conceptual Encounters, in

484    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec advocating a decolonial superdiversity, Paul Spoonley has actively called for engaging the political and historical specificities of diversities in settler societies. We included a number of chapters based on fieldwork conducted in the geographic Global South. While we acknowledge that superdiversity has much more frequently been applied in large, global city contexts, we think that adopting the notion in new geographic contexts will further advance possibilities for comparing and contrasting complex social transformations across the globe, bearing in mind that the underlying structural forces shaping international migration are global and interconnected. This is poignantly captured in Thomas H. Eriksen’s chapter which locates the emergence of superdiversity in the “acceleration of acceleration” that has marked the history of humanity in the later twentieth and early twenty-​first century. With this in mind, we offer our concluding reflections on themes and issues that we suspect will preoccupy those interested in studying superdiversity in the years to come.

Things Keep Changing The production of this collection started almost concurrently with the unfolding of the global Covid-​19 pandemic, the most acute international health crisis in over a century. Jia Ye’s contribution directly points to the very real implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for migrant and racialized communities in cities, unpacking the process of coproduction of diversity, precarity, and inequality in the global city of Singapore. As we were writing this afterword, the United States had just reopened its borders to vaccinated travelers from Europe (though it retained restrictions for others). Access to many countries, including Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, remains difficult even for the cosmopolitan elites, who are usually much less impacted in their mobility options within increasingly restrictive global migration regimes (Gonzales et al. 2019). But the impact of Covid-​19 on migration and migrants goes beyond the travel restrictions introduced by almost every country in the world (for an overview, see the Oxford Covid-​19 Government Response Tracker [OxCGRT]2). Research shows that migrants and racialized minorities are disproportionately affected by Covid-​19 because of a prevalence of risk factors that make them particularly vulnerable to infection and poor clinical outcomes, “including the suspension of asylum processes and resettlement, border closures, increased deportations and lockdown of camps and excessively restrictive public health measures” (Kumar et al. 2021, 9). With Covid-19 case numbers soaring in asynchronous waves across the globe, the virus continuing to mutate, and global vaccination rates remaining markedly uneven, some have argued that we are facing the “end of the age of migration” (Gamlen 2020). This extreme seems highly unlikely. We are already seeing a rapid, if uneven, reopening of international travel routes, including for international migrants, and the demand for migrant workers peaking in the global immigration hubs. The flow of international remittances was only marginally affected during the pandemic, and forced displacement

Afterword   485 continued, sometimes through the opening up of new migration routes (e.g., the forced displacement of over ten million Ukrainians, the Poland-​Belarus border crisis, and irregular crossings of the English Channel). It is noteworthy that even as migration flows have been temporarily disrupted by Covid-​19, the global stock of international migrants only also been marginally affected, largely leaving immigration societies as diverse as they were before the pandemic struck (International Organization for Migration 2021). Emerging scholarship (Benson et al. 2022) on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal the from the European Union (Brexit) on migration and migrants confirms the complex interplay between migration patterns and broader geopolitical and societal transformations. This scholarship is yielding insights into how closely migration and migration governance are shaped and aligned with particular geopolitical projects (e.g., the European Union, “Global Britain”), the ideological constructs and imagined communities that serve to legitimize them, the politics of belonging and diversity that these projects champion and enforce, and the semantic and legal architecture that they employ to order and validate them (see the discussion of the relationship between the Brexit vote and superdiversity in Neal and Cochrane’s chapter). Shifting routes, legal channels, policy measures, and migration regimes will combine with new digital-​bordering modes, “health-​proofing” techniques, and antimigration populist narratives to create an ever-​more complex set of conditions—​which themselves will generate new traits and modes of superdiversity (cf. Vertovec 2020). Those shifts will be accompanied by new actors and data sources becoming involved in researching patterns of diversification. Walls and barbed-​wire borders have become the new visual trope for the perilousness of migration. The prevalence of these images in media representations underlines the continued social relevance of migration, which is only compounded by projections of the impact of climate change on the livability of different geographic areas (see McLeman and Gemenne 2019). Migration remains a crucial mitigation mechanism in regions severely affected by the climate crisis (Black et al. 2011) and provides a “fourth durable solution” for refugees seeking to rebuild their lives (Long 2014). All these processes seem to point us to a continued reconfiguration of the circumstances under which superdiversity comes to matter in different local contexts. As has been argued, superdiversity is a “malleable concept” (Meissner 2015), and as such, it is responsive to ongoing and imminent changes. As we move forward, the relevance of digital technologies and superdiversity is bound to increase. One area of concern will be linked to how we measure and make sense of superdiversity and who gets to make claims about the knowability of migration-​driven diversities. Large-​scale and close-​to-​ real-​time data may offer unprecedented opportunities for documenting complex social transformations, but using novel categories of difference is not without its pitfalls (Cesare et al. 2018). Beyond remaining vigilant about the quality of data, research using a superdiversity lens needs to stay attuned to new digital realities. Palmberger and Spotti pointed this out in their chapters but the idea bears expanding. Digital devices and the data traces they produce are becoming tools for controlling migrants and mobilities, those technologies are increasingly central to how cities are run, and how individuals

