Youth in Superdiverse Societies

Growing up with globalization, diversity, and acculturation

Peter F. Titzmann, Philipp Jugert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138488397
• eBook ISBN: 9781000712018
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Youth in Superdiverse Societies

brings together theoretical, methodological and international approaches to the study of globalization, diversity, and acculturation in adolescence. It examines vital issues including migration, integration, cultural identities, ethnic minorities, and the interplay of ethnic and cultural diversity with experiences of growing up as an adolescent. This important volume focuses on understanding the experiences and consequences of multicultural societies and offers valuable new insights in the field of intergroup relations and the complexity of growingly heterogeneous societies.

The book comprises four sections. The first includes fresh theoretical perspectives for studying youth development in multicultural societies, exploring topics such as superdiversity, globalization, bicultural identity development, polyculturalism, the interplay of acculturation and development, as well as developmental-ecological approaches. The second section highlights innovative methods in studying multicultural societies. It contains innovative dynamic concepts (e.g., experience-based sampling), methods for studying the nested structure of acculturative contexts, and suggestions for cross-comparative research to differentiate universal and context-specific processes. The third section examines social relations and social networks in diverse societies and features developmentally crucial contexts (e.g., family, peers, schools) and contributions on interethnic interactions in real-life contexts. The final section presents applications in natural settings and includes contributions on participatory action research and teachers dealings' with ethnic diversity. Each chapter provides a thorough overview of current research trends and findings, followed by detailed recommendations for future research, suggesting how the approaches can be cited, applied and improved.

Youth in Superdiverse Societies

is valuable reading for students studying adolescent acculturation and development in psychology, sociology, education, anthropology, linguistics and political science. It will also be of interest to scholars and researchers in social and developmental psychology, and related disciplines, as well as professionals in the field of migration.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Conceptual considerations

Chapter 1

Growing up with difference

Superdiversity as a habitual frame of reference¹

Fran Meissner

Today many young people are diversity natives as much as they are digital natives. They have to be able to use various registers to make sense of and engage with how migration-driven diversity is impacting on their lives. It is not surprising that generational specificities of experiencing living in contexts of diversity are gaining in academic interest. Today urban and increasingly also rural youth grow up in social contexts that are so imbued with the implications of international migration that migration-driven diversity has become a habitual frame of reference – a fact of everyday life. Socio-demographic changes are no longer just evident at the margins of society, they are perceived as central to our social fabrics.

Rapid changes in the prevalence of migration have gone hand in hand with a complexification of diversity. This is due to changing migration patterns, with migrants moving from more origins to fewer destinations (Czaika & Haas, 2014). More importantly those trends are tightly intertwined with new ways of regulating migration, migrants, and migration-driven diversity itself. The term superdiversity was coined to better make sense of the simultaneity of those changes (Vertovec, 2007). Superdiversity was ‘to encapsulate a range of […] changing variables surrounding migration patterns – and, significantly, their interlinkages – which amount to a recognition of complexities that supersede previous patterns and perceptions’ (Meissner & Vertovec, 2015, p. 542: emphasis added). Superdiversity challenges reductionist approaches to studying the implications of international migration (Vertovec, 2017b). The term is not about how ‘super’ diversity is. Instead, it presents a complexity-sensitive notion of diversity and diversification processes. Adopting a superdiversity lens poses a number of challenges for studying youth in multicultural societies – including how to approach and theorise research and who or what is made the focus of research. Further, comparatively thinking with superdiversity can shed light on both contextual and broader patterns of how difference comes to matter for young people, both those settled in place and those on the move.

The notion of superdiversity is not always used in-line with the above given definition. In fact, over the past decade, the word has been so frequently invoked that its meanings and adaptations proliferated beyond original intentions (Vertovec, 2017a). Superdiversity – concertedly applied – however, is an important intervention for studying youth in multicultural societies. The aim of this chapter is to substantiate this argument. I will first discuss how superdiversity has come to be a central anchor in the migration and ethnic studies literature. In doing so, I will comment both on the sea changes in the literature that accompanied the consolidation of superdiversity as a research field and on a number of recent criticisms leveraged against the notion. I then briefly expand on why superdiversity should be of central importance for studying youth and negotiations of difference. I specifically highlight why a focus on youth exposes the need to be vigilant about equating diversity as a habitual frame of reference with overly positively connoted ideas about diversity as the new normal. In conclusion, I will comment on the relevance of this chapter to the collection of essays in this book.

