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.