486    Fran Meissner, Nando Sigona, and Steven Vertovec navigate the diversities around them. These are all aspects that add more layers to the processes of diversification, both in how we measure it and how it is experienced on the ground. We are witnessing a shift in how a datafication of migration (Broeders and Dijstelbloem 2016) changes ideas about and approaches to knowing migration (Scheel 2021; Leese et al. 2021). These shifts will inevitably also be felt in how superdiversity comes to matter locally as digital technologies take an ever-​more prominent role in our everyday lives. Because research focused on migration-​driven diversities will likely not remain unaffected by developments in migration research more broadly, it is important to recognize that over the last decades there has been a continued effort to find new data sources that can be labeled migration data—​a process that accelerated at the time of the so-​called 2015 migration crisis (Taylor and Meissner 2020; Scheel et al. 2019). This push for additional data has meant that more corporate players who are not trained in (critical) migration studies are entering a research field that used to be advanced by domain knowledge experts. How and what can be said with data from commercial and other sources will depend on the transparency of new migration information infrastructures (Meissner and Taylor 2021). These information infrastructures are quite different from previous ones, and it will require an effort on part of those interested in studying superdiversity to recognize that the logics of the kind of data production those infrastructures entail will mean new forms of differentiation that are not exclusively research-​or government-​ driven but subject to commercial interests. Attempts to represent superdiversity in real time, for example, might be misguided if they are not done with sufficient theoretical groundwork and skepticism about the data being used. This is particularly important for making sense of legal-​status differentiations and the ways different technologies impact differently experienced migration trajectories. Beyond concerns about the relevance of new digital technologies, it is important to highlight that a substantial part of research concerning superdiversity has been about exploring encounters of difference in global cities. This includes studies of how superdiversity and the presence of new migrants unfold in contexts with diverse existing migrant populations (Vertovec 2015). So far, it has mostly been thought that such encounters were either prohibited or facilitated through various features of the built environment (e.g., Low et al. 2005; Anderson 2011) or by individual attitudes toward difference (Schönwälder et al. 2016). A recasting of cities through data-​driven technologies has very real impacts on how people move through cities and which spatial trajectories they can choose (Kitchin et al. 2015). Ultimately, algorithmic governance of cities and diversities will affect not only who can encounter whom but also who gets to live with whom. This matters because one of the central questions highlighted by a superdiversity lens is how multiplex interconnections of variables impact “where, how and with whom people live” (Vertovec 2007, 1025). Because many of those data systems learn from often commercially sourced data, there are currently no guarantees that those data systems will not also exacerbate pre-existing patterns of spatial division—​be it in terms of housing or everyday encounters. For researchers interested in superdiversity, making sense of the complex social transformations such changes entail is bound to be at the

Afterword   487 forefront of concerns. We need to recognize that we still know far too little about how changes in the governing of cities through data will also reconfigure the dynamics of superdiversity.

Notes 1. Steven Vertovec, Daniel Hiebert, Alan Gamlen, and Paul Spoonley. 2018. “Superdiversity. Today’s Migration Has Made Cities More Diverse Than Ever—​In Multiple Ways.” Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Available online at http://​www.super​div.mmg.mpg.de/​, checked on 5/​2/​2022. 2. https://​w ww.bsg.ox.ac.uk/​resea​rch/​resea​rch-​proje​cts/​covid-​19-​gov​ernm​ent-​respo​nse -​trac​ker.

