Engaging Superdiversity

Reviews / Votes

Challenging the superdiversity sceptic, this broad and compelling collection of chapters carefully engages with superdiversity across time and space, from schools to mercantile spaces, from Indonesia to Denmark, showing the emergence of, as well as constraints upon, new convergences, new cultural practices, and new socialities. * Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * The volume represents a bold attempt to establish superdiversity as a key concept in post-variationist sociolinguistics. Based on a range of fascinating case studies - including African fortune-tellers in Paris, language workers in London call centres, discourses of food and integration in Danish schools, and ethnolinguistic stylizations in Indonesian soap operas - the chapters showcase an ethnographically oriented sociolinguistics that centres on heterogeneity, unexpectedness, complexity and reflexivity. * Jannis Androutsopoulos, Universitaet Hamburg, Germany * This pioneering volume extends earlier use of the concept of superdiversity from describing linguistic and socio-demographic complexity occurring globally since about 1990 to a focus on specific spatial sites and post-panoptic tension between semiotic dispersal and recombination. It admirably succeeds in its aim of reaching out to a wider social science and humanities audience. * David Parkin, University of Oxford, UK *