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The contributors to the Superdiversity book symposium welcome the myriad ways that scholars from a variety of research fields and social scientific disciplines have adopted the concept across varying scales, sites and social phenomena. Each writer nevertheless stresses the need to place any application of the term, descriptively or analytically, within specific social, political and historical contexts. Superdiversity appears very different depending upon an array of conditions – hence we observe a variety of context-dependent superdiversities. This point holds too for categories – especially ones drawn from colonial histories – that comprise differing configurations of superdiversity. These are also highly contextual. It is suggested that the superdiversity concept helps us to "unsee" purportedly fixed, uni-dimensional categories like ethnicity and to place more emphasis on multiple, intersectional combinations of categories. The re-thinking of categories and their contexts might also help us imagine possible superdiversity futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapidly diversifying societies, rising inequalities and the increasing significance of social differences are concurrent processes calling for a reexamination and reworking of certain conceptual and theoretical tools within the social sciences. Here, bringing together a range of theories and findings from various disciplines, a conceptual model is offered to facilitate analyses of such intertwined social processes. The model highlights mutually conditioning relationships between the fundamental conceptual domains of: social structures (here described as configurations), social categories (or representations) and social interactions (or encounters). The connections between these domains produce and reproduce, differentially in distinct times, scales and contexts, what can be called "the social organization of difference". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of super-diversity has been widely evoked - sometimes in highly misleading ways. Based on a survey of 325 publications across multiple disciplines, this special issue endword piece presents a typology of ways of understanding super-diversity. This includes addressing super-diversity as: a contemporary synonym of diversity, a backdrop for a study, a call for methodological reassessment, a way of simply talking about more ethnicity, a multidimensional reconfiguration of social forms, a call to move beyond ethnicity, and a device for drawing attention to new social complexities. Indeed, I believe the latter - the search for better ways to describe and analyze new social patterns, forms and identities arising from migration-driven diversification - is perhaps the most driving reason for expanding interests and uses, however varied, surrounding the concept of super-diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on communities, conditions and contexts of diversity towards post-multiculturalism and model as contributing to a demise of the welfare state and the failure of public services. It mentions forms of immigration impacted on multicultural theories and relationships of immigrants with sending countries. It also mentions seek to foster both the recognition of diversity and the maintenance of collective national identities.

The author comments on Suzi Hall's commentary on his article on the migration milieu. Topics covered include the argument of Hall that the notion of super-diversity should be explicitly related to the structures and processes of power and inequality conditioned by a worsening migration milieu, the multiple discriminations resulting from the regulation of movement across borders, and the opportunities, restrictions and consequences for migrants and asylum-seeker set by these policies.

Reflecting a broadening interest in finding new ways to talk about contemporary social complexity, the concept of ‘super-diversity’ has received considerable attention since it was introduced in this journal in 2007. Many utilizing the term have referred only to ‘more ethnicities’ rather than to the term's fuller, original intention of recognizing multidimensional shifts in migration patterns. These entail a worldwide diversification of migration channels, differentiations of legal statuses, diverging patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants' human capital. In this special issue ofEthnic and Racial Studies, the concept is subject to two modes of comparison: (1) side-by-side studies contrasting different places and emergent conditions of super-diversity; and (2) juxtaposed arguments that have differentially found use in utilizing or criticizing super-diversity descriptively, methodologically or with reference to policy and public practice. The contributions discuss super-diversity and its implications in nine cities located in eight countries and four continents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conviviality across a number of disciplines now conveys a deeper concern with the human condition and how we think about human modes of togetherness. This collection of essays illustrates some of the ways conviviality can be used as an analytical tool to ask and explore the ways and conditions for living together. This introduction surveys a number of key ideas and meanings of ‘conviviality’ across various disciplines providing the readers with an overview of usages and understandings of the term. It identifies gaps in the existing literature, proposes how a comparative perspective elucidates the concepts and shows how the articles within this Special Issue contribute analytically to our understanding of conviviality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrant cultures are routinely posed as threats to national culture. Particular understandings of immigrant and national cultures underlie cultural politics. Culturalism-conceiving cultures as reified, static, and homogeneous across bounded groups-imbues these understandings. Representations of immigrant and national culture are mutually constituted in policies, state institutions, the media, and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law. Furthermore, coupled with a popular or commonsense structural-functionalism that sees all cultural values and practices as inherently interlinked, many modes of cultural politics are contextually stimulated by anxieties about cultural loss. At critical junctures, certain representations gain powerful roles in cultural politics through synecdoche, when specific symbols stand for an integrated set of cultural attributes. Examples include Muslim head scarves in France and the 'ground zero mosque' in the United States. Anthropologists can usefully mitigate culturalism and contribute to public debates by promoting more processual and distributive understandings