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Index

Tables, figures, and boxes are indicated by t, f, and b following the page number acceleration, of social and cultural change, 403–​406 boundedness and openness, 408–​409 class politics to identity politics, 407–​408 identity, competing discourses about, 411–​412 identity, significance of, 406–​407 plural or postplural society, 412–​414 superdiversity and, 409–​411 affective atmospheres, 37–​38 agent-​based modeling (ABM), 236 Alba, Richard, 354–​355 alienation, and the governance of superdiversity, 379–​381, 383–​385 Amelina, Anna, 3 Amin, Ash, 33 anthropology, situating superdiversity within, 15–​16 challenges to anthropology, 19–​21 proposals for dialogue, 21–​22 race and multiculture, 17–​18 transnationalism and multiculture, 16–​19 Australia, multicultural coexistence in, 423–​424, 427–​429 Baltic states, stateless minorities in, 442–​443 Barnett, Anthony, 392 Baumann, Zygmund, 30, 411 Beck, Ulrich, 352–​353 Berg, Mette, 124 bifocality, 169–​170 Blommaert, Jan, 27, 108, 115n1, 122 Bourdieu, Pierre, 111

Brexit, superdiversity through the lens of, 389–​392 London, superdiversity of, 395–​396 rise of defensive nationalism, 393–​395, 397 superdiversity after Brexit, 396–​398 vote inside and outside of London, 392–​393 Brickell, Katherine, 34–​35 “bubble interactions,” and diversification in Latin America, 287, 293–​295 Caribbean rates of migration, 95–​96 transnationalism and the, 17 Castles, Stephen, 2–​3 census using data to capture superdiversity, 192–​194 using data to describe and analyze superdiversity, 200–​203 Ceylon, postcolonial migration, 96 cities, superdiversity in highly regulated, 301–​302 analytical paradigms, 302–​304 Dubai, 307–​308 expanding framework of superdiversity, 309–​310 Singapore, 305–​307 western vs. nonwestern variations, 304–​305 citizenship, through a superdiversity lens, 435–​436, 445 migration and statelessness, 441–​445 “right to return” and “right to stay,” 438–​441 topologies of citizenship and statelessness, 436–​438

492   Index class distinctions, and descriptions of diversity, 140 class politics, to identity politics, 407–​408 co-​creation, urban planning and, 51, 52b coexistence, multicultural, 417–​418, 429 everyday multiculturalism, 418–​421, 421f interlocking variables, 422 legal status and temporality, 422–​425 neighborhood and work life, 425–​429 colonialism and diversity in highly regulated global cities, 305 and diversity in Kampala, Uganda, 138–​140 and diversity in London, England, 143–​145 and diversity in Lyon, France, 140–​143 and rates of migration, 96–​97 settler colonialism, 466–​467 combinatorial spaces, 112–​113 complexification, of migration and diversity, 378–​379 complexity complexity theory, 3–​4 complexity thinking, and methodological innovation, 225–​230 mainstreaming in governance of superdiversity, 382–​383 urban social complexity, 230–​238, 231t1 Connerton, Paul, 409 Contesting Culture (Baumann), 411 conviviality, 37 Court of Justice of the European Union, engagement with intersectional discrimination, 83–​84 COVID-​19 pandemic, and migrant precarity, 336–​338 crisis mode, in governance of superdiversity, 383–​385 critical race scholarship, 349, 365, 367, 370, 371 Cuba, and transculturation, 17 Cuban Counterpoint (Ortiz), 17 cultural domain analysis, 233 cultural-​ethnic-​linguistic (CEL) groups, and economic analysis, 63–​69, 65t, 66t cultural exchange, 143 cultural identification, and accelerated change, 403–​406 boundedness and openness, 408–​409

class politics to identity politics, 407–​408 identity, competing discourses about, 411–​412 plural or postplural society, 412–​414 significance of identity, 406–​407 superdiversity and, 409–​411 cultural pluralism, 90–​91 data, capturing superdiversity in official, 191–​194, 203–​204 census data and immigration, 194–​195 census data outputs, 197–​200 describing and analyzing superdiversity, 200–​203 enhancing capture, 195–​197 using census data, 192–​193 Datta, Ayona, 34–​35 Davie, Maurice, 91 De Bock, Jozefien, 98–​99 defensive nationalism, and Brexit initiative, 393–​395 deprivation, multidimensional indices of, 212–​213 diasporas, and information technology, 167–​170 differential diversification, 331–​332 differential inclusion, in Singapore, 333–​334 digital ethnography, 165–​166, 168–​172 digital migration studies, 166–​168 directionality, urban planning and, 47 diversification, in Latin America, 287–​289, 295 antipathies, and social interactions, 292–​293 “bubble interactions,” 287, 293–​295 empathy, and social relationships, 292 historical roots, 289–​291, 294 migration to Latin America, 288–​289 self-​referential interactions, 293–​295 social networks, defining features of, 291–​293 sympathies, and social relationships, 291–​292 diversity complexification of, 378–​379 diversity indices, 226 education and youth, 277 modes of governance in relation to, 382–​383 politics of, 185

