Superdiversity’s backstory

Abstract

In “Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity”, Vertovec returns to the concept of superdiversity and reviews its uses in different disciplinary fields. Importantly, the book also offers a useful backstory to the concept which helps to better locate it into a long standing but not mainstream anthropological engagement with social complexity. While triggered by a new age of migration and the socio-demographic transformations it was producing in London, the concept was also since inception a way of capturing the diversification of world views and systems of categorisation brought by these processes. However, drawing from research I carried out with EU migrants in London after Brexit, I argue that profound movements and transformations are occurring under the surface of a city that remains “superdiverse”; changes driven by forces that fall outside the analytical reach of “superdiversity”, leaving the question: what drives migration-driven diversification unanswered.