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Ethnography, diversity and

urban space
a b
Mette Louise Berg & Nando Sigona
a
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Oxford, 51 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 6PE,
UK
b
School of Social Policy, Muirhead Tower, Edgbaston,
B15 2TT, Birmingham, UK.
Published online: 13 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Mette Louise Berg & Nando Sigona (2013) Ethnography, diversity
and urban space, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20:4, 347-360, DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2013.822382

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 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2013
Vol. 20, No. 4, 347–360, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2013.822382

Ethnography, diversity and urban space

Mette Louise Berg and Nando Sigona

(Received 6 June 2013)

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity

and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migra-
tion and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts
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such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, pol-

icy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for
studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialism
and bias towards ethnic affiliation often characterising studies within the
multiculturalism framework, while being more grounded locally than stud-
ies within the transnationalism framework. It examines the methodological
implications of increasing diversity and complexity on ethnographic studies
and the definition of the ‘field’. It makes the point that increasing urban diver-
sity poses a challenge to ethnographic ideals of ‘immersion’ and wholeness.
Finally, it introduces the individual articles in the special issue.
Keywords: diversity; everyday multiculture; ethnography; urban space; field-
work; transnationalism

The demise of multiculturalism as a public policy, and as a political discourse

in several European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and the UK,
began over a decade ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York and the sub-
sequent so-called war on terror. In October 2010, the German Chancellor Angela
Merkel declared that multiculturalism had ‘failed utterly’ and that it was in effect
‘dead’, placing the onus on immigrants to do more to integrate into German soci-
ety; a few months later, in February 2011, the British PM David Cameron echoed
Merkel’s attack on multiculturalism with calls for a ‘muscular liberalism’ against
‘passive tolerance’ (for critique, see Gilroy 2012).1 The multiculturalism backlash
(Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010b) that ensued effectively left European immi-
gration countries that are de facto multicultural – in terms of languages spoken,
religions practiced, ethnicity, etc. – without an explicit policy for dealing with this
fact (see also Amin 2013).
Meanwhile, in scholarly discourse, ‘multiculturalism’ as an analytical con-
cept has gradually faded away. Since the 1990s, scholars have questioned and
problematised the boundaries and constructed nature of ethnic communities as
units of analysis (Baumann 1996, Vertovec 1996, Alexander 2002, Brettell 2003,
Glick Schiller et al. 2006), and the intrinsic risks and limitations of methodolog-
ical ‘ethnicism’ (King 2001) and ‘racialism’ (Loveman 1999). In this critique,

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 348 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
multiculturalism was seen as riddled with excessive groupism (Brubaker 2002),
which tended to essentialise and reify differences between cultural or ethnic
groups, while obscuring power differentials within (Baumann 1996).
Ironically, multiculturalism never was the monolith that its critics have
painted it as; it was always contested and multivalent (Rose and Melville 2004,
Vertovec 2007a, Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010a, Modood 2012). The critique of
multiculturalism has given way to a broader expression and recognition of different
kinds of differences, resulting largely from the waves of new migration that have
transformed the demographic profile of urban areas, and increasingly also rural
ones: what Steve Vertovec has termed ‘super-diversity’ (2007b). ‘Super-diversity’
is increasingly used where multiculturalism would have been used previously, but,
as we discuss below, in sometimes contradictory ways.
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Accordingly, depictions of bounded ethnic communities that fit successive

