Super-diversity: a tale of four cities

WISER, ACMS, CISA invite you to a seminar by:

Stephen Vertovec
Director of the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen and Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology, University of Göttingen

and

Robin Cohen
Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and Former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford

All Welcome

Talk Description

‘Super-diversity’ is a term intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything previously experienced in a particular society. Over the past twenty years globally more people have moved from more places to more places; wholly new and increasingly complex social formations have ensued, marked by dynamic interplays of variables, including: country of origin (comprising a variety of possible subset traits such as ethnicity, language, religious tradition, regional and local identities, cultural values and practices), migration channel (often related to highly gendered flows, specific social networks and particular labour market niches), and legal status (including myriad categories determining a hierarchy of entitlements and restrictions).

How does this general term apply to post-apartheid South Africa, bearing in mind the partial, but incomplete, decomposition of the apartheid population categories, new migration, and outbursts of xenophobic violence?

We will talk about a newly-funded comparative project examining changing m igration flows, forms of contact and patterns of diversity in four cities around the world, including Johannesburg.

Steven Vertovec is Director of the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen and Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology, University of Göttingen. Previously he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, Director of the British Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), and Senior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford. Prof. Vertovec is co-editor of the journal Global Networks and Editor of the Routledge book series ‘Transnationalism’. He is author of Hindu Trinidad (Macmillan, 1992), The Hindu Diaspora (Routledge, 2000) and Transnationalism (Routledge, 2008) and editor or co-editor of twenty-eight volumes including Islam in Europe (Macmillan, 1997), Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism (Edward Elgar, 1999), Migration and Social Cohesion (Edward Elgar,1999), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2003), Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism (Routledge 2009), The Multicultural Backlash (Routledge 2010) and Migration: Major Works (Routledge, 2010).

Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and Former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford. He has held full professorships at the Universities of the West Indies and Warwick and taught also at the Universities of Ibadan, Birmingham Stanford, Toronto and Berkeley. He served as Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town (2001/3) is Visiting Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. His books include Labour and Politics in Nigeria (1974, rev. 1982), Endgame in South Africa? (1986), The New Helots: migrants in the international division of labour (1987, 1993, 2003), Contested domains: debates in international labour studies (1991), Frontiers of identity: the British and the others (1994), Global diasporas: an introduction (1997, rev. 2008), Global Sociology (co-author, 2000, rev. 2007) and Migration and Its Enemies (2006). He has edited or co-edited twenty further volumes, particularly on the sociology and politics of developing areas, ethnicity, international migration, transnationalism and globalisation.