Item

Abstract

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.