multiculturalist policies have gradually been replaced by representations of soci-
ety that emphasise fluidity, hybridity and cross-fertilisation (Hannerz 1987, 1992,
Appadurai 1996, Werbner and Modood 1997, Papastergiadis 2000), an emphasis
on migrant transnationalism (Rouse 1991, Glick Schiller et al. 1992, Levitt 2001)
and critiques of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).
The shift has meant that ethnic identity politics and ethnic community-based
mobilisation have had to find new channels and strategies of mobilisation. The title
of a report by the London-based think tank Institute for Public Policy Research
eloquently captures the transition from multicultural identity politics to ‘super-
diversity’: ‘You can’t put me in a box’: super-diversity and the end of identity
politics in Britain (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010).
Minimally, the diversity turn, and in particular the emergence of super-
diversity in academic and policy discourse, recognises that previous ethnicity-
based clustering, which had to some extent superseded race-based clustering, no
longer provides an adequate analytical lens for understanding the complexity and
dynamism of urban multiculture. The shift from studies of group X in place of Y,
to studies of localised forms of diversity – such as those included in this collection
– enables scholars to acknowledge a wider range of differences and similarities
between and within groups than conceptual predecessors such as ethnicity and
race did. As summed up by Karen Fog Olwig in her epilogue to the special issue,
the turn to diversity has entailed a change from focusing on entities, to focusing
on relations. It also enables scholars to be alert to the spatial dimensions of the
politics of difference. In effect, within studies of migration, ‘diversity’ holds the
potential to do what ‘intersectionality’ has done within feminist scholarship, that
is, conceptualising the interrelationships between gender, class, ‘race’ and other
social divisions (Yuval-Davis 2006).2
This special issue brings together seven ethnographic articles and an epilogue
that use ‘diversity’ to gauge and examine processes of everyday intercultural
encounters and practices across European countries, from capital cities to small
provincial towns and suburbs. Focusing on diversity related to processes of migra-
tion, rather than, e.g., sexuality, ability or faith, the articles are concerned with
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 349
the politics and poetics of belonging, and how they relate to social and spa-
tial practices of inclusion and exclusion. However, unlike studies based within
a multiculturalist framework, they consider not just cultural differences, but also
class-based differences (see especially Ben Gidley, Lars Meier, Ben Rogaly and
Kaveri Qureshi, Susanne Wessendorf), housing trajectories (Gidley, Ole Jensen,
Meier), and lifestyle and consumption practices (Meier, Rogaly and Qureshi,
Wessendorf). They analyse practices of the majority, ‘white’ population as well
as of minority or migrant groups, thus unsettling established categories of differ-
ence (Gidley, Jensen, Rogaly and Qureshi, Wessendorf). The articles are attuned
to both the micro-level of everyday encounters in streets, housing estates, mar-
kets and neighbourhoods, but also to transnational connections and belonging (see
especially Gidley, Rhys-Taylor, Camille Schmoll and Giovanni Semi).
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The combination of detailed ethnographic studies of local-level dynamics and

processes of belonging with a transnational sensibility sets these articles apart
from important earlier neighbourhood studies, such as, e.g., Gerd Baumann’s
study of the London suburb of Southall (1996) or Sandra Wallman’s study of two
London neighbourhoods (1982).
Even if multiculturalism has been proclaimed dead, the legacy of previous dis-
courses and systems of classification persists in the present. Similarly, there is
clear evidence of continued racial and ethnic inequalities, and of racism, which
suggest that we cannot entirely do away with these categorisations. They are still
immensely powerful as systems of classification (e.g., in the UK national cen-
sus) and are arguably essential for any quantitative, and especially longitudinal,
analysis of inequality or integration.
Furthermore, multiculture, in the form of conviviality, mundane interactions
and modes of negotiating ethnic and cultural difference, persists in everyday
life (Gilroy 2004, Valentine 2008, Wise and Velayutham 2009). Changing public
policies and discourses may affect practices of everyday interactions, but ‘multi-
cultural drift’ (Hall 1999), that is, the visible presence of immigrants and ethnic
minorities in all aspects of social life as an ordinary and inevitable part of the
social landscape, is here to stay. This is true for the inner cities of European cap-
itals (see Gidley, Rhys-Taylor and Wessendorf, this volume) but increasingly also
for suburbs and provincial cities (Watson and Saha 2012; see also Jensen, Meier,
Rogaly and Qureshi, and Schmoll and Semi, this volume). As the novelist Zadie
Smith observes, multiculture is in any case not about how things should be:

We don’t walk around our neighbourhood thinking how’s this experiment going?
This is not how people live. It’s just a fact, a fact of life.3

