Social Policy and Superdiversity

This chapter makes the case that many of the research challenges set out by Vertovec in his original invocation of superdiversity are social policy challenges, and that many of the criticisms of superdiversity, particularly those concerning the neglect of racism and inequality, can also be made of social policy scholarship. Although some progress has been made in examining the nature of inequality in superdiverse populations, particularly around the issue of access to welfare services, much work remains. With the critical role of policy in addressing inequality and racism acknowledged, there is a need for social policy as an academic practice concerned with vulnerability and human needs to attend to superdiversity. Building on calls for the importance of focusing on everyday experiences and practices to uncover multifaceted forms of division and racism and to look at diversity as social practice, the chapter calls for a new focus and new approaches in social policy scholarship. The proposed approaches are multi- and interdisciplinary, longitudinal, and comparative endeavors that build up from the everyday through mixed methods studies that move beyond superdiverse “subjects” to micropublics and the elite and that look at patterns and processes across scales, places, borders, and time. The case is made for real world research that interlinks social policy and superdiversity to provide the evidence on which to develop policy capable of meeting the needs of all.