Same-same but different: what can superdiversity offer that multiculturalism cannot?

What is it about?

In my recent Policy & Politics article on the multilevel governance of superdiversity in Europe, as part of the journal’s superdiversity Special Issue, my aim is to problematize the relationship between identity and difference, and to suggest ways in which superdiversity can be employed as a useful tool to deconstruct what is usually left unstudied (because it is perceived as unproblematic): the so-called ‘mainstream’ or ‘majority’. I argue that superdiversity as an approach applied to the study of policy and governance can help us challenge the dominant framework that still sees the “Default Man” (western, middle-class, white heterosexual male) as the benchmark of what it means to be ‘integrated’ or to belong to the ‘mainstream’. This does not mean doing away with multiculturalist policies or with identity as a field of research, but rather it implies that identity markers do not need to be pre-determined by policy-makers, in ethnic terms or otherwise.

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Why is it important?

Especially in these times, in which populist movements make such a massive appeal to identity, the task of policy studies is to open up and dismantle identity as an essentializing concept, allowing for new identities and categories to emerge, and for more people to identify with more than one ‘identity’ at the same time. In migration and integration research, this means that we need to treat identity not as a tool to analyze behaviours, but as an object that needs to be deconstructed in its own right.

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