Superdiversity

About: Superdiversity is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 428 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11452 citations.

Super-diversity and its implications

Abstract: 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...

The Sociolinguistics of Globalization

Abstract: Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality.

Language and superdiversity

Abstract: CONTENTS 1. Introduction Karel Arnaut , Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti Part 1: Sketching the paradigm 2. Language and superdiversity Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton 3. Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective Karel Arnaut 4. From multilingual classification to translingual ontology: A turning point David Parkin Part II: Sociolinguistic complexity 5. Drilling down to the grain in superdiversity Ben Rampton 6. Buffalaxing the other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube Sirpa Leppanen and Ari Hakkinen 7. Polylanguaging in super-diversity Jens Normann Jorgensen, Martha Sif Karrebaek, Lian Malai Madsen, and Janus Spindler Moller 8. 'A typical gentleman': Metapragmatic stereotypes as systems of distinction Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese 9. Mobility, voice, and symbolic restratification: An ethnography of 'elite migrants' in urban China Jie Dong Part III: Policing complexity 10. Ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis and social change: A case study Jan Blommaert and Ico Maly 11. Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from China Piia Varis and Xuan Wang 12. Translating global experience into institutional models of competency: Linguistic inequalities in the job interview Celia Roberts 13. Sociolinguistic shibboleths at the institutional gate: Language, origin and the construction of asylum seekers' identities Massimiliano Spotti

Comparing super-diversity

Abstract: 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 of Ethnic 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 impl...

Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity

Abstract: Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.