Superdiversity as a malleable concept for studying emergent social configurations

Like previous concepts that posed a significant challenge to how international migration and its implications are researched and thought about, superdiversity is omnipresent in the recent literature. As Alba and Duyvendak note:

Today, any European scholar addressing issues of migration, integration, and (ethnic) diversity who does not explicitly take into account the notion of super-diversity runs the risk of being reproached for neglecting the ‘new multicultural condition of the 21st century’.

(2017, pp. 1–2)

To offer a flip-side to this statement, when I am presented with work that claims to use superdiversity, I often find that it has little if anything to add to better understanding the challenges posed by superdiversity as defined in the introduction. In other words, I often voice the opposite reproach from the one Alba and Duyvendak suggest. If I see the term used as only a meagre complexification of an otherwise very conventional ethno-focal analysis, I ask authors why they use superdiversity – and I encourage students of migration-driven diversity to do the same. While superdiversity’s prominence leads to (sometimes productive) criticisms, its omnipresence also fosters confusions about what superdiversity refers to and how it can add to our debates. I here see the attention paid to the term as an invitation to explore the potency of thinking through and with superdiversity to spur on innovative research.

To explain what I mean by thinking through and with superdiversity, it is necessary to trace the development of the term since its inception. As I note elsewhere (Meissner, 2015), superdiversity was introduced to debates about the implications of international migration at a very specific juncture in the migration and ethnic studies literature. That juncture was marked by a stalemate: authors in the field came to realise that research conclusions too frequently amounted to not much more than saying that ‘things were more complex’. This lead some scholars to note that ‘we need to do better than that […] it is necessary to specify in which ways “things are more complex”’ (Hylland Eriksen, 2007, p. 1059). This very particular juncture is often forgotten when superdiversity is used to refer to a ‘new multi-cultural condition of the 21st century’ and when the notion is employed as a descriptive term that itself merely indexes that things are more complex or varied. This cannot suffice if the overarching goal of superdiversity research is precisely to move beyond seeking simple explanations and conclusions (Vertovec, 2017b).

In the now more than ten years since the publication of the original article introducing superdiversity to the scholarly debate (Vertovec, 2007), much has changed in the research landscape. Multiple special issues have been published that revolve around the term (Androutsopoulos & Juffermans, 2014; Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton, & Spotti, 2012; Foner, Duyvendak, & Kasinitz, 2017; Geerts, Withaeckx, & van den Brandt, 2018; Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2017; Meissner & Vertovec, 2016; Phillimore, Sigona, & Tonkiss, 2017). The original superdiversity article has – according to google scholar – been cited over 3000 times, making it one of the youngest seminal articles in the field. Significant research time (and money) has been invested in projects that adopted some version of a superdiversity lens and entire research centres are devoted to uniting work on superdiversity.² The resulting research has significantly impacted on how the term is used and how it is empirically made sense of. Superdiversity is a malleable concept (Meissner, 2015) that is filled with more concrete meaning through research and through critically reflecting on the developments that research points to. Such an empirically substantiated and critically reflected agenda setting, with frequent reviews of its own subject matter, is at the heart of what thinking through and with superdiversity is about. It is also at the heart of what sets superdiversity apart from the many ‘isms’ that otherwise dominate research agendas.³

But what does superdiversity in very basic terms refer to? In his article originally coining the term, Vertovec (2007) emphasised various blind spots in how migration was diversifying social contexts. Specific focus was on ‘a dynamic interplay of variables [relating to] [1] multiple-origin, [2] transnationally connected, [3] socio-economically differentiated and [4] legally stratified immigrants’ (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1024). In the same article Vertovec adds [5] differentiated gender and age patterns of migrant cohorts as another important aspect. Subsequent work has noted further blind-spots and often emphasises the role of the spatiality of diversity, the temporalities of change, and the interplay between legal stratification and other instruments of migrant control (e.g. access to social support services). Notably many of these aspects are changeable and sometimes difficult to anchor in hard and fast categories of difference. Growing up with difference viewed through a superdiversity lens is not only about making sense of an expanded taxonomy of difference. It is not about devising more and more detailed categories. Superdiversity provides us with a concept that calls for better connecting of the multiple dimensions of differentiation by moving beyond simply stating that things are more complex.

This basic definition shows that superdiversity was never a theory. This means that the word itself was never meant to give insights into how the dynamic interplay of those different aspects works – nor how it ought to work. One of the initial aims of introducing superdiversity was to move beyond a then pervasive and mono-focal ethnic lens. Noting that superdiversity was never a theory (Vertovec, 2017b) counters one recurring criticism, namely that the term suggests a rigid and necessarily positive picture of diversity (Makoni, 2012). Rather than precluding theoretical pluralism, which is another criticism (Ndhlovu, 2015), thinking through superdiversity invites multiple ways of addressing, poking at, and questioning the riddles that arise when thinking about multidimensional differentiations – and most importantly about how these come about, transmute, and co-evolve within multilateral and temporally shifting regulatory regimes (Hall, 2017; Nieswand, 2018).

