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Conversation Highlights

On what mixity really means

“Mixity is not a singular thing in itself, but it’s an opening to a kind of multiplicity and a range of experiences.”

— Steven Vertovec

On assertion and assignment

“And I think one set of ideas or perspectives or concepts that I’d like to get on the table, particularly for this episode, are what in the social sciences sometimes we talk about as the difference between assertion and assignment by way of categories and identities. So assertion refers to the category that I put myself in and that I assert, that I project. I am a member of this category or group.”

— Steven Vertovec

On the fiction of monoracial thinking

“So I guess all of this goes to the heart of our episode now, the fiction of monoracial identities in some ways. That people ascribe to people they see as different in that sense. And Miri has a lot of really interesting insights into this question.”

— Georg Diez

On lived experiences and family heritage

“It’s actually lived experiences, family heritage, it’s memories, it’s longings, it’s dreams that they talk about.”

— Georg Diez

Chapter Overview

00:00 Understanding Mixity and Human Diversity

01:57 Assertion and Assignment: A Conceptual Framework

04:14 Fieldwork in Northern England: Young British Muslims

12:08 Miri Song on Mixed Identities and Monoracial Thinking

22:51 The Future of Mixed Identities

31:52 Why Monoracial Templates Persist

Full Transcript

00:00 — Understanding Mixity and Human Diversity

Georg Diez (00:00)

In public discourse there’s really a lack of understanding of what mixity is.

Steven Vertovec (00:05)

Mixity is not a singular thing in itself, but it’s an opening to a kind of multiplicity and a range of experiences.

Georg Diez (00:15)

It’s actually lived experiences, family heritage, it’s memories, it’s longings, it’s dreams that they talk about.

Steven Vertovec (00:22)

Yes, these are discursive categories and classifications that we carry in our heads, but they have absolutely real world consequences.

I’m Steve Vertovec and this is the Futures of Difference podcast series. And I’m joined once again by my friend, Georg Diez.

Georg Diez (00:49)

Pleasure.

Steven Vertovec (00:50)

And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about how social categories change and particularly how social categories changed by mixity, by the mixing of categories. And that can mean a lot of different things.

Georg Diez (01:06)

No, it’s super interesting at this time where identity is such a contentious topic. I think people, as we discussed, it’s really at the core of so much political debate and is super relevant for political debate in countries all over the world. And it’s actually seen as a problem. Difference is more and more seen as a problem. And you make the case and we discussed it with your friends and colleagues. So this is actually a constructive element in how to think about the future of society. Not only futures of differences as this podcast is called.

Steven Vertovec (01:43)

And I think one set of ideas or perspectives or concepts that I’d like to get on the table, particularly for this episode, are what in the social sciences sometimes we talk about as the difference between assertion and assignment by way of categories and identities. So assertion refers to the category that I put myself in and that I assert, that I project. I am a member of this category or group. Assignment is what we put others in, the category. So, I think you belong to this or that category and I’m going to treat you accordingly. And sometimes the meanings of those categories align. And we roll on in our engagement with people according to that. Sometimes there are very different meanings attached to assignment and assertion, even if it’s the same social category. A racial category, sexuality, having to do with gender, age, disability or whatever. We constantly classify others in our environment. That’s how we proceed through the world, trying to make sense of things. And we consider ourselves, all of us have multiple identities and categories that we bring into play in our social world and our engagement all the time. So, this dynamic between assertion and assignment is a crucial way of understanding social categories. And now particularly in this episode, we’re gonna be talking about how those categories are changing by people mixing different assertions of identity or different assignments of identity and creating effectively new categories.

01:57 — Assertion and Assignment: A Conceptual Framework

Georg Diez (03:34)

And for Miri Song, who is part of this episode, that’s a personal story in sort of ways her kids are of mixed background in that sense. For you in some ways also a personal story to go back to your research in the late 80s, early 90s in Northern Great Britain, UK. I think you explored those. I mean, because this is going back, in lot of ways, to your earlier research and trying to connect ,as we are always try to do here, this past and the future and how it’s based on your field experience as an anthropologist. Can you share a bit about that?

04:14 — Fieldwork in Northern England: Young British Muslims

Steven Vertovec (04:14)

Absolutely, this is one thing I learned through ethnographic work I did in Northern England, particularly the cities of Keighley and Bradford, where you have people from a background largely Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, but now living for generations in Northern England in these contexts. And I worked particularly with young Muslims, young British, Pakistani, British, Bangladeshi individuals and learned a lot about the ways that they construct identity and social category and whatnot. And I really learned quite a bit about this relationship between what I talk about as assertion and assignment through them. So, this was back in the 1990s when, particularly after the Rushdie affair and the Iranian revolution and so forth, particularly in Britain, but in many places around the world, the category of Muslim was ever more stigmatized, even villainized as something potentially dangerous at odds with British values or something. There were all sorts of stereotypes being laid upon the category of Muslim. And working together with these young Muslims in Keithley and Bradford, I learned about the ways that they chose, particularly during this contested period, to vehemently and powerfully assert their identity as Muslim. We are Muslim. You British, particularly you, perhaps, racist British, are putting us in this category and villainizing us and we are going to use this category to contest your stereotype. Your racism against us. And by the way, they would tell me straightforwardly, we don’t particularly say our prayers. We never go to the mosques. We may not be particularly good Muslims. We want to be later in our lives. But right now we are young British people and we want to live as young people in British society. However, we are going to assert this identity as Muslim, as a kind of anti-racist identity. Because, you see what I mean, they were being assigned a packaged identity. And their own assertion was going to rise and meet that and contest that and push back upon that.

Georg Diez (06:57)

And how was that done? So was that through culture in a lot of ways or through music, film or passion?

Steven Vertovec (07:03)

And through sport, would call themselves, their team would be called the Young Muslims of Keithley. They would wear clothing, absolutely, in music, in gathering, in social protests and so forth. All the while admitting to themselves, well, I’m not a particularly good Muslim right now, but I want to be later in my life. But right now, I’m a young man and I’m going to live as that. But I assert this identity as a young Muslim because of the way youÕre pushing me.

Georg Diez (07:37)

And is that the same sort of situation today or how has that sort of changed to today, this view of, I guess, that more mixity sort of now? Is that difficult to assert mixity or...?

Steven Vertovec (08:04)

I think you’ll findÉ And again, we’re moving away from the Muslim case particularly. I think we’re finding a lot of people adopting a mixed identity as a thing in itself. So again, in a previous episode, I talked about the importance of a Black British identity. So that is a mixed thing. We are coming from a Caribbean heritage or a Nigerian or other African heritage, but we are born and raised in Britain. We are both. And so asserting mixity becomes a new important category of identity assertion in itself. So again, these are just ways that categories themselves, we have to recognize, are not fixed. But are subject to change, particularly through this dynamic of assertion and assignment. And people placing themselves vis-ˆ-vis how these categories are portrayed.

Georg Diez (08:51)

And how has that changed? We talked about social imaginaries in the previous episode and you talk right about social complexity and we talked about Nigerians in the UK versus maybe Jamaicans in the UK. How would you describe these group identities, how they create society or how they negotiate difference within such a space? It gets more more complex in that sort trivial sense as well, but maybe also in the academic sense.

Steven Vertovec (09:27)

Well, this is a real dynamic moving on and on and this will relate this to the topic of mixity, which we’ll talk about with Miri Song. That is that obviously everyone has multiple categories. Again, across the spectrum of ethnicity, race, language, sexuality, gender, age, subculture - all kinds of identities. And people assert these identities in different contexts and are assigned by others identities and categories. And again, it’s a kind of dance about how these categories meet up or completely bump into each other or run past each other. So yes.

Georg Diez (10:19)

So blackness would be a unifying category against whiteness, but then among that category you have different cultural backgrounds.

Steven Vertovec (10:40)

Exactly, so, it’s notion of situated identities. Depending on the particular context individuals find themselves in or social groups. They will assert one of their identities. And often, we talk about, self-essentialization. That sometimes even though no one likes a stereotypic portrayal of any social category, sometimes in order to argue for a particular set of rights or recognition of a particular part of our identity, they will indeed come forth and say, we are X, recognize us as X. Even with the risk of stereotyping or overly condensing and bounding a particular group. In order to make that point of a demand for respect and recognition, they will pull out one identity and say, please, this is who we are.

Georg Diez (11:29)

So I guess all of this goes to the heart of our episode now, the fiction of monoracial identities in some ways. That people ascribe to people they see as different in that sense. And Miri has a lot of really interesting insights into this question.

Steven Vertovec (11:49)

Well, indeed, Miri Song, who’s an emeritus professor at University of Kent and at the London School of Economics, is a world-renowned scholar specifically on this topic of mixed identities and so forth. So, when I was talking with her, I first asked her how did she come to this topic anyways that she’d become a specialist in? Now let’s hear what she has to say.

12:08 — Miri Song on Mixed Identities and Monoracial Thinking

💬 MIRI SONG — University of Kent / London School of Economics

“I’ve been interested in issues around ethnicity and race and migration pretty much forever because I was a migrant. I was born in Korea. I moved to the US when I was very young. And then I migrated to England in my mid-20s to start my PhD. And so I was always aware of that status. And I was always interested in going back to categories, how as social scientists, most social scientists acknowledge that categories and racial and ethnic categories are socially constructed. Anthropologists like you, Steve, yeah. And yet I think what’s so interesting is how easily and often we as people, including social scientists, fall back into a monoracial way of thinking about things and a kind of essentialist way of thinking about categories. That we are still somehow essentially defined or defined by these categories, even if we can sit there and say, oh, but it’s socially constructed, of course. I think that there is a tendency for people to be, I think, in monoracial terms. And so I was very interested in how, of course, there’s a long history of white colonial powers and other people have always tried to limit membership into particular categories and not wanting to end the obsession with racial purity. So that was a large driver, of course, for how people would think about mixed people and miscegenation. So that then connected also to discourses of racial fraction, one drop rule. And these are things, of course, that were used by various regimes and governments to control access to privilege, protect white privilege and status, all of those things. So intellectually, I was always interested in those things anyway. But then when that connected with the fact that I have mixed children and my husband is white and we have mixed kids. And I’m always interested in how they think about things. And it’s not just that, I know so many people who are mixed. So demographically, it’s kind of hard to ignore because in terms of a number of growing populations around the world, you can’t ignore it.”

Georg Diez (14:13)

No, it’s interesting because we discuss so much in categories of, more or less clear categories, even though we acknowledge the complexity. Just listening to Miri, I realized that there is, in public discourse, there’s really a lack of understanding of what mixity is. And I find that, yeah, just startling listening to her. Also thinking ahead, like what the future is of more and more mixed people. So, I don’t know how you see that.

Steven Vertovec (14:45)

Well, I think this helps us or gives us a springboard to thinking about the future. And I talked with Miri a bit more about that and we’ll hear from that. But a couple of things I want to say surrounding what she was just talking about. The first is, you know, this idea of, well, we all know that categories are social constructions. And, you know, when we talk about that sociologically, we want to emphasize, you know, as we’re talking about constantly, the malleability and changeability of these things, the difference between assertion and assignment, like I say, and each side of that equation, the meanings of categories change and so forth. But for some people, when you say, they’re socially constructed, it seems to sound like, they’re not real. They’re just something that we talk about and so forth. And I find that unfortunate because that’s not what we mean by them. And I always think back to being really irritated one time back during the genocide in Rwanda. I’ll never forget a fellow anthropologist indeed being talked to on a talk show and he said, well, these Hutus and Tutsis, we have to realize. Those are just social constructions, those identities. They’re just imposed by colonial authorities and they’re just social constructions. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of people were being massacred because of those social constructions. And that is to say, and especially with categories like race, and we always emphasize there is no biological basis to race. Race is a socially constructed category. However, the real world effects of this social category are there clear as day in terms of inequalities and treatments and discriminations and so forth. So that’s one thing we have to get straight about the notion of social construction. Yes, these are discursive categories and classifications that we carry in our heads, but they have absolutely real world consequences in social relations and people’s status and people’s life courses. So that’s one thing. And then Miri also raises this idea of assumptions of monoracialism. Either you’re this race or that race. And that’s this kind of old style, indeed colonial thinking, the so-called, as you mentioned, one drop rule. That you’re either white or you’re non-white. And if you’re non-white, if you have anything, you are a completely different category. And this is something being very much contested because, again, the boundaries between such categories are not clear cut at all. And indeed people are adopting more and more identities that reflect their mixed backgrounds. Indeed, I was really amazed and this was a big news issue a few years ago. In the 2020 United States census there was a big discussion around the fact that the largest most rapidly growing social category in the United States was mixed. That is people who ticked multiple boxes as to what identity they asserted. And the big question was, what? How did that happen? Was it because the census was changed and it allowed people to tick more boxes? Or was it because simply more and more people had a mixed background? Or because more babies were being born to mixed couples? And the collective answer was, well, it’s all three of those things. There are more people with those sorts of backgrounds. There are more people asserting an identity that reflects confluence of heritage. And the census has, and this is not just the US census, the censuses around the world are starting to allow people to tick multiple boxes. Those are, unfortunate notions, we could talk about that another time. But these again social categories, people allowed to tick multiple boxes because it reflects who they are. So, we’re having many more people with multiple backgrounds and actually that’s a new mode of assertion that they are asserting, I am mixed, I am neither one thing nor another, I am multiple.

Georg Diez (19:19)

This is already a category that creates identity, you’re saying?

Steven Vertovec (19:22)

Absolutely.

Georg Diez (19:23)

Why would you think do we even still cling to these categories then? So, I mean, going also towards looking towards the future. And MiriÕs, it’s interesting that she says, acknowledges that there is this essentialist urge. So even among social scientists, this fallacy to reduce them, themselves or others to these categories. So, there are like three or four categories and it’s always race in some ways. That seems to be the strongest pull. But it’s a fiction in how to look at, I mean, this is most obvious in politics of like, this Hispanic vote goes this way, that way. So, it’s like really childish view of both society, politics, individuals, but it’s still talked about that, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, while there is no Hispanic vote, actually.

Steven Vertovec (20:24)

Hispanic itself is a mixed category

Georg Diez (20:26)

So what does it mean about public discourse, language, our view of society, our simplified notions of how things work actually in the real world? And how can you twist that? How can we move towards something more enlightened, I guess?