Index   493 diversity, and inequality and precarity, 329–​330, 338–​339 differential diversification, 331–​332 differential inclusion in Singapore, 333–​334 migrant moral risk, producing difference through, 335–​336 migrant precarity, 330–​331, 336–​338, 339f, 340f pandemic precarity, 336–​338 spatializing precarity, 334–​335 Downing, Joseph, 143 Dubai, ethnicized divides in, 307–​308 East Africa, recruitment of laborers to, 139–​140 economic analysis, of superdiversity, 60–​61 empirics, 64–​69, 65t, 66t metrics, 62–​64 regression analysis, 67–​69, 68t education in Netherlands, 278–​284 youth and, 275–​278, 284 empirics, and economic analysis of superdiversity, 64–​69 descriptive analysis, 64–​67, 65t, 66t England case study of diversity in London, 143–​145 census data outputs, 197–​200 decennial census and immigration, 194–​195 decennial census and superdiversity, 192–​194 enhancing census capture of superdiversity, 195–​197 migrant-​owned businesses in, 178–​180 using census data to describe and analyze, 200–​203 See also Brexit, superdiversity through the lens of ethnicity and census data in United Kingdom, 194–​195 and descriptions of diversity, 139–​140, 142, 144 in online spaces, 171 vs. race, 361–​362 ethnic-​minority enterprises (EMEs), 177–​178, 185–​186

mixed embeddedness, 182–​183 and politics of diversity, 185 psychodynamic approaches to examining, 181, 183–​185 self-​employment, motivating factors and challenges, 179–​180 and systems psychodynamics, 180 in United Kingdom, 178–​180 ethnographies of superdiversity, 157–​158 digital ethnography, 165–​166, 168–​172 ethnographic methods, 155–​157 methods and challenges, 151–​153 settings for, 153–​155 European Court of Human Rights, engagement with intersectional discrimination, 80–​82 European Union “right-​to-​return,” laws addressing, 97–​98 everyday life, superdiversity in, 417–​418, 429 everyday multiculturalism, 418–​421, 421f interlocking variables, 422 legal status and temporality, 422–​425 neighborhood and work life, 425–​429 families public perceptions of minority, 142 See also homemaking, in public space; home-​spaces, as sites of superdiversity fault lines, as perspective on multidimensionality, 210 folded space, neighborhood scale and, 33–​38 Foner, N., 126 Foucault, Michel, 27, 111 France, case study of diversity in Lyon, 140–​143 Friesleben, Anna Mikaela V., 50 Galipo, Adele, 34 geographies of encounter, 248–​252 geography, and spatial approach to superdiversity, 27–​29, 38 affective atmospheres, 37–​38 from mobility to multiplicity, 30–​32 neighborhood scale and folded space, 33–​38 power-​geometries, 35–​37

494   Index geography, and spatial approach to superdiversity (cont.) scales of superdiversity, 29 tourist to vagabond spectrum, 30–​31 urban relational space, 32–​33 See also home-​spaces, as sites of superdiversity; urban planning Gidley, Ben, 153, 157 global cities and interscalar embeddedness of the spatial superdiversity, 316–​317 and sociospatial diversifications, 317–​321 global cities, superdiversity in highly regulated, 301–​302 analytical paradigms, 302–​304 Dubai, 307–​308 expanding framework of superdiversity, 309–​310 Singapore, 305–​307 western vs. nonwestern variations, 304–​305 global householding and home-​spaces as sites of superdiversity, 248–​252 and politics of superdiversity, 252–​255 “glocalization,” 32–​33 governance, of superdiversity, 377–​378, 385–​386 alienation and crisis mode in, 383–​385 complexification of migration and diversity, 378–​379 complexity mainstreaming, 382–​383 mainstreaming vs. alienation, 379–​381 Grünenberg, Kristina, 50 guest-​worker migration, 92–​93 Haiti, stateless minority populations in, 443–​444 Hall, Suzanne, 33–​34, 125, 235 Heinich, Nathalie, 346 Higgins, Katie, 472–​473 historical perspective, 89–​105 aspects of superdiversity, 89–​90 colonialism, 96–​97 cultural pluralism, 90–​91 guest-​worker migration, 92–​93 historians, and concept of superdiversity, 98–​99