As Smith makes clear, multicultural drift happens at the local level, in neighbour-
hoods. Indeed, there has been a return to neighbourhood studies and increasing
attention to questions of scales of belonging. The articles collected here suggest
that the very local level is more important than the national level for understanding
questions of belonging and expressions of diversity.
 350 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
A key question arising from the rise of ‘diversity’ is what it does, which older
concepts did not do, analytically, politically and discursively, and how different it
really is from its predecessors. We have identified three distinct, yet inter-related
dimensions of diversity, namely: (1) diversity as narrative, by which we refer
to public narratives in which ‘diversity’ is celebrated as a marketable good; (2)
diversity as social fact, by which we refer to areas characterised by a population
comprising multiple ethnicities and countries of origin as well as other intersecting
variables; and (3) diversity as policy, by which we refer to policies aimed at man-
aging integration and fostering social cohesion (which may be variously named).
The three dimensions of diversity are inter-related and overlapping; they also have
both temporal and spatial implications, which a social scientific engagement with
diversity needs to grapple with (see also Amin 2002, Valentine 2008, Alexander
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2011). Equally, there is a methodological challenge of how to conceive, investigate

and represent diversity in its different dimensions and expressions.
This special issue explores how diversity, in its various dimensions, is experi-
enced locally, and what new forms of local belonging emerge in contexts where
places are closely connected to so many non-proximate elsewhere, either through
migration (evident in all articles in the volume), trade links (see especially Rhys-
Taylor, and Schmoll and Semi), political activism (see Gidley) or in other ways,
enabling unprecedented flows of information, images and money, as well as of
affect, memory and longing. The articles are revised versions of papers origi-
nally presented at the ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’ conference held
in Oxford in September 2011.4 When we, the editors (Berg, Gidley and Sigona),
organised the conference, we had expected a wider geographical spread of papers.
Given the resonances between scholarship on intersectionality and diversity as
noted above, we were also surprised that gender and substantial conversations with
feminist scholarship were relatively absent. It is our hope that the articles pre-
sented here will nonetheless inspire debate and future scholarship in which these
shortcomings are addressed.
In the remainder of the Introduction, we address each of the three dimensions
of diversity in turn. We then highlight some of the methodological challenges that
a diversity turn entails, before outlining the special issue.

Diversity as narrative and counter-narrative

On 6 July 2005 London upstaged its chief rival, Paris, in the bidding to host the
2012 Olympic Games. The British team had put the pluralism and diversity of
the British capital city at the forefront of its bid to the International Olympic
Committee. This strategy signals an on-going re-articulation of cultural pluralism
that sees ‘the skills, talents and ethnic backgrounds of men and women commodi-
fied, marketed, and billed as trade-enhancing’ (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002) in a
globalised market where cities compete to attract financial capital and ‘the best and
the brightest’ as the current London Mayor Boris Johnson has put it.5 Such public
celebrations of diversity create a discursive terrain where bottom-up instances of
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 351
diversity can be articulated and political claims made. At the same time, conflict
and contestation may emerge as, for example, in the case of the EDL march in
Peterborough in Rogaly and Qureshi’s article or, more tragically, in the case of the
attacks that took place in London the day after the city was awarded the Olympic
Games (Falcous and Silk 2010).6 The bombings can be seen as an attack on the
‘common-place diversity’ described in Wessendorf’s article, as belying the por-
trait of multicultural harmony, which the then Labour government projected both
locally and internationally. Nostalgic narratives of past harmony and homogeneity
set against present diversity can also powerfully serve to exclude even when they
are told by people who themselves feel marginalised and powerless, as seen in
Gidley’s and Meier’s articles. Therefore, as Fog Olwig suggests in her epilogue,
power relations and hierarchies must be part of analyses of diversity.
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Diversity as social fact