Steven Vertovec (20:44)

Well, this reflects back to a theme we talked about in the first episode and continues throughout. And that is, you know, for many in societies around the world today, there is a greater recognition of our individual multiplicity. We are many things. And that might refer to these categories presumed to be biological, one or another. No, we are many. In terms of culture and cultural practices and sets of values and so forth. Many more people are saying, no, I come from many backgrounds. I know how to behave with my grandparents from the old country and I know how to behave with my schoolmates at school. And these are different cultures and I’m competent in both of these things. So that’s another kind of cultural identity multiplicity. And we are, or we have been, moving more and more into recognition, people asserting that kind of identity. The problem is on the assignment side, many people find it hard to assign other people to a multiple mixed category. It’s much more easier for people, especially when dealing with things like race or so-called visible appearance, to assign people into presumed mono categories. As I say, there was a trend underway. We talked about this in the first episode, some years ago of moving towards recognition of multiplicity. Now, especially with a lot of populists and new right discourse and categorization and assignment of people, they are trying to move back to more simplified categories, mono categories, rather than complex multiple ones. And this is the great tension of this moment that we’re at right now. Recognizing that or another. But Miri also had interesting things to say about the future of these sorts of categories as well. Let’s listen to what she has to say.

Miri Song 00:22:54:18)
I think that there is going to be more mixing in terms of interactions between people who are regarded as being of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. I think the data bears that out. And I think there will be more mixed people. They’re the progeny, the descendants of these relationships. One of the things I think we have to think about which is really important is that, let’s say going back to the U.S. where I most recently did research on mixed people, there’s so much regional variation, huge, right? So you’re gonna have pockets of societies where it’s quite common, and then you’re gonna have pockets where people are just not mixed at all. And interracial unions would raise eyebrows. So there can be huge, huge differences. I think also, it would be a mistake for people to think, when they say, oh the future is going to be mixed. We want to step away from some neat linear, ineluctable understanding of how we go from A to B. It’s not going to be like that. It’s not like we’re all unmixed now and then we’re going to become cablination in the future. There are going to be so many different ways that this could go.

22:51 — The Future of Mixed Identities

Georg Diez (24:02)

So for me as a journalist, I think this is hugely interesting and important what we do here actually, and to just reflect on that again, and what Miri said. We are in this period of transition. We talk about the past, the present and the future, which has a meaning. So, because this is actually the space that’s negotiated ItÕs that space towards a future, that she says rightly, importantly, is not a linear projection of what we think will happen. So,listening to her, I think it’s really important to understand that the forces that we see in society, like opposing a lot of changes in social categories or in a whole mix up or build up of society, are caused by that reality of the transition, that people have difficulties to acknowledge, actually. So, I think that is for one thing and then it is almost in a novelistic way, interesting to start reading and to start really understanding the, for lack of a better word, again, complexity of people. And it’s a bit humbling in some way to understand how simplified one’s vision is of who you think people are. And that a white person, sort of, having a relationship with a non-white person it is neither clear what this white person is. Very essentializing this person in that way, nor what this non-white person allegedly is. So it’s a bit mind boggling. So we have to understand that actually every person is a living novel. And it’s so interesting in its nuances and layers. And it’s interesting also thinking about, like, a systemic way politically, what does it mean to create a public sphere around that where everybody is like different in a good way, different? How can you create some commonality in that difference? But I think this transition period is important to really open up that question and to really negotiate that. And it’s contested, but that has a reason why it’s contested, because it is happening.

Steven Vertovec (26:28)

A transitional period to what is the big question. And that lies at the heart of this whole futures of difference thing. We could be transitioning into one path or another or multiple paths or as Miri says, regionally, even from city to city or city versus countryside or whatever, they will have their different pathways in this. But I like when you say that this is mind-boggling as it should be, because this relates to the idea of our brains are classification machines, effectively. We classify the world, we classify people all the time. And there are kind of received templates that people learn and gather. And one of those received templates is the idea of mano racial. This this kind of biologized notion of people. We’ll talk more about the nature of essentialism in the next episode. But people have this template about race and about belonging. And this is all in terms of the assignment idea that we get. People assign people to races in their heads. And the idea of mixity, not just as a third new category, but as an opening to multiple possibilities of combination, of meaning, of self identities and so forth. That is something that breaks that template. And that’s part of where we are right now and part of the struggle. And there are voices out there and movements afoot trying to say, no, no, no, we don’t want to break this racial template. This is the way we classify the world and it helps us underline a particular hierarchy because there’s again, there’s moralities and values and assumptions made to this kind of template. And why Miri is talking about how this idea of mixity and the variations included in that. In a lot of her work, she talks about how even within the same family, the identifications, the portrayals, the self-assertions of different kinds of identities and practices can be myriad, even amongst siblings. And this goes beyond so-called racial mixing as well. We talk about language, people being able to be multilingual and have different ways of relating to people linguistically or in terms of meanings and so forth. In other sorts of cultural practices as well. We all have situated identities and situated practices. So, I know how to behave in a bar in Chicago and at high table at an Oxford college. That is part of the mixity and multiple competence that all of us are starting to be able to exercise a lot more. But you see what I mean? This is breaking from a simplified template. No, this is where you belong and this is how we expect you to behave.

Georg Diez (29:47)

What’s the meaning then at all of categories?

Steven Vertovec (29:52)

Well, categories still have this important function of assertion and assignment. So, we don’t want to say that all categories should be disregarded because they’re flexible, and all of this. And theyÕre ways of discriminating against people. I mean that’s true. But we do go through the world and it helps us make sense of the world. It helps us relate to other people on the assignment side. We just, the ideal is to have a more nuanced complex view and not a stereotypic homogenizing template for assignment. And in terms of assertion, we have to recognize that, yes, for many people and many so-called communities, a particular category, their religion, their ethnicity, their language, their nationality, has real emotional meaning to people. And we have to recognize and respect that. And that was part of the shift in language. We will call you what you prefer to be called. Whether that regards your sexuality, your national background, your racial identification. We will respect that. So you see what I mean? There’s still a real role for social categories. The idea is not to dismiss them, but to understand them in their full complexity and meaning and social effects.

Georg Diez (31:15)

I guess it’s what was contested then. Or what the argument about identity politics was a lot about that. So, what is the liberal view of society where everybody is equal, which is a fiction. And then this assertion, no, I am of this and this identity and I can describe myself as such. This has an emancipatory function actually to do that. I guess the contention was a lot about that liberal view, which can be sort of repressive in a way.

31:52 — Why Monoracial Templates Persist

Steven Vertovec (31:53)

So, Miri Song, when I talked to her, also had some interesting things to say about what I just called this kind of racial template, monoracial template, and why that seems to persist so much. Let’s see what she has to say.

💬 MIRI SONG — University of Kent / London School of Economics

“There’s no linear, neat, you know, kind of pathway into mixedness because what can happen, of course, is you could partner with a white person, you could have a child. If you want to use in racial fraction, blood quantum terms, who’s mostly white in their genealogy, but they might partner with somebody that’s completely different. So, you know, for generation to generation, you just don’t know what is going to happen. And I think that to the extent that there are going to be more and more mixed people. And in diverse urban centers, it’s more and more common and socially accepted to be in mixed relationships. You can have these blips, whether it’s across generation with siblings or down the generations. You don’t know what’s going to happen. So, to talk about there being a kind of ineluctable, neat pathway, not true. And also, I think that projections about the census that say that the growth of part white mixed people is such that, you know, it’s gonna somehow enlarge the white population or the so-called mainstream. I think that that is pretty problematic, actually, because most of those projections are based on quantitative research, not based on qualitative research where you talk to people about their experiences. And what I found, of course, these are non-random samples, so they’re biased samples in these qualitative studies. But I think that there’s a lot of evidence in my research to show that there are very, very varied interests and degrees of cultural exposure, commitment, racial consciousness to people’s white and minority backgrounds. And a huge amount of variation in racial phenotype in one’s appearance. So I think that we can’t make generalizations about part white people sort of enlarging the white population. I think that we’re really, really far from that, in my opinion.”

Steven Vertovec (33:47)

So as Miri is saying, this kind of, you know, what I call the template, this kind of monoracial classification that people put on the world is not going away anytime soon. It’s, I suppose, what people are going to do with that. And, as I say, for a lot of people, it’s an important part of their self-assertion, their identity as well. So, we shouldn’t try to dismantle it or dismiss it. But I suppose, again, as she’s saying in her work and what many others are saying too, mixity is not a singular thing in itself, but it’s an opening to a kind of multiplicity and a range of experiences that don’t neatly fall in monoracial categories.

Georg Diez (34:39)

No, what she’s also saying, I think that’s relevant for this discussion that we’re having is that it’s going to remain an important category in a political sense. So it’s going to be the space where a negotiation takes place and it’s going to be important for people to adopt certain identities and, in a way, to make, as she says, also claims about themselves. So really to find their space in their history. So, she says personal spiritual for lack of better words, which is really important because we talk so technically always about actually categories, but it’s actually lived experiences, family heritage, it’s memories, it’s longings, it’s dreams that they talk about.

Steven Vertovec (35:30)

For recognition of who they are as well. There’s always this question in a lot of work around social categories and the political sense is, you need to recognize me for who I am, for my own self-assertion. And perhaps I’ve been historically discriminated against because of this identity. And this is what I’m making calls for. Some sort of recognition of the fact that there has been discrimination in the past.

Georg Diez (35:57)

And this is not essentialism. I think that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next episode. This is something more strategic in some ways.

Steven Vertovec (36:05)

It’s a mode of what’s talked about as anti-essentialism in itself. Breaking through to third and open in multiple categories as well. Exactly the content of the next episode.

Georg Diez (36:17)

Yeah and I’m curious. It’s going to be Ann Phoenix, I think. So, yeah, looking forward to that debate. okay. See you.

About the Guest

Miri Song is Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent and at the London School of Economics. She is one of the world’s leading scholars on mixed identities and the dynamics of race and ethnicity.

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Conversation Highlights

On colonial categories that persist today

“You’ve got this post-independence Singaporean state that inherited these categories and they have really institutionalized them.”

— Steven Vertovec

On Singapore’s racial management model

“It was really the post-independent Singaporean government that institutionalized these racial categories into everyday life and public administration, which required further simplification. So far, we’ve been talking about racialized categories. And I would just like to be a bit more specific.”

— Junjia Ye

On temporary migration and rights

“I think what is distinctive about migration in Asian cities, certainly in Singapore, and increasingly being picked up elsewhere, is the enforcement of transients.”

— Junjia Ye

On skill regimes as new instruments of difference

“So freed African laborers as a kind of pre-industrial craft, semi-skilled labor force, Indian indentured as the agricultural force and all the rest being kind of business people and in commerce and so forth. So you had this really strangely constructed society.”

— Steven Vertovec

Chapter Overview

00:00 Colonial Legacies and Social Categories

14:39 The Singapore Model of Racial Management

34:24 Temporary Migration and Its Implications

50:21 Future of Difference and Social Categories

Full Transcript

00:00 — Colonial Legacies and Social Categories

Steven Vertovec (00:00)

You’ve got this post-independence Singaporean state that inherited these categories and they have really institutionalized them.

Georg Diez (00:09)

These are the categories that were created in the past. This is the life they have.

Steven Vertovec (00:15)

ThereÕs this overlapping of, as we said, past, present and future.

Georg Diez (00:19)

Who is doing the engineering for diversity or against diversity?

Steven Vertovec (00:36)

I’m Steven Vertovec and this is the Futures of Difference podcast series. As ever, I’m joined by my friend, the writer and journalist, Georg Diez.

Georg Diez (00:45)

Hi, it’s a pleasure.

Steven Vertovec (00:46)

And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about the pasts, presents and futures of social difference, of key social categories. And the premise is that in order to understand where we’re at today with certain key social categories and the debates and contestations that they have, and in thinking about the future trajectories and meanings of key social categories of difference, we do have to consider the pasts of these categories. How they were constructed, some time ago, who did the construction and to what effect? How have they shaped societies already leading up to today? And, we have a guest that I interviewed about this. With a particular set of colonial categories and their kind of ways that they continue to haunt or structure society. But first, I know Georg what perspectives do you have on the past? You’re a trained historian as well as a journalist.

Georg Diez (01:49)

For sure for me, it becomes more and more relevant these days to understand how things evolved. And if I see the contestation around the question of decolonialism, I think it’s hugely meaningful because there’s always a negative energy. There’s a reason for that energy because I think in today’s political environment, governments or pundits or the media or interested parties, want to use history to streamline the present and the future in some way. I think it’s hugely important to understand where difference comes from. And you say, so if differences are social categories, I would also say, we talked about migration a bit, like how we talked about globalization. So there were different phases of globalization actually happening. And one was colonialism in a certain way that the mixing of the world started. And I think for that reason, it’s super relevant to understand always where we come from, to understand what are the forces that shape the future. And you’ve such a rich experience, you come from researching colonial presence then as an anthropologist, but they’re for sure connected to colonial past.

Steven Vertovec (03:07)

Yeah, I’ll give an example of that in my own experience in researching with colonial pasts. But one thing I wanted to say, you mentioned how there are many voices out there today that point towards history as a kind of presumed explanation for difference and particularly for conflict. As an anthropologist, I’m particularly frustrated when I see in the media some conflict, some presumed ethnic or religious conflict portrayed as an age-old conflict. They’ve been doing this for a thousand years, you know, whether it’s Palestinians and Israelis or Hutus and Tutsis or whatever part of the world we’re dealing with. It’s presumed that the categories of difference and identity have somehow remained fixed in their meanings. And who they pertain to and what the confrontation lines have been age old. And if nothing else, one of the lessons that we’re trying to convey in this podcast series is that social categories are absolutely malleable and their meanings and boundaries change continually through time. And so we can’t talk about an age-old identity because every few generations, the meanings of the contents, the boundaries, the outsiders and insiders, those change constantly.

Georg Diez (04:43)

Also difference is not a negative category per se or at all and neither is diversity. Difference maybe sounds more contentious, but I guess the fight is actually about the word diversity in the US, in particular against diversity equality inclusion initiatives. DEI they are called. And I remember not so long ago in media, but also mostly in like the business world or the setup of our organizational structures, it was clear that diverse groups, per se diverse groups, whatever diversity means, are better, are more productive, are just better. Now all of a sudden this seems to be replaced by homogenous is better, which is weird. And I think it’s, as you say, an important fact or the aim of this podcast is to really keep difference as an important category of thinking about how we want to live our lives in connection to people who are always different in very diverse and complex ways.