intersectionality, 94 mainstreaming, 93 multiculturalism, 93 rates of international migration, 95 “right-​to-​return,” laws addressing, 97–​98 statelessness, 98 uses of superdiversity, 90 homemaking, in public space, 261–​262, 271–​272 approaching and claiming public space, 266–​271 claiming home in the public space, 269–​270 defining public space, 264–​265 feeling at home in the public space, 267–​269 framing home in the public space, 266–​267 and geography of home, 262–​264 levels of homemaking, 265 minority homemaking, 265–​266 political significance of homemaking, 270–​271 home-​spaces, as sites of superdiversity, 247–​ 248, 255–​256 geographies of encounter, 248–​252 marriage migration, 254–​255 and politics of superdiversity, 252–​255 How Modernity Forgets (Connerton), 409 human rights and post-​Cold War world, 1 human rights, and intersectional discrimination, 75–​76 engagement by international courts, 80–​85 identifying discrimination and providing redress, 76–​78 implications of discrimination, 78–​80 methodology to address, 85 Humphris, Rachel, 29 identity, competing discourses about, 411–​412 identity politics, 345–​346 background and prominence of, 348–​349 from class politics to, 407–​408 collective action, 356 “defensive” identity politics, 350–​352 identity and search for recognition, 347–​348 identity as mental construct, 346–​347 and intersectionality, 353–​354

Index   495 multiple and group identities, 355–​356 new and shared identities, 354–​355 “offensive” identity politics, 349–​350, 351–​352 through the lens of superdiversity, 352–​355 immigration backlash against, 138, 142, 144–​145 and census data in United Kingdom, 194–​197, 197–​200 cultural pluralism and, 90–​91 and diversity in London, England, 143–​145 and diversity in Lyon, France, 140–​143 guest-​worker migration, 92–​93 immigrant acceptability in settler societies, 471–​472 and mainstreaming, 93 and multiculturalism, 93 “right-​to-​return,” laws addressing, 97–​98 See also migration, international indigenismo, 287, 289–​290 indigenous societies, and accelerated social and cultural change, 413–​414 Indonesia, postcolonial migration, 96–​97 inequality, and precarity and diversity, 329–​ 330, 338–​339 differential diversification, 331–​332 differential inclusion in Singapore, 333–​334 migrant moral risk, producing difference through, 335–​336 migrant precarity, 330–​331, 336–​338, 339f, 340f pandemic precarity, 336–​338 spatializing precarity, 334–​335 information and communication technologies (ICTs), 163–​165 digital ethnography, 165–​166 digital migration studies, 166–​168 innovation, in the study of superdiversity, 238–​239 complexity thinking, 225–​230 methodological innovation, 225–​230 qualitative data, 238 reasons for innovation, 228–​230 transdisciplinarity, 226–​228 urban social complexity, methods for studying, 230–​238, 231t1 institutional alienation, and the governance of superdiversity, 384

interaction effects, and background characteristics in research, 217 interscalarity, introducing into spatiality of superdiversity, 315–​316 intersectional discrimination, human rights and, 75–​76 engagement by international courts, 80–​85 identifying discrimination and providing redress, 76–​78 implications of discrimination, 78–​80 methodology to address, 85 intersectionality and background characteristics in research, 216–​217 historical perspective, 94 and identity politics, 353–​354 as perspective on multidimensionality, 210 social differentiation beyond, 35–​37 Islam, and diversity in Lyon, France, 141–​142 Jackson, Emma, 30–​31 Jones, Hannah, 30–​31 Kampala, Uganda, case study of diversity in, 138–​140 Kloosterman, Robert, 179 Kukutai, Tahu, 470, 473 language, and superdiversity, 108–​111 Latin America, diversification in, 287–​289, 295 antipathies, and social interactions, 292–​293 “bubble interactions,” 287, 293–​295 empathy, and social relationships, 292 historical roots, 289–​291, 294 migration to Latin America, 288–​289 self-​referential interactions, 293–​295 social networks, defining features of, 291–​293 sympathies, and social relationships, 291–​292 Lefebvre, Henri, 32 legal status, and superdiversity in everyday life, 422–​425 Leppänen, Sirpa, 112