Migration scholars have noted that in the past few decades global migration
patterns have changed from ‘involving many migrants from and to few places’
to patterns involving ‘fewer migrants from and to more places’ (Gamlen 2010;
italics in original) creating increasingly complex and differentiated migrant set-
tlements and communities. This multiplication of global flows has led scholars
to describe capital cities such as London, New York, Paris and Johannesburg as
‘super-diverse’, with a population characterised by multiple ethnicities, languages,
countries of origin, immigration histories and statuses, labour market experiences,
gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution and local area responses
by service providers and residents (Vertovec 2007b). Complex migration and
asylum regimes further contribute to the process of diversification through the
multiplication of immigration legal statuses and the extension of precariousness to
more groups of people for longer periods (Zetter 2007, Sigona 2012). Provincial
cities and towns in the UK and across Europe, are also increasingly charac-
terised by a diversification of diversity (Erel 2011, Phillimore 2011), although
the scale of diversification varies between, e.g., inner-city London neighbour-
hoods (see Gidley, Rhys-Taylor and Wessendorf in this volume), the Nuremberg
neighbourhood of Werderau (Meier), the English suburb of ‘Southtown’ (Jensen),
regional capitals likes Turin and Naples in Italy (Schmoll and Semi), or provincial
Peterborough in England (Rogaly and Qureshi).
Yet super-diversity is about more than merely the addition of further variables
of difference; it is also about ‘new conjunctions and interactions of variables’,
in terms of composition of ‘communities’, their trajectories and public service
needs (Vertovec 2007b, p. 1025). People are increasingly more willing to express
diversity – of lifestyle, sexual orientation and so on – openly, further adding
to the complexity and to the differences that make a difference (Fanshawe and
Sriskandarajah 2010, Vertovec 2012). In conjunction with this, the dynamics of
globalisation and time-space compression have facilitated the intensification of
migrant transnationalism. This means that more migrants stay connected to their
 352 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
places of origin as well as to co-ethnics settled elsewhere, producing even more
multi-layered practices and patterns of belonging and identification.
In this context, geography matters fundamentally. If we take seriously the mul-
tiplication and increasingly complex intersection of axes of difference, we need to
understand how it plays out differently in different conditions, at different scales,
in particular places. For example, specific locations have histories (and memo-
ries) of migration, as well as of minorities’ struggles for rights and recognition.
Such local histories and memories structure emerging conjunctures of difference
in manifold ways, as we can see in the accounts here by Meier, Jensen, and Rogaly
and Qureshi. New geographies of diversity create an almost infinite set of possible
combinations of axes of difference and a range of paces of (absolute and propor-
tionate) demographic change that are differently visible as the scale of analysis
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shifts.
It is clear that rural and suburban areas that have often been figured as relatively
homogenous are increasingly demographically diverse, while inner-city areas long
recognised as diverse are increasingly revealed as super-diverse as defined by
Vertovec. New contact zones and new frontiers of encounter are consequently
opened up. This geographical unevenness means that ultra-local or neighbour-
hood identities may be more important than national identities for both minority
and migrant groups as well as for majority groups. This fundamentally spatial
dimension of diversity has methodological implications which we discuss below.

