Episode 1 (S3): Steven Vertovec on understanding Social Complexity

The Migration Podcast

To kickstart our new series of episodes, we invited Steven Vertovec to speak about ways of studying and understanding one of the consequences of migration, that is social complexity. Around 2007, Steve coined the concept 'super-diversity' to grasp the increasing diversity within migrant populations in British society, highlighting that this diversification should not merely be understood in terms of ethnic, linguistic or religious backgrounds. Occurring at the same time was a diversification of migration channels, legal statuses and conditions, gender, age and forms of human capital. Yet, before arriving at this concept, Steven Vertovec explored and critiqued other concepts such as transnationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism. In this episode, he retraces his intellectual project and tells us how he eventually arrived at 'super-diversity'. This is the link to the article that created excitement among migration scholars: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870701599465 His forthcoming book with Routledge "Super-diversity. Migration and Social Complexity" will be available Open Access in late 2022 [we will update the link here, once the book is out].