496   Index linguistic landscapes, 156 Livingstone, S, 277–​278 Lloyd Warner, William, 364 London Brexit vote in and outside, 392–​393, 395–​396 case study of diversity in, 143–​145 Lyon, France, case study of diversity in, 140–​143 mainstreaming, 93 mapping, and ethnographies of superdiversity, 156 marriage migration, 254–​255 marriages, mixed-​racial, 354–​355 Massey, Doreen, 29, 31–​32 power-​geometries, 35 media, migrants and new, 163–​165 digital ethnography, 165–​166, 168–​172 digital migration studies, 166–​168 “megadiversity,” and diversification in Latin America, 294 Meissner, Fran capturing superdiversity in official data, 191–​192 on history of migration studies, 99 interconnected aspects of superdiversity, 275 on intersectionality, 94 Merry, Michael S., 278 mestizaje, 287, 289–​290 methodological innovation, complexity thinking and, 225–​230 metrics, and economic analysis of superdiversity, 62–​64 Mignolo, Walter D., 467–​468 migrant-​integration research, multidimensionality in, 213–​214 migrant moral risk, producing difference through, 335–​336 migrant-​owned businesses, 177–​178, 185–​186 mixed embeddedness, 182–​183 and politics of diversity, 185 psychodynamic approaches to examining, 181, 183–​185 self-​employment, motivating factors and challenges, 179–​180 and systems psychodynamics, 180

in United Kingdom, 178–​180 migrants, and new media, 163–​165 digital ethnography, 165–​166, 168–​172 digital migration studies, 166–​168 migration, international bifocality, 169–​170 and Brexit initiative, 390–​392 and census data in United Kingdom, 194–​197, 197–​200 complexification of, 22, 378–​379 and complex social transformation, 3, 5–​6 contribution to superdiversity, 2 and cultural pluralism, 90–​91 digital migration studies, 166–​168 Dubai, ethnicized divides in, 307–​308 and education for youth, 276–​278 and education in Netherlands, 278–​280 elite migrants, 316–​317 guest-​worker migration, 92–​93 and higher education in Netherlands, 282–​284 to Latin America, 288–​289 and mainstreaming, 93 marriage migration, 254–​255 migrant precarity, 330–​332 migrant statuses and social stratification, 365–​366 and multiculturalism, 93 rates of, 95 “right-​to-​return,” laws addressing, 97–​98 and statelessness, 441–​445 and superdiversity's disengagement from race, 360–​361 tourist to vagabond spectrum, 30–​31 and transnationalism, 18–​19 urban planning and, 50 and vocational education in Netherlands, 280–​282 See also home-​spaces, as sites of superdiversity; immigration migration studies, 366–​367 “mixity,” degrees of in diverse cities, 146 mobility, to multiplicity from, 30–​32 mobility sensor data, 225–​226 Moore, Terry, 473 multicultural coexistence, 417–​418, 429 everyday multiculturalism, 418–​421, 421f interlocking variables, 422

Index   497 legal status and temporality, 422–​425 neighborhood and work life, 425–​429 multiculturalism, 93 and microspaces of everyday life, 249 in settler societies, 474–​475 multiculture, 16–​18 multidimensionality, and superdiversity background characteristics in research, 216–​218 and interpretations of multidimensionality, 215–​216 in migrant-​integration research, 213–​214 multidimensionality, defined, 210–​211 quantitative research in, 209–​210, 219–​220 in race studies, 215 within related scholarship, 211–​216 research implications and challenges, 216–​219 and research outcomes, 218–​219 in social exclusion literature, 212–​213 multiplexity, as perspective on multidimensionality, 210–​211 multiplicity, from mobility to, 30–​32 nationalism, and Brexit initiative, 393–​395, 397 Ndhlovu, Finex, 125 Neighborhoods and feeling at home in the public space, 267–​269 and multicultural coexistence, 425–​429 urban planning and, 48–​49 See also home-​spaces, as sites of superdiversity neighborhood scale, and folded space, 33–​38 Netherlands, case studies of education in, 276, 278–​280 vocational education, 280–​282 new media, migrants and, 163–​165 digital ethnography, 165–​166, 168–​172 digital migration studies, 166–​168 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and diversity governance, 383 Ortiz, Fernando, 17 “overheating,” and cultural and social change, 404–​406 class politics to identity politics, 407–​408