Diversity as policy
As a policy or a set of policies aimed at managing integration and social cohesion,
diversity is increasingly occupying the semantic terrain previously occupied by
‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic community’. As such, ‘diversity’ is used to describe and
govern populations, in occasionally contradictory ways. As an example, at times
the term is juxtaposed to ‘unity’ or ‘homogeneity’, or as a short-hand for ethnic or
racial terms (Vertovec 2012, p. 293), with the problematic assumptions this entails.
Some local authorities in Britain have formally embraced a super-diversity agenda
(e.g., Birmingham, Leicester, Hackney; see Wessendorf in this volume). Yet the
implications of doing so in a fair, affordable and politically acceptable way have
yet to be worked out (Phillimore 2011, p. 5, 2013).
‘Diversity’ can also be used as a politically uncontroversial lens (Faist 2009)
for managing and monitoring culturally heterogeneous workforces and clients for
corporations and organisations keen to be ‘inclusive’. Indeed, diversity has gone
corporate to a degree that multiculturalism never did (Vertovec 2012); a simple
Google search even reveals a ‘best practice’ diversity policy template, fully com-
pliant with the UK Equality Act of 2010 for sale at the bargain price of £35.7
Yet success in the corporate world has come without recognition of underlying
relations and structures of inequality that shape exclusion and make ethnic cate-
gories contingent. Thus, while a diversity lens on the one hand paves the way for
exploring the complex and often cumulative interactions between multiple factors
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 353
(e.g., age, gender, ‘race’, class, legal status) in the making of social inequalities,
there is also a latent risk of producing an individualised representation of social
inequalities. In calling into question the ontology of ethnic categories, ‘diver-
sity’ can undermine the status of political subjects – the discrete, homogeneous
‘ethnic communities’ – that served as constituencies of an earlier anti-racist and
multiculturalist politics. As such the super-diversity discourse risks creating an
‘equivalence of differences’ (Vertovec 2012, p. 289) that threatens to flatten the
very diversity it ostensibly celebrates and acknowledges. In this use of diversity,
there are resonances with a neoliberal discourse, which at its core undermines
social ties and shifts welfare responsibility away from the state to the individual
(cf. Inda 2006).
Conversely, as Thomas Faist (2009) has noticed, adopting a diversity lens in
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public policy can invite a shift in focus away from the immigrant who is expected
to integrate or assimilate, and open the possibility of discussing the responsibilities
of mainstream institutions. This comes with the growing recognition, in academic,
and increasingly in policy circles that everyone is diverse in multiple ways and that
axes of differentiation are contingent, and socially and politically constructed.
As Schmoll and Semi’s article shows in the case of Turin, a heavy-handed
top-down imposition of an old-fashioned multiculturalist agenda may seriously
misrepresent actual local diversity. In this case, a super-diversity lens might open
up the possibility of new coalitions and a new politics, beyond the static, reified
categories of state multiculturalism. Yet how to honour local realities of diver-
sity in a way considered fair for all is no mean feat; Gidley, Meier and Jensen’s
discussions of housing show the difficulties of weighing different needs and enti-
tlements against each other. The policing of an English Defence League (EDL)
march in Rogaly and Qureshi’s contribution offers instead an example of the hier-
archy of differences underpinning a ‘diverse’ city. ‘Diversity’ in short represents
both a challenge and an opportunity to scholars, policy-makers, organisations and
the corporate world.

Methodological challenges
While multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is now well established, enabling
ethnographers to study people in motion across locations, there have been rela-
tively few attempts to research multiple migrant groups living together in diverse
neighbourhoods (but see Wallman and Associates 1982, Baumann 1996, Sanjek
1998).8 Mark-Anthony Falzon has argued that globalisation and transnationalism
‘posed the major twentieth century challenge to ethnographic methods of inquiry
and units of analysis by destabilising the embeddedness of social relations in
particular communities and places’ (2009a, p. 6). Transnationalism undoubtedly
offered something new through its focus on migrants’ cross-border practices, but
by using the ethnic community as both object of study and unit of analysis, it
did not sufficiently question the existence of bounded ethnic communities. It is
also thin on the significance of local contexts and relationships beyond the ethnic
 354 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
group. The image that comes to mind is of transnational migrant corridors, poorly
grounded in either home or host society. Indeed, Nina Glick-Schiller, one of the
protagonists of transnational anthropology in the 1990s, has later argued that the
ethnic lens ‘obscures . . . the diversity of migrants’ relationships to their place of
settlement and to other localities around the world’ (2006, p. 613). There is there-
fore a need for methods which avoid falling into the assumption that scales of
belonging are necessarily nested neatly within each other, or that local dynamics
are cut off from connections, dynamics and social relations that extend beyond or
transgress geographic scales.
Ethnographers need to pay close attention to local context, historicity and
specificity, but also to non-local, transnational dynamics, connections and rela-
tions. The ethical, methodological and political implications of how we actually do
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this, still remain to be worked out. This is what prompted the conference at which
the articles in this special issue were first presented. Echoing Ash Amin’s call
for an anthropology of the local micro-politics of everyday interaction (2002) we
invited papers that looked at local spaces while also being attuned to translocal
and transnational connections.
For ethnographers specifically, the challenge is how to acquire the requisite
language skills and appreciation of so many home country contexts, the differ-
ent conditions and trajectories of different groups, including legal status, life
stage, gender and generational dynamics and so on, when the residents in a single
neighbourhood (or a single housing estate, see Gidley) originate in many differ-
ent societies and represent different diasporic generations (Berg 2011), each with
their own specific contexts for migration and settlement. There is also a question
of the time needed to build rapport and develop the embodied, tacit knowledge
that enables the ethnographer to go beyond a superficial, journalistic account.9
These challenges are addressed implicitly and explicitly in the articles in the vol-
ume. Gidley has turned to collaboration with a photographer, Alex Rhys-Taylor
relies on a sensuous methodology, while Schmoll and Semi perhaps most closely
align with George Marcus’s suggestions in following the trajectories of traders and
goods (Marcus 1995).

