Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex emergent social
configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world.
Migration plays a key role in these processes bringing changes not just in social cultural
religious and linguistic phenomena but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with
others like gender age and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by
scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms modes and outcomes
of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and
social organization including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories
of social "difference" have significant impacts across scales from entire societies to
individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes threat
narratives and expressions of antagonism superdiversity encourages a perspective on
difference as comprising multiple social processes flexible collective meanings and
overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the
re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional unfixed and porous as
opposed to views based on hardened one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and
increasing social complexity are bound to continue if not intensify in light of climate
change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration social relations
and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social
formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy
and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the
multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and
researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access
version of this book available at www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