identity, competing discourses about, 411–​412 identity, significance of, 406–​407 plural or postplural society, 412–​414 superdiversity and, 409–​411 “parallel lives,” and diversity in London, 144–​145 Pemberton, Simon, 49 plural society, 412–​414 political alienation, and the governance of superdiversity, 384–​385 politics of superdiversity, 252–​255 polycentricity, 111 postcolonialism and diversity in highly regulated global cities, 305 postcolonial migration, 96–​97 and diversity in Kampala, Uganda, 138–​140 and diversity in London, England, 143–​145 and diversity in Lyon, France, 140–​143 postplural society, 412–​414 power-​geometries, 35–​37 precarity, and inequality and diversity, 329–​330, 338–​339 differential diversification, 331–​332 differential inclusion in Singapore, 333–​334 migrant moral risk, producing difference through, 335–​336 migrant precarity, 330–​331, 336–​338, 339f, 340f pandemic precarity, 336–​338 spatializing, 334–​335 problem alienation, and the governance of superdiversity, 383–​384 process tracing, 236 public space, homemaking in, 261–​262, 271–​272 approaching and claiming public space, 266–​271 defining public space, 264–​265 feeling at home in the public space, 267–​269 framing home in the public space, 266–​267 and geography of home, 262–​264 levels of homemaking, 265 minority homemaking, 265–​266 political significance of homemaking, 270–​271

498   Index qualitative data, and emergent conditions, 238 race and census data in United Kingdom, 194–​195 and descriptions of diversity, 139–​140, 142, 144 mixed-​racial marriages, 354–​355 and multiculture, 17–​18 in online spaces, 171 race contingent hierarchies of “whiteness,” 363–​364 critical race scholarship, 365, 367 ethnicity vs. race, 361–​362 integration and, 368–​372 and migration, 360–​361 migration studies, 366–​367 and racialization, 279, 362, 364, 367–​368, 369 social stratification, 365–​366 superdiversity's disengagement from, 359–​360, 361t, 364–​365, 372 race studies, multidimensionality in, 215 Rampton, Ben, 113 Rata, Arama, 470, 473 redistribution strategies, urban planning and, 50–​51 regression analysis, and economic analysis of superdiversity, 67–​69, 68t relational space, superdiverse urban, 32–​33 “right-​to-​return,” laws addressing, 97–​98 Rist, Ray C., 92–​93 Romani populations, statelessness among, 444–​445 Sefton-​Green, J., 277–​278 self-​employment, motivating factors and challenges, 179–​180 settler societies, 465–​466, 476–​477 decoloniality and critique of superdiversity, 467–​468, 475–​476 immigrant acceptability, 471–​472 indigeneity in, 469–​471 multiculturalism in, 474–​475 settler colonialism, 466–​467 white hegemony, 472–​474 Sigona, Nando, 29

Silverstein, Michael, 108 Singapore COVID-​19 pandemic, and migrant precarity, 336–​338 differential inclusion in, 333–​334 migrant moral risk, producing difference through, 335–​336 multicultural coexistence in, 425–​427 multiracialism and co-​ethnic immigration in, 305–​307 spatializing precarity and diversity, 334–​335 smartphones, and international migration, 168–​169 Smith, Michael Peter, 34 social alienation, and the governance of superdiversity, 385 social differentiation, beyond intersectionality, 35–​37 social exclusion literature, multidimensionality in, 212–​213 social identification, and accelerated change, 403–​406 boundedness and openness, 408–​409 class politics to identity politics, 407–​408 identity, competing discourses about, 411–​412 plural or postplural society, 412–​414 significance of identity, 406–​407 superdiversity and, 409–​411 social inequality and complex social transformation, 4 social mixing, urban planning and, 50 social network analysis, 226 social networks, defining features of in Latin America, 291–​293 social policy, and superdiversity, 121–​124, 130 agenda for action, 126–​129 criticisms and opportunities, 124–​126 real-​world research, 129–​130 social transformation, complex, 2–​6 sociolinguistics, 107–​108 combinatorial spaces, 112–​113 language and superdiversity, 108–​111 online-​offline nexus, 113–​115 speech communities, 113–​114 sociospatial diversifications from above, 317–​319