Outline of the issue

The first article following this introduction, by Gidley, discusses the commensura-
bility and incommensurability of lives lived in a London housing estate, focusing
especially on the ethical and methodological challenges of capturing and doing
justice to the sheer diversity of lives behind the identical doors on the estate. This
article is followed by Schmoll and Semi’s reflection on the shadow circuits of trade
in the Mediterranean. They mount a critique of staged top-down multiculturalism
and its folklorising and depoliticising effects, contrasting it with the actual lived
diversity of itinerant traders in Italy and France. Rhys-Taylor’s contribution also
deals with trade and the circulation of goods, but rather than following the traders
as do Schmoll and Semi, Rhys-Taylor stays put in a street market in East London.
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 355
Resonating with Gidley’s discussion of the methodological challenges of diversity,
Rhys-Taylor takes a resolutely sensuous approach to the study of local intercultural
encounters at the market. Wessendorf’s article discusses intercultural encoun-
ters and relations in an area adjacent to the street market, namely in Hackney.
In Hackney, diversity is so common as to have been rendered utterly unremark-
able, except in the cases of young, middle-class ‘hipsters’, and strictly Orthodox
Jews. Both of these two groups stand out, she argues, because of their perceived
unwillingness to mix in local public spaces, thus breaking the ethos of mixing.
By contrast, Rogaly and Qureshi’s article is set in a new arena for diversity, namely
the provincial English city of Peterborough. Focusing on the different practices
unfolding within and meanings attached to a local football stadium, they discuss
processes of visibilising and invisibilising diversity especially in the context of
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a staged ultra-right-wing, anti-immigrant march in the city. Through their ethno-

graphic account of the discussions leading up to the march and the way in which
the stadium is variously signified as a space of white racism or of intercultural con-
viviality, their article provides an argument for the importance of place in studies
of diversity. Jensen’s article moves to another new site for discussions of multicul-
ture, namely an English suburban town. Suburbs have traditionally been seen as
white, bland and monocultural. Jensen shatters this conception and shows the value
of taking both minority and majority cultures and practices into account for under-
standing local manifestations and dynamics of diversity, in this case especially
in terms of housing trajectories. The final ethnographic article by Meier, echoes
the themes of nostalgia and loss evoked in Gidley’s article. Here, in the former
company town of Werderau, a Nuremberg neighbourhood, retired industrial work-
ers lament the loss of a well-ordered, hierarchical world, and contrast it with the
present in which middle-class residents of migrant background have accessed the
now privatised housing in Werderau. The epilogue by Fog Olwig reflects on the
theoretical and methodological implications of the diversity turn in ethnographic
studies of migration.

