Super-diversity in societies explained
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:03
My main interests at present are about processes of diversification in a broad sense and how the public understands diversification of societies. We're particularly interested in migration-driven diversification. We recognize that societies are diversifying anyways in terms of things like more and
00:24
more identities, lifestyles and sina, family formations, political groups, re-clusterings and so forth. But my main concern right now is about migration-driven diversification. Right now, across the world, we're seeing a sea change in migration patterns.
00:45
We're seeing more people from more places moving to more places. So that means more language diversity, religious diversity, ethnic diversity. People are moving under different migration channels and under more complex legal statuses and so forth,
01:02
different gender patterns and so forth. And all of these together, we talk about the rise of new conditions of super diversity, the way all of these sorts of variables fit together. We use a number of different methods depending on the type of data that we're acquiring and trying to analyze.
01:22
So on the largest scale, as it were, we have access to global data by way of the UN and World Bank migration data. We have national data, for instance, direct connection with the Canadian government or the Australian government. And we can accumulate, as it were, big data on migration flows and diversity patterns at the national and municipal levels.
01:48
And those we subject to sophisticated interactive data visualizations that allow us as analysts or members of the public, for their own better understanding, to be able to go in and move around variables
02:01
and see how they play out in maps and all sorts of cool graphics. On a different scale, we gather our own quantitative data by way of large scale surveys, where we can ask specific questions about people's perception of their neighborhoods, about their daily levels of interaction, about their attitudes towards others and towards their neighborhoods and so forth.
02:25
Taking it a level deeper, we have a range of more qualitative research techniques, sociological and anthropological techniques, where we have researchers embedded within state or municipal governments or within NGOs.
02:41
And they look at how these institutions deal with diversification, how they rescale themselves, how they develop policy in terms of diversification. And then finally, we have more ethnographic, everyday research where people are working within neighborhoods, looking at real patterns of interaction, real patterns of discourse that people have about migration and diversity matters.
03:10
We've got a wide range of findings on different scales or looking at different dynamics in the public understanding of migration and diversity.
03:21
Just to pick out a few of them, when people are asked about the numbers that they're talking about, how many migrants and ethnic minorities do they think they actually are in their country? Around the world, we find that people regularly overestimate wildly the number of migrants in their societies.
03:44
And of course, this elevated perception, this misperception, helps fuel the fear of migration and diversification in a lot of populations. Further research shows that when people are actually given the correct number,
04:01
the correct proportion of their given national society that are of migration background, and it's a much lower number than people guess, people routinely say, no, that number is wrong, my perception is right. And this is part of what we talk about as confirmation bias, that people look for information and data that fits their perception
04:26
rather than having their perceptions changed by way of the data. Another set of findings that we're very interested in has to do with the pace of diversification, that we see in many places that when a local population diversifies in relatively small terms and small percentage,
04:49
but very quickly in a short space of time, that also triggers a fear or apprehension of migration that leads to anti-immigrant and anti-diversity sentiments.
05:01
Crucially, over the last five years especially, we've seen the increasing role of social media in coloring people's understanding of migration and diversity processes. There have been major studies looking at half a million tweets, for instance,
05:21
showing that when very emotional and moralistic language is used about migration and diversity in a negative way, this has a profound impact and the number of retweets or the number of Facebook likes increases drastically. The more hostile people talk about migration and diversity, there's a kind of social psychological effect
05:47
of exacerbating perceptions of threat, of conflict, of negative consequences of migration and diversification. And this is happening throughout the social media sphere.
06:06
We know that under certain conditions that we can create people who have positive, even brief interactions with someone of a different background, so let's say from a migration background of whatever kind,
06:23
this leads towards more positive attitudes and those attitudes can also get reflected onto people from other backgrounds as well. Contact really does work. We can prove this scientifically through all sorts of studies. One of our own studies at our institute looked at daily interactions and their relation to attitudes
06:46
in 50 neighborhoods in 16 German cities and we found exactly that. High levels of weekly, if not daily, interaction leading towards more positive attitudes towards others and more positive attitudes towards diversity generally.
07:01
So getting that message across and looking at circumstances and supporting public programs and NGOs that try to get people together for positive modes of contact certainly works. We know that in a conceptual framework that we use at our institute that looks at what we call
07:20
configurations, representations and encounters, ways of looking at how difference is socially organized in cities or nation states, that right now there's a huge emphasis on representations, as we call it. That's modes of discourse, framing of debates, images conveyed about migrants and about diverse societies.
07:43
The framings, the images can be altered in such a way that people can see migrants and diverse societies as less threatening to their own status, to their economy, to their cultures, to their national histories. And so this reframing of national narratives around migration and diversity matters in less threatening ways
08:05
is another important findings that can be turned into a series of recommendations, particularly for media and social media to convey. We're going to continue to look at the large-scale patterns of diversification to try to get a better
08:25
understanding of what the flows and mechanisms are and how they play out in specific localities, specific cities around the world. The bigger question is this area of the meaning or the understanding of migration and diversity and what shapes public understanding of this.
08:44
Some of the future ways to look at this will be to look at this relationship between everyday experiences that people are increasingly having in cities around the world and how this relates to their understanding as gathered through things like social media or wider media or
09:03
looking abroad at dynamics or conflicts happening in other countries. To get really a closer look at how people put together their understandings from outside information gathered and from their own experience. And as part of that, of course, as academics and social scientists, we
09:25
have to look at our own interventions into the public sphere and the ways that we put out our findings and how that might influence in one way or another the way that people understand migration and diversity.