Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices

This book is the fruition of five years’ work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.

Karel Arnaut is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven, Belgium. He teaches on the anthropology of migration as wall as on language, diversity and inequality and co-coordinates a range of migration-related international projects such as AIMEC, ReROOT and ATLAS.

Martha Sif Karrebæk is Professor of Danish as a second language and multilingualism in Denmark at University of Copenhagen. She has a broad interest in the use, practice and ideologies of language in a society characterized by increasing diversity. She has published on language socialization, language and food, interpreting, language in healthcare and in schools in a range of international journals, and she participates regularly in national media.

Massimiliano Spotti is Associate Professor of Ethnography and Digital Literacies at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His research interests include the (dis)approval of identities via socio-technological platforms in asylum applications and software-based approaches to the learning of Dutch.

Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and is also affiliated to Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He is the Director of the Babylon Research Center at Tilburg University.