WP122 Superdiversity discourse

Super-diversity discourse is a relatively new, primarily academic discourse whose increasing presence in the domains of social work, institutional policy, urban and national politics, and the media is signalling a rapidly growing uptake, albeit one that is disciplinarily fragmented and geographically unevenly spread. Arguably, super-diversity?s uptake suggests that its discourse is catching the imagination of the humanities and social sciences as a recognizably productive and an auspiciously novel vantage point that sits comfortably with certain existing explicitly post-colonial anthropological and sociolinguistic takes on diversity and identity, as well as with more recent diversity-related shifts or ?turns? towards, among other things, complexity and (urban, digital, etc.) translocality. After presenting the notion of super-diversity, exploring its conceptual Umwelt and its uptake most prominently in sociolinguistics, attention is given to the future prospects and perceived dangers surrounding its discourse.