ABSTRACT
We start by taking the reader through what superdiversity means and why we believe that a research orientation on migration and mobility needs these days to keep itself occupied with superdiversity. The term superdiversity refers to the ‘diversification of diversity’ that occurred after the end of the Cold War, and is characterized by different and intensive flows of migration – more people moving from more places towards more places (Vertovec 2007) – combined with the generalized spread and deployment of internet-driven and long-distance information and communication technologies (ICT). More than merely capturing the recent diversification of diversity and situating its onset in global history, superdiversity has the potential to become an emerging perspective on change and unpredictability in ever more intensively encroaching social and cultural worlds (Arnaut 2012). While the first force – new migrations – caused a rapid escalation of demographic diversity in centers all over the world, the second force – mobility through ICT – has shaped new environments for communication and identity development wherever it is used. The combination of both forces leads to rapid and relatively unpredictable social and cultural change – a stage of acceleration and intensification in globalization processes raising fundamental challenges for the ways in which we imagine societies, human beings and their activities (cf. Eriksen 2001; Arnaut and Spotti 2015). In this capacity, the emergent academic discourse around superdiversity aligns itself with critical perspectives in transnational studies which reject simplifying and reifying schemes for the complex realities along national and/or ethnic lines – denounced as “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) and the “ethnic lens” (Glick Schiller 2007), respectively. Thus, superdiversity as an emerging perspective “denies the comfort of a set of easily applicable assumptions about our object, its features and its meanings,” which has two profound methodological consequences: (1) we see ‘complexity’, ‘hybridity’, ‘impurity’, and other features of ‘abnormal’ sociolinguistic objects as ‘normal’. (2) The uncertainty brought to bear by this emergent perspective compels us towards a (linguistic) ethnographic stance, in which “we go out to find how sociolinguistic systems operate rather than to project a priori characteristics onto them” (Blommaert 2015: 84).
