NFP-MI: Migration and Super-Diversity: Theory, Method and Practice

Keynote Address

Welfare bricolage in superdiverse neighbourhoods: challenges, concepts, methods, and actions

Jenny Phillimore, Professor of Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham

Migration-driven diversity means European cities are becoming increasingly superdiverse. As the diversity of populations within neighbourhoods increases, both newcomers and service providers face the challenges of novelty and newness when seeking to access or provide welfare. Existing approaches to studying access to welfare in conditions of diversity have tended to rely on a methodologically nationalist focus on imagined homogeneous ethno-national groups, or a siloed approach looking at one type of welfare provider. This talk describes an innovative multi-method methodologically neighbourhoodist approach utilised to develop the concept of welfare bricolage. I show how applying the concept of welfare bricolage can enable the uncovering of the invisible actions undertaken by residents and welfare providers in superdiverse neighbourhoods to address health and wellbeing concerns. The bricolage approach reveals the key role of civil society organisations in providing specialised care and expertise and filling the gaps in provision left by austerity, marketization, hostile environments, and deprivation. I conclude by arguing for the need to focus more closely on the role of civil society organisations in superdiverse neighbourhoods and the potential to learn from the approaches they adopt.

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Rethinking Integration: studying civil society action in vulnerable and superdiverse neighbourhoods

Gabriella Elgenius, Associate Professor, Dept of Sociology, University of Gothenburg.

Civil society has increasingly been recognised for supporting inclusion and integration. Central domains of integration may refer to economic sufficiency, education, employment, health, language skills, and political participation. This presentation explores emerging findings about ways in which civil society organizations address such central domains of integration with reference to markers, means and facilitators. By exploring the types of organizations that exist and the activities they engage in, we highlight the role of civil society, the nature of its initiatives and practices in superdiverse areas in Sweden, using also comparative reflections regarding the UK. Following the arguments of the keynote, some conceptual and methodological issues about conducting civil society research in superdiverse areas will be addressed as will the need for understanding the width and breath of civil society action in superdiverse areas

How to deal with the desire to provide culturally sensitive care without violating the principles of equality and equal care for all?

Birgitta Essén, Professor of International Maternal & Reproductive Health, Uppsala University

Health research in an ethnically diversified population faces far greater challenges than it does in culturally homogeneous settings and the area of sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH)  is well known to face more challenges than other areas of medicine. Clinical encounters in SRH are increasingly marked by cross-cultural value conflicts. On the one hand, health care providers must encourage patients to embrace certain non-negotiable values such as women’s emancipation and the right to autonomous reproductive decisions. On the other hand, health care providers are obliged to take a culturally relativistic approach by showing respect for diversity in cultural and religious values. Hence, health care providers must simultaneously handle two opposite value structures, one liberal and individualist and the other traditionalist and collectivist, in their everyday work. I will discuss three empirically based cases of value conflicts -but with clinical solutions- in the welfare service of SRH, with focus on muslim migrants, gynecologists and midwives.

Beyond super-diversity: de-migranticization, post-migrant condition and what else?

Lisa Åkesson, Professor, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

As we all know, diversity has become a commonplace normality in most people’s everyday life. During the last decades, this has spurred a development of new concepts and perspectives in migration studies, and super-diversity is arguably one of the most influential concepts, both in academia and beyond. Yet, as all seminal academic concepts, super-diversity is both praised and criticized. Some argue that the concept risks reinforce the same identity categories it seeks to challenge, while others criticize the lack of a critical perspective on power or question the concept’s potential to do more than provide a frame for describing diversity. In this presentation, I will bring up some of this critique, and then proceed to examine some other concepts and perspectives that may afford new and alternative analytical inroads for comprehending life in heterogeneous societies. In doing this, I aim to discuss concepts such as “de-migranticization” and “the post-migrant condition”.

Doing (super)diversity

Andreas Diedrich, Associate Professor, School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg

The concepts of diversity and super-diversity have received much attention (critical and apologetic) in many disciplines over the past decades. While they seem similar, they gained fame in very different ways – in the management and organization studies diversity became seen as a new focus for the efficient management of organizations in line with the diversity management hype originating in the US in the 1980s; and in anthropology and sociology (to name a few), super-diversity became seen as a new focus for policy makers and public officials to recognize and manage in a better way a whole array of interconnected grand challenges such as global migration, urbanization, and demographic change. Both have been lauded and criticized for their analytical, methodological or practical use, or lack thereof.

Here I wish to refrain from engaging in those discussions, but to instead highlight another interesting point that has been often neglected in previous studies:

Drawing on contemporary perspectives of organizing, it can be argued that there is no (super)diversity existing as an independent phenomenon apart from the acting and sensemaking of others. In other words, (super)diversity only exists if it becomes labeled as such as a result of ongoing organizing processes involving organizations (e.g. IOM), people (e.g. researchers, consultants, policy makers, managers, immigrants, etc.), objects (e.g. statistics, computers, buildings, digital technologies, etc.) and circulating ideas and concepts (e.g. integration, transnationalism, globalization, recognition of prior learning). To properly understand (super)diversity, I argue, we thus need to explore how they are done in organizing – to take a step back and explore the dynamics of such organizing processes unfolding before “diversity” or “super-diversity” are in place and seem “organized-for-good” and unchangeable.