Steven Vertovec (05:52)

Well, it’s part of the lesson as well that, you know, everyone belongs to multiple categories and they do have inherent meaning, many of these categories to people. As well as I say, we read society and the people that we meet according to certain categories. And how those categories are constructed and filled with meanings or as Michle Lamont said in one of our episodes, filled with a kind of moral weight have real implications for everyday reactions, social structures, economic structures, and so forth.

Georg Diez (06:27)

Can you unfold maybe some of these categories? Because I think it’s important to understand what they are, like this social complexity that you talk about or superdiversity and how that maybe was coming out of your work in the Caribbean. So if that is connected to that , because I think it’s interesting for me to understand when I read your work that, okay, this is what he means. There’s a gay, Catholic, Sri LankanÉ probably not Sri Lankan, but American or maybe Sri Lankan person. And what is the category that’s more important actually? Is it the Catholic or the gay or like what is it? And then how you maneuver that diversity, I guess, or the complexity in society. How do you see that actually? How do you engage with that?

Steven Vertovec (07:20)

Well, we’re perhaps getting ahead of ourselves here because I would say that a lot of the past legacies, particularly the colonial legacies, have been experiences of reduction of categories, of putting people in a few categories. And the super diversity thing or what’s called identity complexity or intersectionality is more of a modern recognition of race, ethnicity, language, gender, age, profession, social status in terms of family, parent, child, grandparent, multiple kinds of social categories that really make a difference to people’s lives are certainly complex. They’ve always been there, but we’re finding more and more recognition of these multiple categories. In the colonial past and particularly in order to rule over colonial societies, people in power, the British, the French, the Dutch and so forth, had ways of reducing populations to a few categories that would help them administer people, rule over people and understand how the society is structured. The creation of the census in colonial India was one way that that gave the British a view of who they’re ruling, who we should talk to for this purported community. And a lot of these colonial categories overlooked actual open-ended multiple identities, multiple statuses, and put people in fewer and fewer containers. And so that was one of the real legacies. And we’ll hear about one experience of that in a moment and how that lives on. My work in Trinidad, so I did my doctoral field work in Trinidad, lived there for about a year and a half, trying to understand relations between different categories of people there. And Trinidad was one of those British colonies where the population was, as it were, kind of artificially created by the imperial power. The indigenous Arawak population had been wiped out by disease and slavery and other things. And first there was of course a slave population brought from Africa to work on the plantations. After the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, the British needed labor, a kind of docile labor force that could be sort of dragooned into action. And so they brought indentured laborers from India. So right there you have an artificially constructed society, 40 % African background, 40 % Indian background. And then the rest of the population comprised of French, British, Jews, Lebanese, other people who came for economic purposes. And the society was really constructed both in racial terms and those different racialized categories of people that the British put together had different places in the economy. So freed African laborers as a kind of pre-industrial craft, semi-skilled labor force, Indian indentured as the agricultural force and all the rest being kind of business people and in commerce and so forth. So you had this really strangely constructed society. So I looked at what happened under those conditions and after those conditions and then particularly as Trinidad gained its independence, those groups, particularly Africans and Indians, became political competitors, which they weren’t before. And that changed the dynamics and the shape of what these social categories were. And particularly the largest segment of the Indian population were Hindus. You had a smaller Muslim population, but most were Hindus. And the nature of Hinduism, I write all about this in the book, the nature of Hinduism was completely redefined and streamlined and changed to create a kind of quasi-racialized Hindu population that also became its own political party, its own force and so forth. And so I looked at how this changing nature of Indianness and Hinduness vis-a-vis various African populations, how the meanings of these categories changed from a colonial period to a post-colonial period and then into a period of rapid economic change as well and what effects did those rapid economic changes have on the construction of those social categories and the way they were lived out in everyday villages, remote parts of Trinidad. So you see what I mean? There was a stamp of a colonial creation of a society, a structuring of society, and that then took on its own permutations after the colonial period ended.

Georg Diez (12:52)

And how is that? And that’s really interesting also to understand, as you say, your resistance to understand history is something that is actually a natural sort of development of a place or a society or a country or people and see how it’s often, as you say, constructed with interests in mind or with, yeah, sort of often economic interests in mind. And how that goes forward. So what is that? Because we will talk about Singapore in this episode as a post-colonial entity, I guess. But also heavily constructed and heavily interesting to study and like future oriented. From the work in Trinidad what’s your takeaway for understanding like specific takeaways for understanding the present or the future of difference?

Steven Vertovec (13:49)

Well it’s again this lesson that these social categories in which people put themselves and read others are malleable and change due to political, economic and social changes, social circumstances, but also particular strategies, particularly political strategies that groups might have that went to harness a particular identity for a particular political end. Competition over resources, this is often the post-colonial legacy that after the British or the French or the Dutch left their colonies, it created a situation of competition amongst those categories of people that the colonial powers themselves had constructed. And that’s much of the reality in many parts of the world today. Those legacies remain. That’s a big part of the post-colonial experience. And you mentioned the efforts to decolonialize that experience. And part of that is trying to deal with these social categories that the imperial powers created and stamped on societies.

14:39 — The Singapore Model of Racial Management

Georg Diez (15:06)

It means just, the ÒdeÓ is maybe a bit misleading, though. It’s actually unfolding the colonial heritage in some way. It’s not the ÒdeÓ itÕs not like a reverse process, it’s more like a recognition of the realities of what happened and how these, as you say, categories came about.

Steven Vertovec (15:31)

The ÒdeÓ in decolonizing is itself contested amongst a lot of scholars. A lot of that exercise is recognizing the effects that colonization had on various peoples, but also how those effects continue through the current day in various ways. Particularly by way of social structures, of making some people in more advantageous positions than others. And those weren’t natural. Often those were due to the labor relations or economic structures or politics that the colonizers themselves had stamped on a society in order to run it for their purposes. So the ÒdeÓ is trying to create, I suppose, one way of putting it, is dealing with the social categories of the colonizers in ways that put them aside to create a more even playing field and to have people reassess the nature of these categories, even the categories that they themselves belong to. Now, in order to help us make sense of this rather abstract discussion, now, as you mentioned, we’ve got a colleague and friend, Ye Junjia who’s at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore to tell us a little bit more about the colonial legacies of social categories in Singapore and how they’re managed today. Let’s listen to what Jia has to say.

💬 JUNJIA YE — Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

“So I think the major colonial legacy in thinking about difference and diversification in Singapore must be race. I think the introduction of race by the British really started the process of simplifying difference and diversification. We live in a part, or I live in a part of the world that has incredible historical diversity and mobility across not just of land but across of oceans as well. And I think the introduction of racialized thinking by the British started the simplification process of channeling people into differentiated racialized categories. Now the British approach towards race was fairly laissez-faire as was their overall administrative approach to Singapore as a colonial entrep™t, right? That is a post where they could channel through some of these raw materials from the other parts of the empire, moving through Singapore to be processed and then sending it out to the other parts of the world. It was really the post-independent Singaporean government that institutionalized these racial categories into everyday life and public administration, which required further simplification. So far, we’ve been talking about racialized categories. And I would just like to be a bit more specific. In Singapore, we are primarily talking about the simplification of racialized diversity into four main races: the Chinese, the Malay, the Indian, and the other category. In Singapore, we have no time to say all of these categories in full form, so we call it the CMIO. And the CMIO continues to structure everyday life in Singapore. And there are very clear spatial implications to this. For example, 80 % of Singaporeans live in public housing, or what we call Housing Development Board flats. These are publicly subsidised flats that, unlike elsewhere where people do not want to live in public housing, in Singapore, public housing is aspirational housing. And race is built into the administration of flats where each building of flats must reflect the multiracial composition of Singapore. So multiculturalism, is multiracialism in Singapore as understood through the CMIO model. And it has become normalized, ordinaryized through our public housing program. The idea behind it is in many ways a very pragmatic one where we’ve got this polyglot plural population that needs housing, need to have access to running water, steady electricity. And so in order to house such a plural population in a very dense way, with them sort of seeing difference as normal, the HDB decided, well, we don’t care if you don’t like or don’t know who your neighbors are, you’re going to learn to share a wall with them or multiple walls with them. And over time, difference will become normal. You may be sharing a wall, taking an elevator, checking your mail at the same time with somebody who speaks a different language than you at home, who practices a different religion. You may not know them personally, but nevertheless, you can live together in quite a dense way. So race in that sense is structured into our multi-racialized spaces. It has also been made to be quite a ordinary unspectacular part of Singaporean living.”

Georg Diez (21:19)

So I think that’s fascinating. To understand how the past is really so much shaping what we experience today. And it seems that how she explains it, this necessary fiction of race is so prevalent today. So of this simplification, as she says, of diversity that has been long, long established. And it seems really only and mainly the European mind, the European stamp, the Europeans claw on these places that is actually creating this racialized present actually. And then I think that’s very important to go forward as we talk about the futures of difference, how to deal with these fictions of race and how, because it’s necessary actually to undo these fictions and to make clear that these are fictions. But in the time being, and that’s another aspect that we talked about with Dan Hiebert, it’s the role of government. In the meantime it is even more simplified to make societies work in some way in the Singaporean context. So it’s clearly shaping public policy, I think these are two really interesting factors because we talk about in some way migrationÉ I mean, we might talk about that in this context as well. I guess Singapore is a big migrant state. It has a big migrant community. I think it’s really to the point of this episode, it is important to understand like these are the categories that were created in the past. This is the life they have. And to deconstruct that power structure, maybe that’s the decolonial, sort of it’s the deconstruction, the power structures in the present, because you take everything for granted, usually. And politicians sort of portray things as essential, as the natural state of things. And I think the role of maybe academia or also media would be to really unfold or make that sort of question these categories and make them accessible in different ways.

Steven Vertovec (23:36)

Yeah. Singapore is such a unique case in terms of its, well, its colonial legacy is common with other places, as I was saying with Trinidad as well, with a kind of stamp of a British way of thinking about groups, particularly racialized thinking. But they’ve brought it into a kind of presence and there are certain images of where they want to go in the future, which we’ll also hear about from Jia. That have implications for other societies and we’ll come to talk about that. But one of the key things I’d like to pull out from what Jia was saying and from what I know on having worked with her and other colleagues in Singapore. You’ve got this post-independence Singaporean state that inherited these categories and they have really institutionalized them in the name of a kind of social harmony, but in an almost kind of, not quite authoritarian, but let’s say a rather heavy-handed state management of difference. As she talked about, the CMIO categories are literally something that people carry around on their identity card. They are stamped with a racial identity by the state. And that will give them different kinds of treatment across social services and in society, and particularly, as she was pointing out, in housing. And here you have this almost kind of heavy-handed state in the name of a presumed social good, a kind of cohesion, determining who is going to live with who and under what terms, i.e. the social housing, which is quite, as she pointed out, quite nice in Singapore. It’s a very middle-class society, quite nice, but they determine how many people of what racial group are going to live together and how they’re going to live together. And in all the public announcements on the underground and all of these sorts of things. This reinforcement of racial categories is around people all the time and the state is desperate to maintain good relationships between people put in these racial blocks as it were.

Georg Diez (25:55)

So the goal is differece. So can you explain that a bit more? What’s the thinking behind that?

Steven Vertovec (25:59)

The goal is to reinforce a racial category at all times and to, as it were, enforce what we talked about in social scientists as the contact theory. They want to make sure that people are coming into everyday contact with a racialized other in such a way that a familiarity and a modus vivendi will evolve out of it, and it does. Singapore is actually quite successful even though we might find some of this categorization really quite abhorrent. It’s a reinforced set of racial identities. In the negative parallel, South Africa also stamped racial identities on people all the time, but with a policy that was designed to keep people apart. Whereas in Singapore, people are stamped with an identity, with the motivation to bring them together.

Georg Diez (27:03)

So maybe it’s important, it’s really interesting. It’s important maybe to understand what European immigration histories are or the US, because that’s quite, as you say that’s heavy-handed Singaporean. In European contexts, it’s quite off-handed, I guess. So you have a little Italy’s in the US. You have like, Stettler communities in Europe. You have immigration that is actually working in this cultural sense of that Turkish communities or Syrian communities assemble in certain areas. And that’s not structured, that’s not state engineered and that’s what we want because this is our way of thinking that society works. But then what is the advantage and disadvantage? Because I think the Singaporean model is interesting and I wouldn’t even say in its ambivalence but more in its aspiration maybe. You say, heavy-handed, but you can react to that. I see that as like already three or four categorical differences. The non-racialized, racialized model in Europe, which is cultural. So then you have this social engineering in Singapore. And in between clear apartheid models. I don’t know how you explain the advantages, disadvantages of the European model, if that is the model. Because it is all about the state and going forward it will be about the state. Like who is doing the engineering for diversity or against diversity?

Steven Vertovec (28:39)

Well, this is really coming to some key points and in a moment it will lead to a paradox of Singapore when it comes to migrants. But what you’re saying in European, let’s say, and North American histories of settlement, of migrants, of racialized others, of ethnic minoritized others and so forth, more a kind of laissez-faire policy oriented. Particular migrant groups on arrival were not designated to live in certain areas but ended up obviously in certain areas of large cities: London, Berlin, New York and so forth.

Georg Diez (29:22)

Which is contested now in some way because you think, oh, they keep their sort of parallel societies in some way.

Steven Vertovec (29:29)

Well, that’s a hugely contentious term. I don’t know if we’ll have time to go into that, but we could. But nevertheless, people ended up in certain gateway neighborhoods, largely because of the nature of housing and the cost of housing and migrants going into areas where housing was cheaper because they needed a kind of launch pad. And that’s where the Chinatowns, Little Italy’s, Little Istanbul’s, etc., originated from. Sometimes this was enforced, like in the USA, by so-called redlining, which tried to keep black populations only in certain areas and would not allow them to move out. But in other cases, London and Paris and others, it was a normal case that migrants would move into an area and within time, often within a single generation, would move out to other sorts of areas and disperse. And new sets of migrants would come into particular areas. But segregation was always the nightmare of urban planners and policymakers. And it was always a question, is segregation something done to people? I.e. the only alternative is to go into concentrated areas. Or was there self-segregation, people wanting to be in an area where a common language is spoken, common commodities available and so forth. There were always mixtures of both. And this goes back to what’s called the Chicago School of Sociology, looking at urban transformations through various groups moving in and out of areas. And segregation of groups, creation of so-called ghettos or imagined parallel societies was always, as I say, something that policymakers always tried to to move against. And right now in Denmark we see this in a very heavy-handed way, ways of trying to break up communities, of enforcing people to move out in the name of some imagined good.