Conclusion
This volume brings together a series of articles that use diversity to account for
a wider range of differences than studies within a multiculturalist framework
did, including class, whiteness and lifestyle. They take into account people’s
transnational connections, linking these to the micro-level of everyday life. The
articles variously engage with the three dimensions of diversity outlined above –
diversity as narrative, diversity as social fact, and diversity as policy – and show
how a ‘diversity turn’ holds the potential to rejuvenate migration research, schol-
arship on race and ethnicity, and the social sciences more generally, in terms of
the theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry pursued, the empirical data
generated, and the interpretations and knowledge produced. They open up a new
agenda for scholarship, pushing us to go beyond static categorisations, which con-
strain our understanding of social life and towards a better understanding of the
 356 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
contingency, spatial specificity and complex conjunctures of multiplying axes of
difference. This new agenda attends closely to how histories and sedimented nar-
ratives of encounter shape such conjunctures, while also revealing new sites of
encounter as shifting cartographies of difference emerge.
‘Diversity’, we argue, is more suitable for capturing these new patterns and
practices than earlier concepts such as multiculturalism, ethnicity or ‘race’ were,
while, as mentioned earlier, one should also be alert to the lingering ‘shadows’
of previous systems of classifications and discourses. It is not enough however
merely to enumerate quantitatively the proliferation of differences. As the articles
in this collection demonstrate, a fine-grained, ethnographic understanding of the
diversification of diversity as lived experience helps us understand when, where,
how, why and for whom some differences come to make a difference. Crucially, a
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more rigorous sense of how space itself shapes the unfolding of diversity on the
ground is needed, a dimension that has been relatively under-developed until now
(but see Amin 2002, Hall 2012, Keith 2013).
The articles included here contribute to an ongoing conversation about how
best to capture diversity in all its dimensions without either making the incom-
mensurable commensurable, that is, ‘flattening’ perspectives or, alternatively,
presenting different points of view and experiences as random and unrelated to
their wider context. The challenge, as Pierre Bourdieu has put it, is to create ‘a
complex and multi-layered representation capable of articulating the same real-
ities but in terms that are different and, sometimes, irreconcilable’ (1999, p. 3).
As Bourdieu also observed, the predicament is shared by ethnographers and novel-
ists, resonating with a recent review of John Lanchester’s novel Capital: ‘creating
and managing a large, varied and realistic cast of characters is very hard for an
individual novelist to do, particularly now that society is so diverse’.10 The arti-
cles in this special issue tackle the challenge through fine-grained ethnographic
accounts that are historically informed and which acknowledge the intellectual,
ethical, political and methodological dimensions at stake.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)
at the University of Oxford for financial support for the conference at which the articles
were first presented. We are especially grateful to Vanessa Hughes for her contribution to
the organisation of the conference, to Ida Persson for admin and logistical support, and to
COMPAS director Michael Keith for his intellectual support, not least for stepping in to give
an inspiring keynote at very short notice. We are also deeply indebted to our co-editor Ben
Gidley for his substantial input to the Introduction; and to Karen Fog Olwig for her close
reading of the articles and stimulating epilogue. Finally, thanks to Claire Alexander and
Amanda Eastell-Bleakley at Identities for seeing the special issue through to publication.

Notes
1. For Angela Merkel, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-
germany-multiculturalism-failures, [Accessed 4 June 2013]. For David Cameron, see
 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 357
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference,
[Accessed 30 May 2013].
2. A systematic discussion of the similarities and differences between the two concepts is
beyond the word limits of this article.
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/21/zadie-smith-big-society-
multiculturalism, [Accessed 30 May 2013].
4. See http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/events/forthcoming/ethnography-diversity-urban-
space-conference/, [Accessed 6 June 2013].
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/04/boris-johnson-immigration-uk-economy,
[Accessed 4 June 2013].
6. By juxtaposing these two events, Falcous and Silk (2010) reveal the tensions and ambi-
guities between assertions of inclusive civic nationalism and the geo-politics of the
‘war on terror’ within Britain’s post-imperial self-imagining.
7. http://simply-docs.co.uk/Equal_Opportunity_Diversity_Policy_and_Guidance/Equal_
Opportunities_and_Diversity_Policy, [Accessed 26 June 2013].
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8. There is not space here to summarise the extensive debate about the relative merits of
Marcus’s programmatic article. For important critiques, see Hage (2005) and Candea
(2007); for more sympathetic engagements, see Falzon (2009b) and Coleman and
Hellermann (2009). For an overview of ethnographic traditions of studying minority
and migrant groups in both anthropology and sociology, see Alexander (2006).
9. On ethnography as an embodied skill, see Gidley (2009). We note that Baumann’s
fieldwork in Southall was conducted over a period of 6 years and wonder if any funding
body today would be willing to invest in research of such longitude.
10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/24/capital-john-lanchester-review,
[Accessed 5 June 2013].

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 360 M.L. Berg and N. Sigona
METTE LOUISE BERG is a Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
(ISCA) and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of
Oxford.
ADDRESS: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford,
51 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 6PE, UK.
Email: [email protected]
NANDO SIGONA is a Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute for Research into
Superdiversity (IRiS) at the University of Birmingham.
ADDRESS: School of Social Policy, Muirhead Tower, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, Birmingham,
UK.
Email: [email protected]
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