of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the millennium, multiculturalism - a term spanning a variety of policies and institutional frameworks - has been seriously challenged in a number of ways. While critics have increasingly attacked multiculturalism and blamed it for numerous social problems, the nature of global migration and modes of immigrant belonging have themselves changed considerably since the time when multicultural models were first established. By way of exploring the post-multiculturalist condition into which, some commentators suggest, we are all moving, this article addresses the following questions: what are the changing public discourses surrounding multiculturalism? What are the characteristics of new forms of immigration, and how have these new forms of immigration impacted on multicultural theories? What are the relationships of immigrants with sending countries? How do all of these patterns contribute to what might be called post-multiculturalism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a kind of boom time for the anthropology of migration. Anthropologists are currently studying a wide range of migration-related topics. Many of them, of course, are not entirely new: anthropologists have been researching migration dynamics and impacts since at least the 1930s (most notably within the Manchester School of anthropology). Since the 1970s the discipline's burgeoning interest in ethnicity has largely entailed research on post-migration communities. Since the 1990s, migrant transnationalism has become one of the most fashionable topics. There is still much to do in research and theory around migration, not least with regard to public debates around multiculturalism. This introduction suggests a number of possible new directions for anthropological inquiry into migration and multiculturalism, and summarizes the special issue's contributing articles in light of their contributions toward moving the discipline in these directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be. Some thirty years of government policies, social service practices and public perceptions have been framed by a particular understanding of immigration and multicultural diversity. That is, Britain's immigrant and ethnic minority population has conventionally been characterized by large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or formerly colonial territories. Policy frameworks and public understanding - and, indeed, many areas of social science - have not caught up with recently emergent demographic and social patterns. Britain can now be characterized by 'super-diversity,' a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade. Outlined here, new patterns of super-diversity pose significant challenges for both policy and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on migrant transnationalism focuses on the ways that specific sociocultural institutions have been modified in the course of being stretched across the globe. Yet migrant transnational practices are involved in more deep-seated patterns of change or structural transformation. Such modes of transformation concern: 1) an enhanced 'bifocality' of outlooks underpinning migrant lives lived here-and-there; such dual orientations have considerable influence on transnational family life and may continue to affect identities among subsequent post-migration generations; 2) heightened challenges to 'identities-borders-orders' stemming from migrants' political affiliations in more than one nation-state; these particularly arise around questions of dual citizenship and nationality; and 3) potentially profound impacts on economic development by way of the sheer scale and evolving means of remittance sending; money transfer services, hometown associations and micro-finance institutions represent three kinds of remittance-related organizations currently undergoing significant forms of adaptation with significant consequences for development. These modes of transformation, and the practices of migrant transnationalism surrounding them, both draw from and contribute to wider processes of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although globalization has usually been associated with advanced communications technology, arguably nothing has facilitated global linkage more than the boom in ordinary, cheap international telephone calls. Low-cost calls serve as a kind of social glue connecting small-scale social formations across the globe. In this article I present recent data on the rapid growth and diffusion of telephone traffic and describe the proliferation of prepaid phonecards. Second, I outline the commercial, social and geographical ramifications of this explosion in transnational communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological notions such as social network, social capital and embeddedness have proven valuable when adopted into a wide variety of social scientific fields. This has certainly been the case in the sociology of migration. Similarly, certain concepts drawn from studies on different modes of transnationalism -- for instance, research and theory concerning the global activities of social movements and business networks -- might serve as useful tools for understanding transnational social forms and practices among migrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnationalism and identity are concepts that inherently call for juxtaposition. This is so because many peoples' transnational networks of exchange and participation are grounded upon some perception of common identity; conversely, the identities of numerous individuals and groups of people are negotiated within social worlds that span more than one place. In this introductory article, the transnational perspective on migration studies is first discussed, followed by some critiques and outstanding questions. The final section summarises points raised by the contributing authors of the main articles in this themed issue of JEMS, especially with regard to various ways transnational settings and dynamics affect the construction, negotiation and reproduction of identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of recent research across several disciplines not surprisingly finds a wide variety of descriptions surrounding meanings, processes, scales and methods concerning the notion of 'transnationalism'. Here, several clusters or themes are suggested by way of disentangling the term. These include transnationalism as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of 'place' or locality. These and other approaches to transnationalism are being explored in a newly commissioned ESRC research programme on Transnational Communities (see http:// www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the name of 'muIticulturalism', western societies have witnessed since the 1980s a proliferation of discourses concerning the