FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Migration seminar: Doing Diversity
Thursday 27 March, 13:15 - 15:00
Niagara, 9th floor, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, or zoom
Welcome to the Migration Seminar
Doing Diversity: street-level decisions in superdiverse neighbourhoods
Profile
Dr. Mark van Ostaijen, Associate Professor affiliated to the Department of Public Administration and Sociology (DPAS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Dr. Mark van Ostajen (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Attendance
This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05. If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.
Zoom
Will be available closer to the seminar date.
Abstract
Urban diversity has become one of the most challenging issues of our age. This has led to new ‘superdiverse’ realities or ‘majority-minority’ cities in which more than half of the population has a migration background (Vertovec, 2007; Crul, 2016).
The novelty of this situation (Kraus, 2023; Lazeri, 2023; Keskiner and Waldring, 2023) urgently demands a focus on its institutional consequences because this creates challenging circumstances for ‘street-level workers’ in the frontlines of these neighbourhoods, such as teachers, cops and care-workers (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2012). But since we do not yet know how street-level workers are ‘doing diversity’ (Ahmed and Swan, 2006) this can cause severe problems, such as public service disparities.
This project therefore focusses on decision-making processes of street-level workers and unfolds how their decisions are based on intersectional justifications, such as gender, class or ethnic justifications (M’Charek, 2010). It comparatively investigates how street-level workers justify decisions, and why decisions differ, between six superdiverse neighbourhoods in Malmö, Aarhus, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Marseille and Bilbao. In doing so, this project is the first large-case and comparative study on the institutional consequences of superdiversity, which eventually creates a peer-learning infrastructure to improve evidence-based knowledge about ‘doing diversity’.
This project is innovative because it:
- creates empirical and comparative knowledge on the institutional consequences of superdiversity in context
- advances theoretical frontiers beyond superdiversity, intersectionality and street-level bureaucracy
- generates new methodological ground combining qualitative (shadowing), experimental (vignettes) and co-creative (Labs) methods. This is how this project will create a new interdisciplinary field: comparative justification studies to tackle street-level biases, stigmatisation and discrimination.