Georg Diez (31:40)

Or in the migrant crisis here you had all sorts of Syrians being placed in some far away East German communities where they were like intentionally like forced to integrate and that was like a very weird concept of social engineering without any real thinking behind it, real infrastructure behind it.

Steven Vertovec (32:03)

And it’s a highly debated issue. Some would say that the creation of ethnic enclaves is actually a good thing that helps as a step process of integrating. Other policymakers would say, no, this is a bad thing because of this idea of parallel societies that they don’t need to talk to anybody else or learn the language and so forth. And, you know, through our research at our institute and research of other colleagues, of course, we’re going to say it’s much more complex than that. It’s a matter of having it both ways. But nevertheless, in places like Singapore, we see this combined recognition of certain social categories, whether they are adopted by people themselves or not. They seem to say that, well, these are the stamp we’re going to put on people, and we’re going to construct our urban spaces by way of making people live together. And this is a model that’s been working except when we come to new migrants. And they, the Singaporean state have decided, we are going to segregate and keep difference. And Jia Ye has something interesting to say about that. Let’s hear what she has to say.

34:24 — Temporary Migration and Its Implications

💬 JUNJIA YE — Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

I think what is distinctive about migration in Asian cities, certainly in Singapore, and increasingly being picked up elsewhere, is the enforcement of transients. And I think recognizing enforced transients of migrants has major implications in migration studies, which I think for very long time has privileged the study of permanent migration or so-called settler migration. Asian cities, Singapore, for example, enforces transients for the majority of new arrivals. As much as highly skilled workers are in theory able to access permanent residency or citizenship, although we’re also seeing those requirements and conditions shifting, the majority of new arrivals are brought in not to be naturalised, not to be integrated. They are brought in as temporary transient labouring bodies. This doesn’t mean that they only work for a year or two. It means that they will have no access to citizenship. And at the end of their work journey here, however long they may be working, and many of them do end up working for a few decades, they will be repatriated. So I think the enforcement of transients, this kind of, this temporality of migration is distinctive and enforced at quite a large scale in Singapore. This enforced transience is also seen in the kinds of spatial containment that we see with particularly, not only, but particularly with low-wage male migrants who are usually located in these large purpose-built dormitories on the peripheries of the island. And I can see these on-site dormitories that they would live for the duration of the project. But the more permanent large-scale dormitories are located on the outskirts of the city, and these would have 12 to 20 migrant men living in one room on bunk beds. Not surprisingly, when COVID-19 hit, they were the most infected population, right? Most infected.

So much so that there was a daily counter of migrant worker dormitory cases and the rest of Singapore cases. And they were not allowed to leave the dormitory. They were very much at that time constructed as the risk rather than being at risk. Yeah, they were seen as the threat rather than being threatened. There is that kind of spatial segregation of low-waged primarily men in these dormitories. But I think there is also a different kind of migrant geography when it comes to where migrants live. When we think about the domestic workers. Domestic workers in Singapore, the majority of them live with their employer. And currently, the ratio is every one in five Singaporean households has a domestic worker living with them. So these will be migrant workers who are very much a part of our public housing landscape as well, right? In fact, they’re probably within the neighborhood even more than many of us, yeah? When many Singaporeans would leave the neighborhood to go to work during the day, it is the domestic workers who would be walking kiddo to kindergarten. Who would be making sure that grandma and grandpa get their daily exercises in the park or along the what we call park connectors.

Georg Diez (37:15)

Okay, hugely interesting, I think, when we talk about the future of difference. That’s, I think, one key aspect. What strikes me is in some ways that we have these different stories and narratives about who we are as countries and we take for granted usually that our story is the right one. So the European approach to the world is we’re right and the others are wrong. So that still goes on. Singapore is weirdly authoritarian country which enforces race in a way that we’re like above. We don’t do that anymore. So that leaves the parts of the reasons why they do it, why they think social engineering in that way is necessary. I would be interested to understand really again, as you explained, guess, the context theory. But it seems a bit more advanced than European thinking about sort of make up a society. But I was wondering again, so if the conceit of the Europeans is then, okay, this temporary migration that’s happening in Singapore, this transience, that’s not our history. That’s not how we do it. But I think you make the point that this is actually where the future is going towards. And I wonder if that’s, I thought about, I guess, slavery is not the right word, but is that fiefdom then? Like what is this category? Is it feudalism that is coming up? Because they largely rights-free, these temporary migrants. And in some ways, it’s a very troubling, I guess, development. I don’t know how you see thatI mean these a multiple questions, it is really about the relationship, I think, between the imaginaries of countries like Germany or UK or France which think they are more enlightened and aren’t, I guess. And the contestation with the social engineering that places like Singapore do and the reality that teaches us.

Steven Vertovec (39:20)

Singapore is so curious in its relationship to diversity and difference. As we said, they accept this colonial heritage of racial identities and stamp this on society of Singaporeans and promote and indeed celebrate. You know, this idea of the multiracial state is something you can get fridge magnets and so forth that celebrate this. And there’s posters and lots of public displays of our pride in being a multiracial, multicultural society amongst Singaporeans. And that’s celebrated. But the difference of temporary migrant workers is not celebrated. That’s something to be segregated and excluded and kept on the periphery of society, largely around legal status and rights and so forth. And, you know, this is something that a lot of countries are starting to consider and is one of the viable future pathways that we might see taking place around the world right now. The Singapore model. And I think when I raised this with Jia, she had a particular reaction to the idea of Singapore as a model for the rest of the world.

💬 JUNJIA YE — Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

“My immediate reaction when hearing that elsewhere is sort of seeing the Singapore model as the way to go is Yikes! I think the skilled regime, especially in a time and place of migration, is more than a migrant-sulting mechanism, right? The implications of it exceeds administration. It shapes work conditions. I think the skilled regime through its practices of conditionality and its intersections with migration, it is an instrument of difference-making. It differentiates labor and it increasingly granularizes labor itself. I think it’s important to recognize what does being labeled unskilled justify? Yeah, it is important to recognize that it is these unskilled bodies that are exposed to, say, the most harm while at work.”

Georg Diez (41:48)

This makes me think of something we discussed in the last episode with Dan Hiebert about the question of aging populations and shrinking populations and the need for influx of migration or labor into societies. And that is a very different view of how you see societies evolve, which is more, I guess, about integration and then accepting these new migrants into societies. And the Singaporean model seems harsh in that respect. And it does seem to be the end of difference in some way because these people don’t even exist in a way in these societies. They’re very clandestine, unseen.

Steven Vertovec (42:38)

Yeah, indeed, there’s so much in what Jia was just saying there. Let’s try to unpack some of those things. So one is about the need for migration to keep a population at a certain level. In fact, Singapore has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, 0.9. I think it’s second from the bottom after South Korea. And so, you know, the government is quite conscious of that, but because they have stamped the society with this CMIO, Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other category, they need to ensure that the proportion, that the relations between those populations also stay at the same levels. They don’t want any kind of imbalances. So that’s one kind of challenge in a society that’s actually shrinking. And the other has to do with the issues raised by Dan Hiebert, and that is the labor needs of such a prosperous society. You go to Singapore and you’re absolutely astounded at the quality of life there. And so to maintain that kind of standard that Singaporeans have come to expect, massive migration is needed. And Jia used this this notion of a skills regime. And that’s one of the ways that Singapore is doing it. And one of the ways that other countries now are thinking of emulating. That is, on the highly skilled end, technicians, knowledge producers, cultural producers, corporate people, the road to permanence, the becoming a permanent citizen, or resident at least of Singapore is much more open on the low skilled end, domestic workers, construction workers, factory workers, port workers and so forth there’s no chance of staying in Singapore. That’s what she means by this transience. And so this becomes one of the big issues when thinking about the futures of difference and related to Dan’s talk. The need is absolutely there for labor on both ends, high skilled, low skilled. How to manage that? Well, people are going after this Singapore model of having a transient or temporary migrant population that is particularly, as it were, purposely segregated from the rest of society and they are disposable. They are temporary, they perform certain functions and they’re expected to leave again. And now that we’re, bringing new technologies with digitization and so forth, that’s becoming more and more possible to control the presence of people and to make sure that they leave after a designated time fulfilling some labor function. Now, you know, someone would say, well, there’s a positive side because it is providing work for these people. They might remit money back to Bangladesh or Pakistan or Thailand or wherever they’re coming from. So that’s a good thing. And yes, it provides an opportunity. But in the meantime, their rights are extremely limited, their voice, they’re tied to their employers, their exportability really can be seen as dehumanizing as well. And is that a viable model for a lot of societies in the future? But it’s really being talked about and I was just reading about it in The Economist today. This is a model being put forward by a lot of economic realists.

Georg Diez (46:36)

For Europe as well.

Steven Vertovec (46:37)

In Europe as well. We should have much more migration. But forget about all this integration stuff or population replacement. Let’s just build dormitories and contain people and bring just their labor.
Now, you know, what a lot of people raise and, you know, we’re in Germany and there’s the example of guest workers. Germany did kind of do that from the 1950s to the 1970s. Have people who were deemed to be temporary workers, just guest workers, and they were expected to go back to Turkey or to Yugoslavia or to Italy or Greece. And for all sorts of reasons, they didn’t do that tribution to society, not just by way of their labor, but culturally, by way of their presence, by way of their creativity, by way of their entrepreneurship and so forth. They’ve contributed to the country. But some will say, well, it’s not the same as that old guest worker model. What’s being proposed now in a particularly digitized and AI world is those people won’t be given the chance to stay like the Turks and the Italians and the Greeks in Germany of decades ago. They will be exported after a designated period of time. And as we say, that’s going to fill these labor needs that Dan Hiebert raised, but it’s going to raise all sorts of contentious issues about rights, about difference. Now, difference is going to be part of this skill regime. Some people are going to be deemed more worthy if they’re high skilled and less worthy if they’re low skilled. And that’s gonna have multiple impacts on social inequalities, economic inequalities, political rights and voice and so forth. And so I think, you know, there are positive dimensions of a future around temporary migration schemes like in Singapore and various major pitfalls with such a model as well.

Georg Diez (48:45)

So how does that address the question of aging populations and social welfare states or social security in these countries? So that’s like separated because the birth rate is still plunging and the same is happening.

Steven Vertovec (48:59)

Well, the argument would say, you know, some people have said, well, you know, migration isn’t a solution to aging societies because migrants age also. But with temporary migration schemes, migrants don’t age, migrants leave.

Georg Diez (49:16)

But they donÕt pay taxes do they orÉ

Steven Vertovec (49:19)

That’s a good point. Migrants, while they’re here, will pay taxes, will pay into the schemes that will help thatÉ

Georg Diez (49:28)

Without the rights.

Steven Vertovec (49:29)

But without the rights that come with taxation. No taxation without representation. Well, no, sorry, representation’s off the table. We’ll still take your taxes though. And we’ll pay you a salary and then send you away and bring in somebody else. And so in that way, for a lot of the right-wing populists, that’s an acceptable migration model. And it may cut through issues around culture, race, ethnicity, and so forth, but replace it with skilled, with high skilled and low skilled. And for me, you know, one of the great dangers is emulating, you know, it’s a worst case scenario or perhaps an unfair model, but under the Third Reich, you had ÒZwangsarbeiterÓ. People who were in bakeries and farms working in Germany, with absolutely no rights. There were forced laborers. Now, that’s unfair because temporary migrants are going to be voluntary. They offer their labor. So, you know, I want to knock that comparison right out. They’re by no means forced laborers like under the Third Reich. But the fact of having a population living amongst us with no rights and no voice and just here for their labor and put in this position because of this new social category of skill, I think can bring about many kinds of social problems, not least inequalities of various kinds.

50:21 — Future of Difference and Social Categories

Georg Diez (51:11)

Or conceptually, mean, you can’t have like modernity and pre-modernity at the same time in the country. Because, as you say, so this is, you say, no taxation without representation. That was the push from like a colonial or feudal society to a modern society where you have this regime of rights.

💬 JUNJIA YE — Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

“Rights and voice.”

Georg Diez (51:32)

Rights and voice. And I don’t know if this sustainable as a democratic model. I guess, the question is how much Singapore is in that sense of functioning democracy.

Steven Vertovec (51:43)

It’s pulling this apart. Rights and voice, yes, but only for some. And is that the kind of society we want to live in? Me, not.

Georg Diez (51:54)

That’s, of course, quite a provocation. I think it is interesting, though, to think about these dystopian futures and as we discussed in this episode, the past, present and futures which are overlapping in certain ways. I think this is a post-rights or pre-rights regime that we’re entering. That is in some way a neo-colonial era. And we clearly live in a colonial present where the search for raw earth is connected to colonial practices on the African continent. And the same with these domestic workers, that seems sort of transient colonial practice that is, I think, hugely destructive for understanding how democratic societies should evolve. And you bring up the guest workers example. I think that is as a German interesting to reflect upon, because it’s portrayed as a success now in some way, I think. And it wasn’t conceived as such. It wasn’t meant to be that way. So, I think, there is something to be said for offhanded laissez-faire approach that lets societies evolve in the end. Even though it’s less clearly pro-diversity at the same time. So we live in contested times and have these contested narratives. But I think the question of, we come to this in the next episode, more mixed societies. How that is evolving. I think that is something that will be hugely interesting to look at.

Steven Vertovec (53:43)

Yeah, I agree. And, you know, one of the real lessons that Jia and other colleagues have presented us by way of Singapore is this overlapping of, as we said, past, present and future. How the colonial past is still stamped on society in important structural, institutional policy ways. But how a new future is emerging what she calls this skills regime. It’s a re-sorting of society, not along racial terms, but upon skills and what people offer. And those skills are being translated into various legal and economic statuses and even different temporalities. Some people with high skills are given long-term perspectives, people with low skills are given short-term perspectives. This is a re-sorting of society. Indeed, Jia talks about migration sorting regimes and how skills becomes a new mode of difference, a new social category. And this is, I think, going to be playing out around societies around the world. So that’s one set of future dynamics, as you said, that we’ve put our finger on and discussed. And in the next episode of the podcast series, we’ll talk about a different kind of emergent social reality. And that is the so-called mixing of people of different heritage. One of the fastest growing categories of difference that there is. Which is going to play out very importantly and very differentially in the future.

Georg Diez (55:23)

Okay, I’m excited. Thanks.

About the Guest

Junjia Ye is a geographer at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research examines migration, labor, and social difference in Asian cities.

🎧 Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Conversation Highlights

On the global fertility decline

“Everywhere, pretty much in the world, the rate of fertility is falling. This started in the more developed countries, the global north, but it’s diffused now into middle income countries, even into a number of low income countries. So just to give you a couple of examples of this, it wasn’t so long ago that we talked about the world population explosion.”