Index   499 from below, 319–​321 from the middle and beyond, 321 spatiality, of superdiversity, 313, 321–​323 and global cities, 316–​317 introducing interscalarity, 315–​316 sociospatial diversifications, 317–​321 transnational migration, 314 speech communities, 113–​114 Spoonley, P., 123 Sri Lanka, postcolonial migration, 96, 201 Srole, Leo, 364 Stam, Talitha, 281–​282 statelessness, 98 statelessness, through a superdiversity lens, 435–​436, 445 migration and minority populations, 441–​445 “right to return” and “right to stay,” 438–​441 topologies of citizenship and statelessness, 436–​438 structural equation modeling (SEM), 236–​237 superdiversity aspects of, 89–​90, 181–​182 conducting research on, 4 criticism of, 182 definition of, 1, 4–​5 uses of, 90 uses of term, 107–​108 superdiversity, comparisons of, 137–​138, 145–​147 Kampala, Uganda, 138–​140 London, England, 143–​145 Lyon, France, 140–​143 superdiversity, mapping, 27–​29, 38 affective atmospheres, 37–​38 from mobility to multiplicity, 30–​32 neighborhood scale and folded space, 33–​38 power-​geometries, 35–​37 scales of superdiversity, 29 urban relational space, 32–​33 See also urban planning systems psychodynamics, and ethnic-​minority enterprises, 177–​178, 180, 185–​186 mixed embeddedness, 182–​183 and politics of diversity, 185 psychodynamic approaches to examining, 181, 183–​185 United Kingdom, 178–​180

Taylor, Charles, 347 temporality, urban planning and, 47, 458 territory, dimensions of struggle for urban, 454–​459 composing a commons, 454–​455 domestic territories, 455–​456 land as active space, 459 multiplication of temporalities, 458 popular institutions, 456 and technologies of urban governance, 457–​458 transdisciplinarity, methodological innovation through, 226–​228 transnationalism, 16–​19 and elite migrants, 316–​317 and information and communication technologies, 168–​170 and sociospatial diversifications, 317–​321 transnational migration, 314 Treaty of Amsterdam, 82 Tremlett, Abigail, 126 Uganda, case study of diversity in Kampala, 138–​140 United Kingdom census data outputs, 197–​200 decennial census and immigration, 194–​195 decennial census and superdiversity, 192–​194 enhancing census capture of superdiversity, 195–​197 migrant-​owned businesses in, 178–​180 using census data to describe and analyze, 200–​203 See also Brexit, superdiversity through the lens of United Nations, engagement with intersectional discrimination and human rights, 84–​85 urban economics, of superdiversity, 59–​60, 69–​7 1 economic analysis, 60–​61 empirics of economic analysis, 64–​69, 65t, 66t metrics of economic analysis, 62–​64 regression analysis, 67–​69, 68t

500   Index urban life, popular economies and territories of operation, 459–​460 dispersed urban life, 449–​451 struggle for territory, 454–​459 technologies of urban governance, 457–​458 territories of operation, 451–​453 urban planning, 43–​44, 52–​53 co-​creation and, 51, 52b consultation and engagement in, 47–​48 current debates, 45–​48 and international migration, 50 neighborhoods, characteristics of, 48–​49 and redistribution strategies, 50–​51 research themes, 48–​52 See also superdiversity, mapping urban relational space, 32–​33 urban social complexity, innovative methods for studying, 230–​238, 231t1 diversity in agents' or variables' characteristics, 234–​235 emergent conditions, 237–​238 multimodal research and interdependency of agents and variables, 235 multiplicity of agents or variables, 230–​233 outcomes and trajectories, 236–​237 qualitative data, 238 Varis, Piia, 31 Velayutham, Selvaraj, 418 Vertovec, Steven aspects and uses of superdiversity, 89–​90 comparing superdiversities, 137

definition of superdiversity, 389–​390 on history of migration studies, 99 information technology and new social formations, 163 interconnected aspects of superdiversity, 275 on intersectionality, 94 introduction of superdiversity, 15, 410–​411 London, diversity in, 144 migrant statuses, 365 multidimensionality and superdiversity, 211 original conceptualization of superdiversity, 359, 360 social features of superdiversity, 59, 181–​182 social policy, 121 use of superdiversity concept, 5, 31 Walby, Sarah, 4 Waldinger, Roger D., 179 Wallman, Sandra, 145 Wessendorf, Susanne, 411–​412 “whiteness,” contingent hierarchies of, 363–​364 Wise, Amanda, 418 youth, and education, 275–​278, 284 Netherlands, case studies in, 278–​280 Netherlands, higher education in, 282–​284 Netherlands, vocational education, 280–​282 Zapata-​Barrero, R., 354