general place of minorities, programmes designed to foster equality, institutional structures created to provide better social services, and resources extended to ethnic minority organizations. Despite much goodwill and not inconsiderable evidence of progress in local and national initiatives concerning minorities, however, such developments have often in effect excluded minorities from, rather than facilities their engagement with, the majority public domain. In significant ways this has been because many public policies and Wider political discourses surrounding multiculturalism tend to employ ill-defined ideas and implicit notions - particularly regarding `culture' which, when operationalized, function socially and politically to separate and distance members of given minorities. These `culturalist' underpinnings found in a variety of multi-culturalist initiatives can be seen to echo or to parallel views espoused in the so-called new cultural racism'. Examples on the level of local government authorities in Britain are cited. Clearly, initiatives promoting all forms of equality for minorities must encouraged while culturalism'-in-multi-culturalism must be overcome. Instead of attempting to redefine `culture for policy-makers, the author suggests that in rethinking and restructuring modes of public incorporation affecting minorities (roughly following certain key ideas of M.G. Smith on plural societies, John Rex and Bhikhu Parekh on the public domain), we may be able to begin to move beyond some currently exclusive and divisive aspects of institutionalized multiculturalism. Certain modes of local government interface in the British city of Leicester which have been co-developed by local government authorities, by a complex range of local Islamic Organizations, by a uniquely successful Muslim representative federation, and by prominent Muslim individuals are examined by way of suggesting one new model of public incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the development of Hinduism in the Caribbean context specifically in Guyana. Evolution of Caribbean Hinduism as an ethnicization of religion under Brahman leadership; Diversity of the backgrounds of Indian immigrants to the Caribbean; Importance of overseas Hinduism on the anthropology of Hinduism.

ABSTRACT Although 'multiculturalism' is a terra increasingly employed in social science and in the public sphere, there is a dearth of comparative research and a lack of detailed studies showing the complexity of social groups, the variety of their forms of organization, and their emergent forms of interaction or interface with local government which the terra 'multiculturalism' should ideally entail. Here, set in the context of the British East Midlands city of Leicester, an examination of the makeup, socio-economic position, organizational structure, and nature of government interface surrounding one minority segment is provided to indicate such complexity anti variety and to submit material for further comparative study. Numerous layered and cross-cutting backgrounds, identities, and mobilized groups among Asians are described, as are several significant modes and processes of interaction and political representation, particularly among Muslim citizens. In highlighting the activities of certain individuals, association and umbrella groups representing minorities, together with programmes and undertakings initiated by local government, the importance of minorities having multiple points of interface is stressed by way of proposing more progressive models of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of immigration and the citizenship policies in Europe. Post-war immigration to Europe has involved some 30 million people, making this one of the greatest migratory movements in human history throughout Europe. The UNESCO-MOST project "Multicultural Policies and Modes of Citizenship in European Cities" (MPMC) will, in many ways, amount to a kind of complex mapping exercise. A great variety of institutions, frameworks, policies and processes concerning the participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in local political affairs will be observed and compared across Europe. The research and the feedback received from both policy-makers and immigrant/ethnic minority groups themselves will doubtless raise new questions as to the degree of effectiveness different kinds of representation and consultation. The MPMC project will provide significant contemporary material with which people can explore "citizenship" in its broadest sense of bringing excluded people more fully into the democratic process. INSET: Management of social transformation (MOST).

Trinidad has been the setting for several important studies of both ethnic differentiation and religious syncretism. Rarely, however, have these topics been related to each other. This article explores ways in which perceived forms of convergence in belief and practice have developed among certain ethnically specific traditions: Shango and the Spiritual Baptist faith among Africans and Kali Mai puja among Hindu Indians. Factors contributing to this process include: common approaches to, and beliefs about, a localized supernatural world; parallel features surrounding ceremonial spirit possession; and among religious leaders, modes of competition to demonstrate a wide range of spiritual competence. Such forms of perceived convergence (often mis-attributed to genuine syncretism), it is argued, are largely made possible by the considerable social distance between Africans and Indians in Trinidad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence suggests that in many European countries generally positive views about societal diversity predominate. Yet, as research has rather focussed on negative attitudes towards immigration and diversity, less is known about positive attitudes and those who hold them. The paper makes a conceptual and an empirical contribution to filling this gap. We introduce a multidimensional concept, “diversity assent”, to capture both evaluations of diversity and attitudes towards reflecting diversity in societal institutions. We test the concept using the case of urban Germany, drawing from a large, purpose-built survey. We demonstrate that, while assent differs for the two dimensions, a sizeable majority of those who evaluate diversity positively also agree with representing diversity in official policy and institutions, with some differences along socio-political lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reframe the understanding of globalization and transnationalism with Covid-19 and Global Networks. Topics include fundamentally changing the practices of transnational actors and their constituent networks in both global and local affairs; and engage in social encounters perpetuating global-local relations and sustaining networks and connections.