— Dan Hiebert

On the battle of narratives

“No, I think it’s relevant also, we talked last time about the imaginaries, which is different from narratives, but I think it is a battle of narratives. It was then and it’s still now. I do agree.”

— Georg Diez

On superdiversity and migration

“These changes in the nature of migration, especially since the 80s, 90s up till today, really form part of this relationship that we had between scholarship and government. So yeah, at COMPAS, that was the Center on Migration Policy and Society at University of Oxford. I was the founding director of that.”

— Steven Vertovec

On Africa’s emerging role

“This is happening not evenly across the world. As I said, it kind of started in higher income countries and it’s moved to middle income countries. But even now, there are certain parts of the world that have not yet fully entered this trend, and that is particularly Africa.”

— Dan Hiebert

On journalism and migration

“Yeah, no, that’s I think part of my disenchantment with journalism in general to be able to drive forward positive change and actually fulfill a more constructive role in society.”

— Georg Diez

Chapter Overview

00:00 The Migration Crisis and Its Implications

03:07 Media Narratives and Migration

06:00 Globalization and Migration Dynamics

09:13 Cultural Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity

12:14 Government Policies and Migration Management

14:56 Superdiversity vs. Multiculturalism

18:06 From Multiculturalism to Diversity

21:03 Migration Scholarship and Policy in Germany

23:55 Public Perception and Migration Narratives

27:12 Future Projections for Migration and Identity

32:50 The Role of Journalism in Migration Discourse

35:35 Demographic Change and the Future of Diversity

39:57 Aging Populations and Economic Implications

44:14 The Welfare State and Migration Dynamics

49:33 Government’s Role in Navigating Demographic Changes

53:34 Cultural Shifts and Fertility Trends

56:06 The Battle of Narratives in Migration Policy

1:01:44 Future of African Migration and Global Labor Needs

Full Transcript

00:00 — The Migration Crisis and Its Implications

Georg Diez (00:00)

Countries like Japan or Germany are suffering from this age crisis.

Steven Vertovec (00:04)

Bringing in new migrants to provide gaps in the labor market is going to be a key feature.

Georg Diez (00:10)

These are all measures that need a strong government.

Steven Vertovec (00:15)

70 % of the German population is still pro-diversity, pro-migrant.

Georg Diez (00:22)

but I think it is a battle of narratives.

Steven Vertovec (00:36)

Hi, I’m Steve Vertovec and we’re here with the Futures of Difference podcast. I’m here with my friend, the journalist and writer Georg Diez. And today we’re going to be talking about a subject that comes to a lot of people’s mind when talking about social difference and social categories and so forth, and that is migration.

Georg Diez (01:25)

No, it’s such a fascinating topic, I think. For me as a long-time journalist, it’s such a contentious topic and you have so much experience in the field. And I think we’re going to have a really interesting aspect actually that I didn’t think about so much, demographics and the role of Africa in it. So I’m really, really looking forward to that conversation.

Steven Vertovec (01:19)

Now, again, one of the reasons why we’re talking about migration early on in this podcast series is people associate difference often with people coming from other places, cultural difference, or the fact that people may look different or their style and clothing is different. Linguistic difference is a huge part of categorization of others as well. But as well as things like values, certain cultural practices, family formation, all kinds of aspects of people’s lives are deemed different from so-called host populations into which migrants come. And so again, early on we should be talking about migration. It’s not the only or necessarily even in certain contexts, the most important mode of difference. But I think for a lot of people in the population, when you say, a category of difference they’ll think you’re talking about migrants of some sort.

Georg Diez (02:19)

Such a politically charged topic also. And we talked about this last episode with Michele Lamont’s take on stigmatization and difference as a problem and migration as sort of the root cause of that, which it is not, I guess, but maybe it’s something that pushes that contention forward and leads, I guess, to what some call populist backlash. We said last time was more, you said it was a front lash. It’s actually interesting to think about because we want to talk about present with regards to the future. We want to sort of explore not only what’s happening, but what will happen.

Steven Vertovec (03:02)

And a major part of this, whether we call it a backlash, front lash, maybe that’s not particularly helpful, but a certain change in the discursive sphere, the way certain groups are talked about, certainly in many cases in social media, amongst right-wing parties and so forth, they do focus on migrants and migrant forms of difference as part of a threat narrative, we call it. Of saying, be afraid, these people are making irredeemable changes to your society that threaten their coherence or their future dynamics or threaten traditional cultural practices of your country and so forth. And so, yeah, again, it is important to think about and talk about how migrants play into this whole sphere of stigmatizing certain categories of people.

03:07 — Media Narratives and Migration

Georg Diez (03:54)

And this is really your expertise. We have your friend and colleague Dan Hiebert later in the episode with his take on how demographic changes will affect population, how they are set up or how populations decrease actually in parts of the world and what governments can do. But you have so much experience actually in the field from your career in anthropology and working for Max Planck and other institutions. What’s looking back from today, what is your view of what you actually did or learned and who you worked with in the time that you were in the field?

Steven Vertovec (04:41)

Yea Well, I’ve certainly had lots of experience studying migrant populations, migrant flows, migrant dynamics. But one of the things I’d like to bring to the fore is a relationship as a scholar with government as well, because obviously, and this will play into some of the discussions with and around what Dan Hiebert is going to say, of course, governments are in the position of managing, curbing, or attracting migrants for various purposes, various reasons, various aspects of politics, economy and society. And so yes, I’ve had experience as a scholar working with governments, particularly the British government. So I was a number of years a professor at Oxford. And first, I was director of a national research program called Transnational Communities.

Georg Diez (05:35)

When was that?

Steven Vertovec (05:36)

It was in the late 90s.

Georg Diez (05:38)

Different time

Steven Vertovec (05:40)

Very different time. And that’s part of one of the points I’m going to make here. So the Transnational Communities program was at a time when we were really starting to appreciate with new modes of technology, the way that migrants who came from one country, one part of the world to another managed to maintain a life really, social connections, political, economic connections with another part of the world in everyday terms. This was before we had Skype and Zoom and so forth, but nevertheless at that time, the cost of international telephone calls absolutely crashed. And so it allowed people to be in daily contact with their loved ones, with community organizations, with political organizations, religious organizations in their place of origin, as well as in the place to which they moved. And so, it was a national research program. We had 19 projects all around Britain, universities and research institutes. And we worked with government trying to inform them about these new or let’s say differentiated lifestyles and ways of living that migrants to Britain were undertaking and what implications they had. One of the big implications was remittance flows. That’s the amount of money that people send back to their place of origin. And this in the late 90s, early 2000s also went through the roof and became a large part of the global economy. And we did research and informed the government that this is a huge part of development for a lot of countries, the money that migrants sent back and how important that was, as well as contributing to the labor market and society in the place to which they moved. And so working with the British government, we did manage to inform them, give them a different understanding. A lot of our results came into things like government white papers and so forth. And we did manage to change some government perspectives on migration. That was followed by a…

06:00 — Globalization and Migration Dynamics

Georg Diez (07:51)

How would you think was the take on that at the time? So Because as we said, this is such a different period in, I guess, Western history. There was this view that this is multicultural society. We discussed this last time about the terms of you’re a bit skeptical because it’s a term that’s not really, but you may explore that a bit more. Like, why is it a problematic term? But in general, there was a sense of the world coming together in some way and finding ways to live together. I think it’s interesting. So if we come back to these issues again and again, that there’s this huge part of technology. So that always plays a role in how groups are constituted and then also see themselves. First of all, as you said, the telephone, now it’s the internet and that’s really undervalued, I guess, to understand that aspect. And then there is always the economy and the economic factors. And today we see mostly discussions about culture. So these are the three, at least three different aspects. I think it’s always dangerous if culture is discussed, mostly because that’s where the contention comes in. And maybe that was different in the late 80s, early 90s. There was more optimistic view of culture as a space for finding common ground or how do you remember that?

09:13 — Cultural Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity

Steven Vertovec (09:22)

I think throughout this podcast series, we’ll come back to the issue of culture. And, I mean as an anthropologist, I’ve spent a lot of time not only looking at cultural practices, differences, worldviews, and so forth, but the ways that people have conceived what culture is. It’s another issue about multiculturalism and so forth. But, you know, I want to come back to what you’re saying about that time, the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, again, this was the great age of globalization. This is when everyone was talking about globalization in different forms, the greater interconnectivity of the world. And what our work on Transnational Communities brought into that understanding, conversations around globalization, is that migrants themselves, these kind of everyday people from the countryside or cities in the global south or Eastern Europe or wherever, were moving, had increased mobility, transportation, lower costs and so forth, but were maintaining these linkages. So globalization wasn’t just about commodity flows and linkages or multilateral agreements between countries, but migrants themselves were linking parts of the world in diasporas. This was also a time when the study of diasporas also was starting to boom. We realized that people around the world had these connections that they were maintaining. So the world was becoming a much more integrated and interlinked sphere than we had ever appreciated before. And so our work was showing how migrants, you know, these small people and families on the ground, not just the big corporations or governments we’re actually linking the world and bringing it together in ways that we hadn’t appreciated before.

Georg Diez (11:22)

Would you think, looking backwards, I mean, this is a time of optimism and I guess, now it’s not a time of optimism, but was it even true that optimism at the time? So from your work, was the optimism really more about a certain elite view of globalization working or was there actually in governments or in the societies, that you studied, a more positive optimistic view of how migration could also benefit societies? I mean, remembering from the discussion in Germany, that doesn’t seem like it was actually the debate at the time. Even then, it seemed to be discussed really under this premise of this is a threat to German identity. We can’t afford this. So it was never broadly discussed as a not only necessary but productive positive change of society. I don’t know if that’s maybe important to understand that there was optimism or how to rekindle that optimism in government’s ability to create or constructively work with migration. Because I think that’s necessary going forward. So that we have an understanding, first of all, about the power of governments, but also about how to communicate actually that this is beneficial. I don’t know if there’s something to learn from the time then and your work within government.

12:14 — Government Policies and Migration Management

Steven Vertovec (13:05)

Well, I think there’s never been a time when there hasn’t been some skepticism, particularly in conservative spheres, about migration. And that’s again, coming back to your point about culture. Some people see migrants as a cultural threat or something that will dilute a presumed national culture. But then this is often pitted against the economic needs, particularly of business, the need for labor. And that is always a balancing act to try to bring the public along into understanding the needs for migration. There’s always a kind of trope: Oh migrants steal jobs. Endless amount of studies by economists, by sociologists and others show that that is really not the case. They actually fill jobs. They fill job vacancies because there’s not enough labor. That was the time in the 90s and 2000s. That’s the point up to now. And as we’ll talk about further in this episode, that’s going to be the future scenario as well. The need for migration, not just a matter of managing the mobility of people who want to move around for their own purposes, but the need to maintain a labor market and goods and service production and so forth. But it’s always that balancing act with presumed ideas about culture. And again, difference are key concepts throughout this series.

14:56 — Superdiversity vs. Multiculturalism

Georg Diez (14:57)

So regarding your work with governments, you worked in the UK for a bit. And then you, I think, worked more with Oxford on a program called COMPAS. But in general… And then you worked with German government. So maybe I would be interested about not only futures of difference, but the varieties of difference. I think it’s interesting for me to explore that a bit. So what is the difference in the UK, which is strongly colonial, which is a very different sort of story of difference as opposed to Germany, which is not colonial, but post-war migration, but also different migration that we talk about now. It’s much more structural, sort of with what’s called Gastabeiter in Germany. So it’s more structural and also economically driven. Migrant population and the UK is much older. Much more complicated I guess in lot of ways, but maybe also layered across, maybe in the 80s it was already changing or early 90s was already changing with the opening of the world, as you say, with the end of the Cold War. Maybe that affected that migrant view already then.

Steven Vertovec (16:15)

Yeah, absolutely. These changes in the nature of migration, especially since the 80s, 90s up till today, really form part of this relationship that we had between scholarship and government. So yeah, at COMPAS, that was the Center on Migration Policy and Society at University of Oxford. I was the founding director of that. So at COMPAS, one of the main things that we achieved is I think we did manage to change the minds and inform and create a better understanding of migration dynamics amongst a cadre of civil servants. But again, there was just a ceiling when it came to the politicians. The politicians frankly weren’t interested in more nuanced complex views of migration. They needed to provide, as they see it, simple messages to the population to the voting public and so forth. And that became a very frustrating endeavor. We were seeing the emergence of much more complex patterns of migration that I ended up writing about as super diversity. We have many different pathways and experiences of migration, all related to different kinds of policy changes and so forth. And we argued for a much more complex understanding. And some people got it, and the politicians weren’t even interested in getting it.

Georg Diez (17:49)

What’s the, you say diversity that is your term, super diversity, but you also sort of, there’s also this shift at the time, no, between how to think about multicultural society and how to, why talk about diversity? What was the background for that change of vocabulary?

18:06 — From Multiculturalism to Diversity

Steven Vertovec (18:11)

Well, that’s right. Throughout the 80s and 90s in Britain, but also in places like Canada, Australia, et cetera, the concept of multiculturalism was one of the foremost concepts of how society was understanding itself, but also a lot of policy implications, a lot of institutional arrangements and so forth was around providing rights and services and basically a kind of public space for different so-called communities based around language, country of origin, religion and so forth. And of course, in many ways, especially in terms of kind of cultural rights, that was a good thing. I was critical and I wrote a number of critical things throughout the 90s and early 2000s around multiculturalism though, is because it was starting to create very bounded and stereotypic understandings or representations of particular purported groups. And again, our work and understanding was showing that these groups were actually very complex in themselves, often including many different legal statuses, linguistic, cultural, other backgrounds. And so multiculturalism was painting itself a simplified notion of society. At the same time, politicians David Cameron, Angela Merkel in Germany, were criticizing the idea of multiculturalism because they thought that having a number of different so-called cultural communities was breaking apart a kind of social cohesion of a society, of chopping it into bits. And again, that was a kind of awkward discussion. We could have a whole podcast series just about that, I think, about this, contestation and meanings of multiculturalism and so forth. Nevertheless, a lot of the conservative politicians had their way. A lot of multicultural discourse went out of the public sphere, and it was largely replaced by diversity, which then came to include gender, sexuality, disability as part of a makeup of social difference and a rethinking of social categories that count in society.