Superdiversity has been used in many ways. In a recent article Vertovec (2017a) presents a typology that points to no less than seven ways of using the term. If we agree with his assessment that what should propel the use of superdiversity is finding ‘better ways to describe and analyse new social patterns, forms and identities arising from migration-driven diversification’ (Vertovec, 2017a, p. 1) we can focus on the domains that contribute towards this goal.

Three waves of superdiversity research

To more clearly delineate uses of superdiversity we can note that the term, over the past ten years, has mostly engaged with three domains – descriptive work documenting a diversification of diversity, practical applications that engage with the ‘So what?’ and the ‘What next?’ once a diversified diversity has been recognised, and finally theoretical and methodological innovation which allow looking at diversification processes with novel tools or data (Meissner & Vertovec, 2015). To situate these domains, I here use the analogy of a set of waves that are entangled and intertwined but distinctly evident.

Encounters in diversifying contexts are a central theme of what we might call the first wave of superdiversity research. Often this work is focussing on the increasing everydayness of migration-driven diversity in primarily urban settings (Neal, Bennett, Jones, Cochrane, & Mohan, 2015; e.g. Wessendorf, 2014; Wise & Velayutham, 2009; Ye, 2016). This focus was particularly strong in early work referring to superdiversity, but it continues to be relevant. Criticisms that gesture towards an insufficiently critical or ahistorical presentation of superdiversity (Back & Sinha, 2016; Sealy, 2018) tend to focus on this wave. One of the goals of this work is to make sense of how and when diversity works – an important and necessary exercise that provides a needed balance to research and public discourse focused on instances when the implications of migration are characterised as an obstacle to social cohesion. This specific focus sought out positively or ambivalently connoted examples of how people muddle through in light of tremendous differentiations. One of the most prominent and most citied examples of this work is Wessendorf’s (2014) ethnographic study in the London borough of Hackney where she notes that migration-driven diversity in this setting was not out of the ordinary but very much a ‘commonplace’ aspect of her respondents’ lives. She thus presents a counter-narrative to ideas about diversity anxieties and pitfalls (Putnam, 2000) then fiercely debated. What is more, parts of this first-wave research also point to accompanying ruptures and inequalities. Researching encounters in contexts of superdiversity thus does not only paint a positive picture of what it means when diversity (seems) to work (Piekut, Rees, Valentine, & Kupiszewski, 2012; Ye, 2018). For example Ye (2018), also employing ethnographic techniques, but focussing on the context of Singapore, notes how observing everyday practices of diversity highlights a number of presuppositions we maintain about the disconnection of those practices from, for instance, politics of migrant labour integration.

A ‘second wave’, which certainly overlaps with the first, both in terms of authors and in terms of timing, devotes its focus to practical challenges that are highlighted if shifting from a uni- to a multi-focal research lens. They moved specifically policy focused research from addressing ethnic or country of origin diversity to addressing migration-driven diversity as a more multi-faceted phenomenon. Doing so posed the challenge of simultaneously considering overlapping differentiations, shifting ideas about how in practice diversity is made sense of and, in terms of policy, how migration-driven change could be better responded to. Previously targeted migrant groups can no longer be taken for granted as subjects of policy interventions (Van Breugel & Scholten, 2017), service providers have to adjust to the ‘novelty and newness’ that thinking through superdiversity on the ground entails (Boccagni, 2015; Phillimore, 2015). This research has progressed work on unpacking and evaluating approaches to policy making and what kinds of institutional adaptations might be necessary in light of recognising a diversified diversity and on how to move beyond imaginaries implicit in measuring the ‘success’ of multiculturalism (Schinkel, 2017). For example, building primarily on the analysis of policy documents and interviews with policy makers, Scholten and colleagues (2018) show how in superdiverse contexts it becomes more important to think about immigrant policies as a multi-level policy challenge – meaning as a concern that matters to local, national, and supranational rules and regulations that are developed as a response to migration.

I here certainly only point to some authors. There is a much larger range of articles falling into these two waves and ongoing research is still just starting to fill some of the empirical voids that are fundamental to making sense of the observable dynami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptual considerations
• Part II Innovative methods
• Part III Adolescents’ diverse social worlds
• Part IV Preparing multicultural societies for dealing with diversity inside and outside of schools
• Index