Volume 2016, Issue 241 - Special Issue: US Perspectives on Super-Diversity and Schooling, Issue Editor: Nelson Flores

Super-diversity is an important social field of analysis, diversifying and deepening the current base of research in multicultural education, bilingual education and in transnationalism in education. Researching super-diversity provides an intersectional lens from which to understand the relationship of race and language among myriad diverse immigrant groups, rather than the single-group studies that are common in education research studies. Secondly, researching super-diversity is both about capturing the joy and creative cultural production that occurs in spaces with multiple language groups, but to also attend to the racism and power that may look different in super-diverse spaces. The present article discusses techniques of data collection in super-diverse contexts that can give rise to these goals: researching horizontally and researching vertically . Researching horizontally means selecting participants in order to provide opportunities to see how youths’ creative cultural and linguistic repertoires of practice illuminate super-diversity. Researching vertically looks at how power reconfigures in super-diverse sites in relation to the ways in which diversity is managed and governed.

Examining processes through which identity and semiotic markers of race, gender, and sexuality are constructed, this article looks at the ways categories like “gay”, “Asian”, and “Latino”, for example, are articulated, counted, and delineated as well as complicated by intersecting lines of difference that entangle subject positions. Drawing on findings from a three-year ethnographic study in a Northern California urban public high school, this research connects the micro-level processes of language and the macro-level processes through which difference is constructed. Arguing that notions of enoughness and authenticity are used to assess participants’ claims to identities, this article further pushes scholars of super-diversity to consider the role of power and privilege in shaping such forms of legitimacy. Focusing on power and privilege in the negotiation of identity is significant for scholars of super-diversity because it moves us toward an analysis of the ways unequal power relations are produced and articulated through people, their interactions and relations, and perceived differences. In an era of super-diversity, subjects live with multiple, overlapping, mutually inflecting identities, far from previous tick-box approaches which treat identity as a static set of categories one may check off as representing. Considering intersecting lines of difference, we see that identity is not just discrete categories, but a process of drawing boundaries, taking positions, playing with representations, and making meaning out of symbolic resources.

This article explores the communicative interactions of one Latino youth, Lorenzo, in an English Language Arts classroom located in an intensely-segregated Black and Latino urban community. While the larger city in which this school is located is known for its diverse cosmopolitan population characteristic of super-diversity, I argue that Lorenzo’s language practices index his socialization in contact zones shaped by Black and Latina/o cultural and linguistic practices. While sociolinguistic perspectives on super-diversity might offer an explanation for the repertoires of languages uttered by Lorenzo and his Black and Latina/o peers, the language practices explored are reflective of the cultural historical experiences of Lorenzo’s intensely-segregated community which have been practiced prior to any conceptualization of super-diversity. Drawing on super-diversity research, language ideological inquiry and language crossing and sharing scholarship, this article calls for further attention to the cultural historical past of Black and Latina/o communities in future discussions of super-diversity in the U.S.

Sociolinguists have always been leaders in advocating for the legitimacy of all language practices. Recently, sociolinguists have begun to question whether frameworks that have historically been used as part of this advocacy are adequate for describing the language practices that have emerged as part of contemporary globalization. Some scholars have proposed super-diversity as an umbrella term to unite the project of developing a new sociolinguistics of globalization. Though we are sympathetic to the goals of developing new tools for sociolinguistic inquiry, we point to three limitations of the super-diversity literature: (a) its ahistorical outlook; (b) its lack of attention to neoliberalism; and (c) its inadvertent reification of normative assumptions about language. We suggest the concept of sociopolitical emergence as an approach to sociolinguistic research that adopts insights offered by the super-diversity literature while explicitly addressing these limitations. To illustrate this approach, we consider the case of a hypersegregated Spanish/English dual-language charter school in Philadelphia. This case study begins by situating the school within the history of Latinos in the United States and Philadelphia as well as within the contemporary neoliberal political economy. We then analyze emergent linguistic practices and emergent linguistic categories that have been produced within this historical and contemporary context in ways that resist the reification of normative assumptions about language.

In this article we embrace the call that Flores and Lewis (this issue) put forth for situating research on linguistic “super-diversity” within particular historical, cultural and social contexts, challenging monolingual norms, and acknowledging ideological forces that drive the “sociopolitical emergence” of particular language practices. Using ethnographic and audiotaped data, we explore emergent linguistic practices in an after-school program in Los Angeles that in important ways both mimics and amplifies the diverse migration flows that characterize super-diversity. Focusing on linguistic interactions in this site, we question the tendency in research on super-diversity to celebrate translingual practices without consideration of power relations, including locally specific ideologies of language as manifested in both explicit and implicit forms. We examine linguistic practices that emerged and took shape as new members entered our space, identifying translingual and transcultural competencies that participants displayed as they “read” the local context and made choices about what language forms to utilize. We suggest that these may be largely unrecognized skills that are cultivated in contexts of super-diversity. At the same time, we sound a warning note about the constricted nature of the forms of language that came to predominate in this space. Finally, we highlight practices that were designed to disrupt hegemonic notions of language, support linguistic flexibility, and capitalize on the possibilities that super-diverse linguistic and cultural contexts offer.

At Warruwi, a remote Australian Indigenous community, people use a range of Indigenous languages on a daily basis. Adults speak three to eight Indigenous languages and these high levels of multilingualism are out of step with current trends which see most Australian Indigenous communities shifting to a single variety be it a variety of English, a contact variety or a traditional Indigenous language. The three Indigenous languages most widely spoken at Warruwi are quite dissimilar as they belong to separate language families. This article discusses three characteristics of language use at Warruwi that are likely to play a role in supporting the levels of multilingualism found there: the diversity of individual linguistic repertoires, receptive multilingual practices whereby interlocutors address one another in different languages and language ideologies that are quite different to those found elsewhere. Characteristics of multilingualism at Warruwi are compared with those reported for other communities with small-scale multilingualism. Francois’ (2012) concept of egalitarian multilingualism is used as a starting point for the exploration of models of small-scale multilingualism.