Georg Diez (20:41)

Before we move into the future, maybe you describe a bit where we come in with your friend Dan Hiebert talking about mostly, I guess, changes how migration is actually happening these days and then what was actually the societal background to that? I think it’s important to understand also that there is an analytical, there’s a shift in the factual basis of how to talk about migration that’s not really acknowledged in public discourse, how I see it, and that’s part of the public discourse problem, that the actual need for migration isn’t talked about, it’s more the threat of migration that’s in the foreground. How was it different working in Germany when you came to Max Planck in the mit 2000s, I guess?

21:03 — Migration Scholarship and Policy in Germany

Steven Vertovec (21:38)

Well, there was a couple of different things when I landed in Germany 2007, 2008. Yeah, it was still caught up in this multiculturalism is dead, not quite accepting Germany as an immigration country. You remember that was a big debate. Is it? Is it not? Well, obviously it is because you have people coming here, but the way that they wanted to self-represent Germany was at that time not immigration. So that was a bit of a contestation coming in. And coming to Max Planck was very different for me because in the UK, it was an expectation that publicly funded research institutes like COMPAS, that I was director of, that we had to have a social impact with our work. We had to change policy, we had to change public understanding and so forth. And I came to Max Planck and, you know, their view is that it’s a good thing, of course, if we do have that impact, but first and foremost, it’s about the science. You need to bring the science forward. You need to make contributions. You need to change methods and so forth. So they’re much more interested in the science that we’re doing rather than how it translates into the public. So that was a bit of a difference for me. But at the same time, I was invited to be one of the original members of what’s called the Sachverständigenrat, the expert council on Migration. And this was set up at that time by a number of the large foundations in Germany, Mercator, Volkswagen, and so forth. And they wanted to be the civil society voice for thinking about migration and advising the government or giving critical feedback and so forth. And so that was our role at the time. The Sachverständigenrat now has changed, it’s actually financed by the government now. It still has that critical function, but it’s slightly different. But at that time, The Sachverständigenrat, when I was on it, the role was to kind of translate to the public, this is what government changing policy on migration looks like. This is its implications. This is context that’s happening and this is how it’s being understood by the public. We set up something called the Integration Barometer, a kind of way of feeling the temperature of what the population in Germany is thinking about migration and migrants and so forth. So we set up all these instruments. So you see what I mean? It was again, policy relevant, but we weren’t driven by policy. And sometimes we said good things about government policy. Sometimes we were very critical of government debates that were happening at the time and the way that government was talking about migration to the public.

23:55 — Public Perception and Migration Narratives

Georg Diez (24:34)

Seems like a long time ago. The way that you perceive it as or that you would portray it as of the big civic society understanding that there is a rational way, “Sachverständigen” is a very rational way of putting it in the German context, way of talking about migration. I guess then the Syrian civil war started and migration crisis, as it was called, sort of started to really put the heat on societies and politicians in a quite destructive way. I remember the public sphere was really going crazy around 2015/16. I was a columnist back then, I really felt a shift in the mode of society and discourse. It was the early days of social media, but was social media really kicking in and determining very much how media was reporting and surely more and more how policy or politicians were done and were working and how policy was conceived. So there was this, again, this technological shift in the public sphere that led to a very charged discourse and very problematic, I think, combination of how resentment was growing and maybe outpacing actually rationality in the discourse. And I think it’s interesting to maybe if we go a bit from the present to the future to see, as I said before, like what is the factual basis, what is actually happening? Because even today you can see there is a drop in actually refugees coming and that doesn’t reflect on… this is not reflected in the public discourse where there’s still more panic about some incidents of violence and the general distrust in a racist distrust I think in a lot of ways about migration. I don’t know if you want to say something about Dan because I think it’s interesting to pivot now to where we will be going, I guess, as a planet, because that’s his perspective. He is really zooming out and say, this is the next 30, 40 years, this is where we’re going. I think it’s really hugely helpful to understand this projection for policy today.

27:12 — Future Projections for Migration and Identity

Steven Vertovec (27:12)

Yeah, Absolutely. Let’s make that pivot. But you raised something important. I just want to comment on and for us to keep in mind as we think about futures of migration and so forth. So you raised the issue of the Sachverständigenrat and this kind of rational discursive argument that we presented as a Sachverständigenrat to the German society to help understand migration, its dynamics and its effects and so forth. That was all well and good. And then 2015, 2016 happened. This large influx of asylum seekers. And the way that that sent ripples through German society. I wrote a piece in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, I actually called it Germany’s zweite Wende, the second changing point, that this is going to have changes to German society almost on the level of reunification of Germany. It’s going to send all kinds of ripples, both good and bad, throughout Germany.

And so, you mentioned a kind of emotional counter to the rationalist argument around migration. And I think that was certainly the case with the so-called Willkommenskultur, the welcome culture in Germany. We saw a mass outpouring of the general public welcoming this influx of people. And I really got irritated with a lot of the, especially the foreign press started to talk about, yeah, this hippie-like, touchy-feely, welcome culture, and quickly died out, and you had the rise of the far right and so forth. And most of our research at our Max Planck Institute shows, no, that did not die out at all. 70 % of the German population is still pro-diversity, pro-migrant, wants to have a society that’s diverse and complex and so forth. It’s only a minority that are really so antagonistic about it. But the media portrayal, you would think differently. You would think that Germany is completely taken over by the AfD and so forth. And that’s still not the case. That so-called welcome culture, that kind of emotional response, compassionate response to welcoming people in need, that is still there.

Georg Diez (29:33)

No, I think it’s relevant also, we talked last time about the imaginaries, which is different from narratives, but I think it is a battle of narratives. It was then and it’s still now. I do agree. mean, I was reporting from Munich at the time and it was just a very clear understanding. There was a civic pride in what society could do and what a citizen can do. And I also portrayed it in some way as a Kennedy moment, for Germany. It’s really not wait for… don’t ask what the state can do for you, but you do yourself. And that was the mood and that’s not something, it’s quite irrational to think about that this is like something made up or something that is only superficial in society. It’s a weird way of thinking about society and it’s part of, I think, my problem with the narratives that are created in media that they so often created along the lines of what media thinks, how the world works. And it’s actually not how people work because people are really affected by things and then act. It’s not fake. As you say, it stays and it actually changes society in ways that apparently media narratives can’t pick up and can sort of continue to, I think the attention span is too short and it’s not interesting because change is actually not interesting to report on because it’s not something visible.

Steven Vertovec (31:13)

Well, this was an experience I had as well. It’d be interesting to get your take on this. I forget when it was, not immediately following 2015, 2016, but a few years later, I was invited to your former organ: “Der Spiegel”. And I spent a day with editors and journalists at “Der Spiegel” talking about their coverage of migration and how they cover it.

And, you know, they were pretty explicitly saying, I remember as one guy put it, he says, there’s always 10,000 airplanes in the sky. We have to report on the one that falls down. And I said, well, but isn’t it an interesting and important thing to talk about the 10,000 in the air, i.e. to talk about the good news, the normality of something that’s actually quite phenomenal and not just to focus on the bad news, the one thing that goes wrong. And they wouldn’t really have that. And they thought that bad news stories about migration are what they want to cover, not the everyday good news of how people contribute to society, become part of their communities, and so forth.

Georg Diez (32:28)

Yeah, no, that’s I think part of my disenchantment with journalism in general to be able to drive forward positive change and actually fulfill a more constructive role in society. I think it’s not about like wishy-washyness, it’s more about actual realism so that there is an important factor in creating narratives that are actually true as opposed to, narratives that are like partly true or exaggerated, which is the negative. I remember reporting at the time and the reaction was, there was the role of the German… the Munich mayor for example was a very positive, strong figure at the time. And it was not so interesting. So it was explicitly said, no, it’s hard. We don’t want that. So I wouldn’t say it’s an intentional bias. It’s more like a misconception of what actually journalism is. So it needs to be reporting critically on things. That’s true, but it’s also democracy, the important factor to contribute to a positive vision or to an imaginary that is actually transformative. And I think media is not able to produce transformative narratives because they distrust it. They think then they’re activists. But I think it’s a really wrong conception. It is a problem, especially in the migrant discourse or in this moment where there is a massive change in societies and migration is just one of it. I mean, there’s aging populations, which we’ll talk about. There’s climate change. There’s technological upheaval. So how do you talk about that in constructive ways? I think it’s essential as a society, but media is not able to do that. Then you have a void that can be filled with fear or distrust.

32:50 — The Role of Journalism in Migration Discourse

Steven Vertovec (34:40)

And as you put it earlier, this battle of narratives is going on, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. And we’ll have to think about what those narrative battles are going to look like as we move into the futures. And basically, as our friend Dan will say, the need for further migration, absolute need for it. The case is being made for that. And how will the narratives deal with that? And how will the media deal with that as we move into the future?

Georg Diez (35:13)

So let’s bring in Dan maybe, because I think it’s interesting how he brings in another dimension of migration, which is the whole big topic of demographics. And I think it’s a topic that people feel uncomfortable with still, because it seems like population engineering has a Malthusian ring to it, so it’s like, it can be dystopian in some ways population fall is either wanted or created or inevitable and what does it do to, again, imaginaries? Is this an aging population? How can an aging population perceive of itself as aging and disconnected from the future in some ways? I think that’s a lot of where Europe is at or Western societies in general are struggling with and creates this resentment in society.

35:35 — Demographic Change and the Future of Diversity

Steven Vertovec (36:10)

The beginning of that struggle.

Georg Diez (36:11)

We’re at the beginning of that struggle. So maybe we’ll listen to Dan and who’s Dan?

Steven Vertovec (36:16)

He’s Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Canada and an advisor to the Canadian government on migration issues. And Dan started off thinking about the futures of migration with a focus on changing demographic realities.

💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia

“Everywhere, pretty much in the world, the rate of fertility is falling. This started in the more developed countries, the global north, but it’s diffused now into middle income countries, even into a number of low income countries. So just to give you a couple of examples of this, it wasn’t so long ago that we talked about the world population explosion. We thought that the population on earth would just keep going and going and going until there was some catastrophe. That’s just turning around. Probably in 2023, maybe last year in 2024, the global fertility rate came down to the level of replacement. So about 2.1, 2.2, somewhere in there. And that’s really a historically new thing for no one alive today has lived in a time before where the demography of the world is kind of in sync now between births and deaths, but births are falling. Couple of quick examples. So this is the one that I think surprises a lot of people. As of last year, the total fertility rate of Mexico is now lower than the United States. The fertility rate of Turkey now is about the same as it is of Europe. So it’s really spread to low income countries. And what this tells us is the world is going to keep growing in terms of population for a while. The United Nations says that the world is going to stop growing in about the 2080s. That’s probably way over optimistic. It’s probably going to stop growing in the 2050s. So we probably have one generation left of global population growth and then we reach the age of peak people. After that, the world population is probably going to go down.”

Georg Diez (38:16)

So that is quite stunning and I think it’s a game changer in how to talk about... It’s a wake-up call and it’s not clear what’s the good news, what’s the bad news, I guess. I mean, he is quite ambivalent about that because if you think about the world simplistically, even then it’s not clear. He says there is this story about the explosion of the world population and it’s threatening because we have a small planet and we have like small limited resources. So I guess in some way it would be good news that we’re not becoming more and more and consume more and more. But within societies that has quite different effects and that is connected to, well, migration is really the wrong word. I think it’s more like migration is only one aspect of worldwide change and the makeup and understanding of how societies work and culture is then something that is where it’s navigated or negotiated and economy is where it’s actually happening. But this is a game changer in a lot of ways because it’s not about population flows that are unmitigated. But it’s more like about population flows that you want to happen, I guess. Or you need to happen.

Steven Vertovec (39:37)

Yeah, I just want to take up that point. You know, there some people who on the face of it would take this fact that Dan laid out about, you know, and eventually and sooner rather than later, global population that’s shrinking and thinking, okay, in a world, you know, seriously challenged by climate change and unsustainable use of resources and so forth, that that in itself might be no bad thing, to bring us back to living within our means as a planet, as it were. So there’s that. But that in itself, I think, is a rather simplified understanding, you know, thinking of the world and its population and resources as just one thing. The problem is it’s incredibly unevenly distributed. The resources, access to resources. Coupled with this idea that you’re going to have an ever more aging population in some parts of the world and a young population in another, coupled with use of resources, maintaining certain standards of living while trying to raise standards of living in other parts of the world. You see what I mean? It’s a much more complex picture of inequality and distribution across the planet, not simply as the planet as a whole. So yes, it might be a good thing, the population stabilizing or even getting smaller, but we’re still faced with major challenges of economy, society, politics, healthcare, other things, and their distribution around the world.

39:57 — Aging Populations and Economic Implications

Georg Diez (41:17)

And that’s such a crucial topic. I think societies like Germany, but maybe the UK is similar or the Western societies, they wake up to this understanding that they are actually aging and what are the policy requirements or what are the consequences of that change? And then I think Dan talks about that fact, that from population degrowth follows, specifically in Western societies, but also in other societies ...

Steven Vertovec (41:51)

And one of the key things again is this aging. We should listen to what what Dan says about that. Some of the challenges of simply that one part of the equation of global demographics and their future is what happens when one part of that planet is an incredibly old population without young people.

💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia

“Maybe that’s good. Like maybe we need to have a kind of right sizing of the world population, given the amount of resources we’re using and everything else. But in a transition period from high growth to negative growth global population, we’re going to have a transition period of lots of challenges. And those challenges will mainly be related to aging populations. Countries are going to have older populations. Fewer young people, older people living longer. And when that happens, you get lots of stresses and strains on the social welfare system. For example, the ability to provide people with health care. I’ll use a Canadian set of numbers, but every country is much the same, right?! The per capita cost of health care for a Canadian is about $6,000 per year. For a Canadian in their 90s, it’s about $35,000 per year. So the more Canadians you have in your 90s, the more your health care budget is going to be strained, especially when you don’t have as many in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. So as fertility falls, as populations age, it’s going to be really difficult to keep these services going. Best example of this, or maybe the most sobering example of this, is Japan. Japan is the world’s oldest society. It’s tried to maintain a full level of social services. And what has that done? It’s put the country in enormous debt. The debt to GDP ratio of Japan is about 260 or 270%. It’s extremely high. It’s very, very hard to keep these things going.”