In this paper we advocate the study of local street markets to explore fundamental issues about the relationship between economy and society. This relationship evolves over time and we believe that it has been recast in an age of increasing cultural diversity and neo-liberal state regulatory structures. In street markets we can see how diversity and the nature of economic transactions become mutually constitutive. We argue that cultural diversity propels local markets, while everyday interactions in markets influence intercultural relationships. These complex processes are affected by the spatiality of markets and the regulatory environments within which they operate. We conclude by framing a research programme on street markets and discuss a number of methodological complications that would need to be addressed in this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces a series of articles on transnational migration.

Provides an overview of the periodical 'Global Networks.' Objectives; Disciplines; Choice of the journal title; Developments in the journal.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread worries that the health crisis is resulting in generalized hostility towards minorities and reduced support for a diverse society. Relying on a large survey of diversity attitudes in Germany fielded before and during the pandemic, we employ a quasi-experimental design to evaluate whether such a trend has occurred among the general public. Past work suggests two competing expectations – one anticipating a rise in hostility grounded in threat theories, and one anticipating stability grounded in public opinion research and theories of longer-term value change. Empirical results reveal generally high assent to socio-demographic diversity and minority accommodation, and remarkable stability during the pandemic period. Additionally, survey vignettes show strong and equally stable anti-discrimination norms that are inclusive of Asian-origin populations. Overall, results suggest that surges in racist incidents during the pandemic do not reflect analogous surges in hostility within the population at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the effects of direct and indirect forms of contact on intergroup relations are well documented, little is known about their longitudinal co-development. Based on the social-psychological literature, we hypothesize that indirect contact predicts future direct contact by reducing intergroup anxiety. Across five longitudinal studies (Study I: German adults, N = 560; Study 2: German, Dutch, and Swedish school students, N = 6,600: Study 3: Northern Irish children, N = 1,593; Study 4: Northern Irish adults, N = 404; Study 5: German adults, N = 735), we systematically examined this effect, and further tested the mediating role of intergroup anxiety in Studies 3 to 5. Cross-lagged models provided consistent evidence for the positive effect of indirect contact on future direct contact, whereas a reduction in intergroup anxiety mediates this effect in most models. Results highlight the importance of indirect contact, which has the potential to increase direct contact, and thus promote social cohesion in diverse contexts, over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assessed evidence for a contextual effect of positive intergroup contact, whereby the effect of intergroup contact between social contexts (the between-level effect) on outgroup prejudice is greater than the effect of individual-level contact within contexts (the within-level effect). Across seven large-scale surveys (five cross-sectional and two longitudinal), using multilevel analyses, we found a reliable contextual effect. This effect was found in multiple countries, operationalizing context at multiple levels (regions, districts, and neighborhoods), and with and without controlling for a range of demographic and context variables. In four studies (three cross-sectional and one longitudinal) we showed that the association between context-level contact and prejudice was largely mediated by more tolerant norms. In social contexts where positive contact with outgroups was more commonplace, norms supported such positive interactions between members of different groups. Thus, positive contact reduces prejudice on a macrolevel, whereby people are influenced by the behavior of others in their social context, not merely on a microscale, via individuals' direct experience of positive contact with outgroup members. These findings reinforce the view that contact has a significant role to play in prejudice reduction, and has great policy potential as a means to improve intergroup relations, because it can simultaneously impact large numbers of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between neighbourhood diversity, various forms of intergroup contact and trust in a sample of native Germans clustered in 50 neighbourhoods in several German cities. The authors argue that the consideration and direct measurement of intergroup contact is essential for fully comprehending the consequences of rising ethno-cultural diversity in Western democracies. Our results show that neighbourhood immigration-related diversity in itself does not exert the same negative effects on generalized and outgroup trust as found in the North American context. Instead, intergroup contact moderates the effects of neighbourhood diversity. The results add to our understanding of the different socio-political consequences of immigration-related diversity and immigrant contact in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]