Georg Diez (43:51)

I think again, for today, very relevant information and also pointing towards, as we discussed sometimes, of how the public sphere reacts or how politicians work with rallies. Very troubling because you see these debates around the welfare state, we can’t afford that, mostly under the premises of, we need to cut welfare and we need... It’s also discussed in terms of migration so we can’t afford to integrate these people who need that safety net. And it’s actually totally the wrong story. The story is as, as Dan makes clear, that these countries like Japan or Germany and to different degrees, the UK or the US, are suffering from this age crisis and the social welfare state is really not affected by migration, but to the contrary actually would need massive influx. In Germany, it’s in the hundreds of thousands per year to actually sustain that social welfare state. So I’m wondering, I mean, I don’t know what’s your take on that. So for a journalists, it’s frustrating to be not able to portray this crisis in its full dimensions. What is the problem, what’s the solution. I think what we’re facing is, as Dan says, is this massive transition period. And this is a long period. We need to somehow have the mental capacity, actually, the mental infrastructure, that is also politics and journalism, to be able to navigate that without being so destructive.

44:14 — The Welfare State and Migration Dynamics

Steven Vertovec (45:35)

And one thing I want to get on the table as well, because this is a series about social categories and modes of difference. The category, however we want to call it, aged person, senior citizen or something, is going to take on new meanings in itself. As a larger portion of the society is comprised of senior citizens, aging people and so forth. And you know, as I say, even before we come to migration, we’re going to see a considerable shift in social services and even infrastructures designed more for older people. Accessible transportation, goods and services, entertainment, all kinds of things are going to be geared towards a population that’s ever bigger and bigger. And whether that’s going to be a new source of political power, of economic power, or if it’s going to be considered and portrayed as more of a drain on society and resources and a cause of resentment. We know all the different ways that certain social categories are loaded with meaning. That’s one of the lessons of this whole podcast series, how social categories take on new meanings and values over time and how that has ripple effects in actual social relations, in political structures and so forth. So that’s even before we come to migration. And then as you rightly point out and as Dan’s talking about, the need for a labor force to continue the production of goods and services for a society and particularly for a society geared towards an aging population is going to be absolutely acute if people want to maintain anything like the quality of life and cultural system that they have now, which is also a big question, combined with the question of climate change and sustainable use of resources. So I think we’re going to see all kinds of reconfigurations of social categories, use of resources, political policies and so forth around changing society. And bringing in new migrants to provide gaps in the labor market is going to be a key feature of that realignment and reconfiguration, I think.

Georg Diez (48:07)

It’s also central to understand what’s the role of government here, I think. It would come out of a period where government was really seen as the problem for lot of people, but certainly not as a strong actor in the changes that we see. So technology is driven by tech giants, by markets in general, markets were seen as the force for good for some people. But for sure the energy in society and as we move into that space where you need to understand what’s the makeup of society? By migrants or influx, or by what Dan also discusses of governmental measures to increase the fertility rates in countries. These are all measures that need a strong government and a policy background, an understanding as you described for the UK in the early 2000s. And I wonder how you see that because it seems that then there was this infrastructure, this epistemic or actual infrastructure that prepared governments to act constructively or to find a role. And I’m not even sure, like, maybe it’s just a Western problem, maybe other countries, like he talks about… You talk about Singapore a lot, so maybe other countries have that capacity. But I think it’s really state capacity that’s needed to navigate that.

49:33 — Government’s Role in Navigating Demographic Changes

Steven Vertovec (49:42)

This is something that Dan addressed head on. Let’s listen to what he says about how governments, first of all, before they come to migration, react to some of these issues.

💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia

“Why don’t governments fix this? Why don’t governments encourage people to have more children? Why don’t we get a lot of pro natal programs? Actually, that’s been tried. It’s been tried in dozens of countries. No country that has tried to turn fertility around has been fully successful at that. By fully successful, I mean getting to a point of replacement fertility. No country has done that. Maybe the best example here to illustrate the point would be Hungary. So about a decade ago, the Viktor Orban government thought, well, we don’t like immigrants very much. Let’s get Hungarians to have more children. They put in place probably the world’s most extensive pro natal program. Tax incentives, literal financial incentives. Special privileges If you have more children, etc.. At the time when Hungary did this, I’m just going to use a generalized number here just to make it simple. It had a total fertility rate of one and a half. Back in 2016, the target was to get it up to 2.1. To a replacement rate of fertility. What is it now? About 1.3. So, completely not successful. Maybe it would have been even worse if they hadn’t put in all those programs, but nevertheless, those programs are totally not successful. So no country has been able to turn this around.”

Steven Vertovec (51:15)

Yeah, so Dan raises this interesting point that, yeah, you know, one of the obvious reactions to declining fertility rate is increase the fertility rate. And as he points out, you know, this has been tried. And, you know, one thing we need to look at is what are the reasons for dropping fertility rates ar ound the world? You know, it’s not chemical or biological or something in the environment. It’s something in culture and society around the world. And there are many experts who know much more about this than me, but one of the clear things that emerges from some of this work is it has to do with the changing status of women. That women, as they’re able to control their reproductive rights and so forth, they themselves want to have less kids and to have more either economic roles and jobs or a different sort of lifestyle. And we see around the world that as people move into more middle-class lifestyles, that goes along with having less kids. It’s an aspiration for a certain kind of lifestyle of being able to provide more for the children that you have and so forth. So this is part of the global trend everywhere of why fertility rates are changing. Because of women having more say in what they want. It’s not the case universally, but that’s part of the trend. And so to try to change that through government policy is really a battle, a try to force maneuver by government that simply is not going to work with a lot of people.

Georg Diez (53:05)

Also, he’s pointing towards Hungary and he’s polite enough to leave it in a pretty neutral space ideologically. But it’s the same in the US ,at the moment, that actually white nationalists have tried to drive up fertility rates or birth rates among white Christians. So there’s always, I think inherently, an ideology in this world.

53:34 — Cultural Shifts and Fertility Trends

Steven Vertovec (53:38)

And it’s also part of a narrative too that it’s presumed that migrants and particularly non-white migrants, oh, they have so many more children than the rest. And, you know, while at the very beginning, factually, demographically, that might be true, we see across the world and across time within one generation that changes. And migrants, just like the so-called host population, their fertility rate drops enormously and is on par with the rest of society, even within one generation.

Georg Diez (54:15)

I think it’s also interesting that women moving into the workforce work market is both culturally and economically important. And I guess, again, culture is so central in how we maneuver as societies to this transformation. And we have this cultural, Steve Bannon said, politics downstream from culture. So the right understands that and the left is so defensive about what are the narratives of that change. So I think it is interesting going forward how to create these narratives, that are countering narratives of negativity and as Dan says, in a neutral way, the replacement this term. It’s actually the term that the right uses, the great replacement, the fear of the whites dying out with sort shrinking birth rates. And this emergency, this white emergency in some way. And I think that is in this period of transition that we’re in is a highly irrational, highly destructive force in politics. And I wonder, it needs really strong governments, confident governments to maneuver that without, I guess, falling back into rhythms or mechanisms that are pandering to nationalist tropes. And I think the interesting factor is that to understand how societies will be changing. And I think Dan has also some points there, like what are actually... Continents, countries that are sort of not shrinking. I think that also needs different narratives because I think he alludes to Africa mostly and Africa is always seen as the problem, the poor continent. And this will also massively change in the 21st century. Africa will become a really attractive imaginary maybe for... in the world because you need basically, as he says, there’s going to be a competition for young people and they come mainly from Africa. So how do you think about that as?

56:06 — The Battle of Narratives in Migration Policy

Steven Vertovec (56:38)

In another part of the conversation I had with Dan he was talking about, he pulls that a lot of these questions and narratives, as you put it, battle of narratives. He calls it the battle between cultural traditionalists and economic realists. The cultural traditionalists want to maintain a particular image of society that might be a racialized image of society and what its culture, what German culture, American culture, British culture, French, whatever it is, is supposed to look like. And it’s a preservative approach to national culture and how to think about migration in terms of that. And the idea is we’ll keep out migrants because we want to preserve some imagined national culture. And then Dan talks about economic realists who are saying, fair enough, cultural traditionists, you can have that discourse. The fact is though, with an aging society, a society that is not replacing itself, if you want to maintain an economic standard of any kind, and ideally within a sustainable set of resources, you are still going to need migrants to fill all of these gaps. And the way he puts it, the economic realists are going to win by the end of the day because people realize economies shrinking, the need for care for aging populations, and so forth, are simply going to call for more labor from abroad. But given the changes in the world and aging population everywhere, where is that labor going to come from? And let’s hear what Dan has to say about that.

💬 DAN HIEBERT — University of British Columbia

“This is happening not evenly across the world. As I said, it kind of started in higher income countries and it’s moved to middle income countries. But even now, there are certain parts of the world that have not yet fully entered this trend, and that is particularly Africa. Fertility rates in Africa are still much higher than they are in the rest of the world and to a degree, a few other Middle Eastern countries, but mainly Africa has the world’s highest fertility. And if you just take U.N. population division figures, and they give us very nice projections on where the world’s population is going. If you take those figures between now and the end of this century. So over the next 75 years that what they project is that outside Africa, the global population is going to shrink pretty dramatically. There’s differences of opinion on how big and fast that process is going to be. But by at least a quarter of a billion people. So at least 250 million fewer people in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, if you take those UN projections seriously, Africa will grow by more than 2 billion people. So massive growth in one side, significant decline on the other. Those figures are probably not exactly right, but it doesn’t matter. The main point is going to be that in this next generation or two, Africa will become the world’s only reservoir of youth. It will have the only large, really substantial youthful population in the world. And that, of course, is going to have a lot of meaning.”

Georg Diez (1:00:07)

No, again, fascinating to listen to Dan. I think it’s hugely important to have that factual basis of understanding where societies are moving into. As we discussed, so if it’s really, again about how we think we are as societies and how we think other societies work, and there’s this racial component and you think, oh, the African societies, they have more kids.

And that’s like framed as a racial trope, but actually it would massively shift. And the question is how receptive Western populations, Northern populations are to that to that shift. And I wonder how governments can maneuver that space. But I also wonder what it means then for, because we talk about social categories a lot here and that’s what you work on so much. And that’s also connected to diversity, superdiversity, so it’s not only that there will be African diasporas, I guess, in Europe or in the US, maybe Europe first. I wonder where the migration flows actually go. They already sort of with the Mediterranean, I guess, to go to France and Spain, Italy, so Southern European countries have that influx. But it’s not only, as you say, in your book about superdiversity, it’s not African per se, it’s a much more layered approach of identity or, that’s also a word you don’t like, but like of being in a society. So I don’t know how you see that unfolding in the future.

1:01:44 — Future of African Migration and Global Labor Needs

Steven Vertovec (1:01:44)

No Absolutely. You know, Dan is right to point out and he’s not alone. There are many migration specialists who point to this future in which Africa will be seen as a kind of resource or reservoir of labor, of people. And actually some project that there will be a competition for African workers to come fill all these needs in other countries around the world. And that given the case exactly as you point out, we’re talking about a transformation of key social categories, not least so-called race and ethnicity categories. Already we’re beginning to see these transitions. For instance, at our Max Planck Institute, we have a fantastic project led by Johanna Locate about the changing meanings of blackness in Germany. “Was heißt Schwarz” So the nature of black German is as people from various parts of Africa and other parts of the world, Caribbean, South American, come together and re-craft this category of black. We’ve already seen that. We know in Britain where I lived for a long time, there’s the idea of black British and that itself is a different kind of social category and meaning for people within it and for people outside of that. Different from black american and black European.

Georg Diez (1:03:18)

Because there are Black communities who come from Jamaica or from colonies. Well, and then there’s African migration.

Steven Vertovec (1:03:26)

Exactly. Black British, the concept was forged over generations and over decades, largely surrounding people from the Caribbean. Now people from Nigeria have overtaken people of Caribbean origin in the UK as the largest component of Black British. And they themselves are working together with others, reshaping the meaning of Blackness in Britain. And so as the Africa Diaspora Report becomes more and more part of the social realities in many different countries, we’re going to see social categories changing again for Africans or people from African heritage themselves and for people from the outside. The growing presence of Africans in many societies around the world will be highly contested by some and reshaped and reworked as part of everyday social realities for a lot of other people. That is definitely a future that’s going to happen. The point I want to end with and segue to our next episode though is those identities are not only going to be about race, culture, values, self-identities and so forth, but given the nature of migration regimes around the world, they’re also going to be intersected by various kinds of legal status. So not only will there be more Africans and more societies around the world though, they will be highly differentiated also by the kind of legal status they have, the kinds of rights they have, the kinds of temporalities they’re allowed to have in different countries. And that is going to be a key part of the nature of difference in futures around Africa and migration.

Georg Diez (1:05:20)

So that was a lot of relevant interesting stuff talking about this whole dynamic between the battle for narratives and the need for policy and how to maneuver that in the coming transition. I think it’s really hugely important to have that demographic factor really stronger in the foreground. It seems a bit under covered. It has huge policy implications for how to organize, I guess, incentivize migration and it’s a huge burden. Not burden but responsibility for governments to move forward. And I think it’s interesting to cover that in the coming episodes with the people that you invited.

Steven Vertovec (1:06:44)

Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, that battle of narratives, as you rightly called it, that’s taking place anyways in a kind of discursive sphere of its own, really a battle of cultural values, of moralities and so forth. But then as Dan Hiebert has brought into the conversation, these demographic realities, there’s no arguing with aging societies, falling fertility rates, the growth of Africa as a kind of resource to fill the labor needs of a lot of the world. And when we’re looking at the future, we have to see how those demographic realities are going to affect those narrative battles as well. And as you put it, how these play into policy. And I think a lot of the policy thing has to do with migration channels and the legal statuses that are going to be given to migrants and how those affect the creation of social categories and all of the social and economic implications that follow from that. And those are some of the things we’ll be talking about in the next episode.

Georg Diez (1:07:54)

Great, looking forward to that. Cheers.

About the Guest

Dan Hiebert is a geographer at the University of British Columbia whose research examines how migration reshapes cities, labor markets, and social structures across diverse societies.

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Conversation Highlights

On the evolution of diversity discourse

“Diversity, equality and inclusion for many people in politics and in social media, influencers has become the thing to fight against.”

— Steven Vertovec

On moral boundaries and social categorization

“I’ve written about the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries, and symbolic boundaries are basically, how the identity of groups that are different from our own is perceived and constructed. And a lot of this operates at the moral level, describing some group as worthy, some group as less worthy or simply unworthy.”

— Michèle Lamont

On the backlash against diversity

“And I guess perceived as something that we should discuss because you say it was unexpected, almost unforeseeable, that this is what happened, this massive backlash we talk about, I guess the homogenization and nationalization processes, authoritarian tendencies. In most Western democracies. So this is not only about diversity in terms of social categories.”

— Georg Diez

On destigmatization and cultural change

“The question is for all those groups that have been stigmatized now to use the category you raised, can we destigmatize those groups? And again, the work of Michèle Lamont has been instructive on this. Yes, we can destigmatize groups, and there are various ways of going about that.”

— Steven Vertovec

On the rise of right-wing populism

“So, one thing we’d have to say that if we are to change course from whatever we’re calling this, this moment, now, populists new right understanding of groups and categories back to somewhere else. The question is for all those groups that have been stigmatized now to use the category you raised, can we destigmatize those groups? And again, the work of Michèle Lamont has been instructive on this.”

— Steven Vertovec

On how Trump constructs moral hierarchies

“So if you look at a lot of what Trump has done since he was elected, he’s constantly creating these pecking orders, trying to influence, telling us white Afrikaners have been victim of discrimination in South Africa, and we need to bring them in. And other groups, trans people have been overly privileged by progressives. So, they’re not worthy.”

— Michèle Lamont

Chapter Overview

00:00 Introduction to Futures of Difference

02:05 How Diversity Discourse Has Evolved

08:06 The Backlash Against Diversity and Social Categories

20:13 Right-Wing Populism and the Political Landscape

28:31 Moral Boundaries and Social Categorization

37:14 Contact Theory and the Fragmentation of Public Discourse

47:32 Stigmatization, Modernity, and Uncharted Futures

52:02 Destigmatization and Cultural Change

55:34 Generational Perspectives on Social Difference

58:58 The Future of Migration and Social Dynamics

Full Transcript

00:00 — Introduction to Futures of Difference

Steven Vertovec (00:03)

Why is this happening, now? Diversity, equality and inclusion for many people in politics and in social media, influencers has become the thing to fight against. And so I think that’s an interesting point to think about social media and echo chambers in ways that that aren’t about the content of the public discourse, And in the years since then, remarkably and really, nobody saw it coming. We’ve really flipped on that The Futures of Difference podcast with Steven Vertovec and Georg Diez. Mixity. Yeah. I’m Steve Vertovec and this is Futures of Difference. I’m here talking with my friend Georg Diez, who’s a renowned writer and journalist here in Germany.

Georg Diez (00:52)

It’s a pleasure to be here and do this with you. Futures of Difference, as the podcast is called. I think it’s really exciting

Steven Vertovec (01:00)

And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about where we’re at right now. What is the public discourse around difference, around these social categories? Race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion, and what kinds of changes are taking place before our eyes? And, Georg what I want to do before we come to where we’re at now is take us back. Where have we come from? What has changed in the last 10 or 15 years? And the way I want to do this is by going back. In 2012 I published an article called Diversity in the Social Imaginary. And I looked at the way that the concept of diversity had at that point, early on in this century permeated all kinds of public institutions. It was the the concept of the time in corporations, in universities, and every public sector, agency all had their diversity department, managers, policies and so forth. It was absolutely mainstreamed across all of these. So that was where we were at in the early 2000s. And how did we get there? How did diversity become this thing in the first place? By the early 2000s. And how has it gone completely the other direction to where we’ve gotten now. So if you’ll permit me, let me just tell the story of diversity and how we got there. The diversity thing, I often called it this, this, this concept that has permeated all these different spheres by the early 2000s really can be traced back to, the civil rights movement and affirmative action in the United States. In the US in the 1960s, as we know, there were all kinds of new legislations arising out of social movements, particularly around race, to fight against discrimination and to promote the, the status and the economic and political well-being of particularly the black population in the US. So, affirmative action was happening in the 1960s and 1970s. But then you come to Ronald Reagan and his administration, and they did everything they could to put the lid back on affirmative action. But what happened is all of the legislation and policy measures that had been created under affirmative action renamed themselves as diversity, so they could continue doing what they were doing to help promote the status, particularly of blacks, and others, in the US. And so diversity became the thing to replace affirmative action. And that was starting to be rolled out in various kinds of institutions. At the same time, of course, you had the women’s movement and the gay rights movements, and so they gradually became part of a larger diversity corpus to make sure that various groups and these categories, you see where I’m coming up with the idea of categories, we’re not being discriminated against. So it was largely an anti-discrimination measure. And so that was all well and good. And by the time you get to the 1990s, there was a big discrimination case filed in the US against, the oil firm Texaco and Texaco lost this case and had to pay $176 million dollars in, kind of fees, because they’d been found guilty of discrimination. And also the courts ordered them to put diversity management training into their corporate structure. And this sent a ripple effect across the entire corporate world. Everybody decided to do the same thing because they wanted to avoid lawsuits. And so that was one way for kind of the wrong reasons, diversity became mainstreamed in the corporate sector, and the corporate sector really led the charge, led this whole diversity, what later became diversity, equality and inclusion. These were all things done by the corporate sector, universities and public employers followed. By the time you get to late 90s, early 2000s, the same things happening in the EU, you have anti-discrimination legislation being put into effect across the EU to protect all kinds of groups, racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, gender, from discrimination in the name of diversity as well. And so this was the way through various, purposes and processes. Diversity just became all around us and in all kinds of advertising, etc.. This really had changed things. And so that’s why I wrote this article tracing this emergence of the diversity thing. And as part of that difference became what diversity was about: to protect various groups marked by their difference

02:05 — How Diversity Discourse Has Evolved

Georg Diez (06:11)

to a mainstream, normative, white middle class male model.

Steven Vertovec (06:18)

Groups that were different were being protected from discrimination under a diversity umbrella. So that’s where things had gotten by then. And also you’ll remember, the early 2000 was the real heydays of globalization. the world was changing, more interconnected, people being exposed to cultural practices and peoples from all around the world. And it was a period that, the great, German sociologist Ulrich Beck called a period of cosmopolitanization. He talked about the way that the other, the cultural other, was being interiorized in our heads. We were getting more and more used to the fact of people, of different backgrounds being exposed, either through migration or through media. So this whole diversity thing and the cosmopolitanization of society were big trends happening around globalization also at the same time as well. And it was even deemed by a social philosopher, Gerard Delanty, as an inevitable process. This was like a historical evolutionary trend that as the world became more and more connected, people in their heads would become more and more cosmopolitanized, be more relaxed around so-called cultural others. And then you had this framework of a mainstreamed diversity, policy, management, legislation, all happening at the same time. So this really looked like the way society was going. And I talked about it as changing the Social Imaginary. The Social Imaginary. It’s a term talked about by philosopher Charles Taylor how society understands how itself works. Yeah? What’s going on? How do we think it’s working? And at that time I figured, okay, diversity, cosmopolitan attitudes were getting so mainstreamed that this was the image societies were having of themselves. And that was 2012. I published that. And in the years since then, remarkably and - really nobody saw it coming - we’ve really flipped on that. Diversity, equality and inclusion for many people in politics and in social media, influencers has become the thing to fight against. And these things have been shut down. So what some thought of as this inevitable process, a progressive process, has been flipped on its head and turned into the thing to fight against and to put down and to dismantle all of these mainstreamed infrastructures that were put in place. And so if we want, we could we could go through, you know, the various steps along the way about how this was chipped away at and overturned. But it’s absolutely remarkable. And I be keen to get your views on this, how quickly that whole Social Imaginary of diversity and cosmopolitanism has been flipped on its head. And that’s the thing that I’ve been shocked about, personally upset about, because I have my own normative views of how that should go. But as a social scientists, I can see how that can happen. I’ve gained a kind of understanding working across many, many different kinds of societies in historical periods about how social meanings, social categories, the way other groups are talked about, how those have shifted over time. So, you know, I’m personally and in terms of my own views, kind of upset by the way that things have flipped. I’ll be straightforward about that. But as a social scientist, I can say, yeah, okay. I can see how that happens. Now the big question is, and what we’ll try to explore through this whole series is, okay, you know, this is a process that has happened now. And we can talk more about exactly how we arrived, where we are now and where we are actually at now. But we don’t know which way this is going to go. Is this going to continue along this heavily, I would call it simplified reduced view of fixed social categories. Or are we going to go back to more of this, this open cosmopolitan, progressive view of social categories and belonging. And each one of those pathways has serious social, economic and political consequences. Society will really look differently depending on which pathway we take, but I just thought it’d be useful to look back at this point just 15 years ago of where things looked like they were going and where we’re at now, and it looks like we’re going in a completely different direction. I don’t know what your experience or views on those kinds of trends have been.

08:06 — The Backlash Against Diversity and Social Categories

Georg Diez (11:23)

Thanks, I think, Steve, it’s really helpful to see what’s happening in this bigger perspective. I think it’s a massively, important historic change that actually ends, as you say, maybe 50 or 60 years of perceived emancipation. And I guess perceived as something that we should discuss because you say it was unexpected, almost unforeseeable, that this is what happened, this massive backlash we talk about, I guess the homogenization and nationalization processes, authoritarian tendencies. In most Western democracies. So this is not only about diversity in terms of social categories. This is a political process. It’s an end of an era in some ways. Some some say this is the end of the neoliberal era. So the connection to, as you say, to capitalism is actually interesting because you say this is about globalization, and I guess you can trace the rise, the ascent of a certain form of capitalism from the 50s, 60s as an emancipatory phase. And, it’s interesting. I think I was connected to legal fights in the US, but also economic progress. And then why is that a force for good in some way. But but I think it’s important to see this arch because then, you see, I’m a historian by training, and not an anthropologist, as you are So then you see maybe the contradictions also in what would you describe it? Because it’s not plausible that it’s totally new. Maybe it was always there. And then the question is, I think Toni Gramsci talks about hegemony. I think it’s important to reflect on what is the cultural imaginary, what is the what’s the Social Imaginary that I think that’s why it’s so important to bring in Charles Taylor. What are the images that we have of ourselves as societies and that has quickly shifted, but not maybe the social realities of people or the resistance of groups of society that wanted to perceive their whiteness or their, patriarchal views of society. I don’t think that is changed. And then I wonder how you see that shift in - how you perceive society work reflected in your in your, in your work in some ways. So because it’s, it’s quite plausible that, that you’ve been looking at a smaller segment then you thought of society or, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a bit of a, it’s a question to methodology, I guess. How you measure the imaginary of societies.

Steven Vertovec (14:11)

Yeah. No, you’re quite right on that. In a lot of my work, in very different contexts, I’ve looked especially at the way particular groups have conceived, themselves and tried to, assure their place in politics and economy in the social structure and so forth. And the way they’ve done that is has changed over time. But what I guess, I’m looking at and what we want to explore in this episode and in future ones, is that that wider change in the public sphere, the way that certain groups can be talked about because, you know, let’s be clear that even in the great age of diversity DEI cosmopolitanization, as Beck called it, of course, you still had racism. You still had all kinds of, of hard and fast boundaries between groups. You know, not everything was melting into each other and so forth. And, you know, by certain conservative political parties in various countries, immigrants were always seen as rather suspect or an easy scapegoat for other things happening in society that that was always still there. But what’s happened is this change in what’s acceptable, how you talk about certain groups, you know, it’s often talked about that there’s this term the Overton Window, what’s what’s acceptable in public speech. And, you know, that has really been broken through. And, you know, in my head, being, you know, pull from your experience to, you know, obviously Donald Trump, has helped shift this. You know, there’s been a shift in discourses in India and South Africa and across Europe at the same time. But certainly the the effect of Donald Trump changing this Overton Window, you know, in when he was campaigning in 2016 already and started to use the terms about Mexican immigrants or rapists and animals and so forth, that, that shattered, or at least pushed out an Overton Window of what before then, even conservative politicians talking about immigrants wouldn’t use that kind of language to vilify that harking back to another period where some groups were dehumanized, and that was the the big shift in the Trumpian discourse. And also, of course, it coincides with the time of the growing place, importance and function of social media. We can’t, you know, go around that. That was something happening at the same time. So as Trump pushed out that Overton Window, people on social media could pile on. Suddenly it was okay to talk about other groups in really harsh, dehumanizing terms like that. And then whether it became about blacks or trans or gays or women in general, could use really harsh language. And as we know, you know, the role of algorithms in perpetuating this kind of speech. And then eventually, by the time we get to the current Trump administration, where all walls, censoring certain kinds of language have been removed from X and some of these other platforms, that’s really just piled on. And this is how these categories and the way they’re talked about in a broader public has changed quite a bit. So you’re quite right that most of my career I’ve looked at how public discourse about certain groups have been impacted by those groups and how those groups have formed their own images of themselves in this kind of iterative process. Now we need to look at that wider public discourse right now. Like I said, I’m shocked years ago that wider public discourse, diversity, equality, inclusion was, unquestioned by most politicians because, as I say, it was led by the corporate sector itself. Now, the corporate sector following the politicians is dismantling the thing that they were the ones leading 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, it was interesting. I don’t know how you,

Georg Diez (18:40)

your colleagues think about that and you say shocked so much, but I wonder, as you say, how the, the logic of these, group constructions, worked in the past. So if you say so, if the business sector played such a role. So I guess it’s, it’s, reflecting a cultural shift. So I guess it’s, it’s, reflecting a cultural shift. Again. But but but the visibility of these groups, is, I guess, created a very strong but not felt backlash. I remember the early 2000 when there was in France, the beginning of a movement that was against gay marriage at the time, and that seemed to come out of nowhere. But that’s a long time ago. There must have been these, resistance movements in some way. Much, much earlier. And you can see that in American politics, the 2008 Tea Party movement. So I wonder if you or your colleagues, have started to sort of see changes in the way people talk about others before or, was it or do you look mostly at diversity and not anti-diversity.

Steven Vertovec (19:52)

Well, you know we have I mean I haven’t been a specialist in looking at, you know, racism, which is, you know, an important field within the social sciences itself. But I have looked at, you used the term backlash. And that’s an interesting notion. Is backlash the appropriate way of talking about where we are right now and just, you know, the way I’ve looked at this in public discourse in the past, again, you know, years ago, I think it was 2010 or so. I published a book co-edited with Susanne Westendorf called, Backlash Against Multiculturalism. And again, in the 1980s and 1990s, multiculturalism was also one of these terms, particularly the US, Canada, Australia, not so much in Germany. Netherlands especially what was also one of those those kind of meta narrative normative terms that conditioned the way society thought about itself, the ways that policies were constructed, the way that legal measures were taken in the name of multiculturalism. And even though I was quite critical of notions of multiculturalism, I think we’ll come to that. The reasons why later in this series. But nevertheless, there was a big backlash against multiculturalism by various conservative parties. The Tories in the UK, especially, David Cameron talked about, you know, how multiculturalism has been a disaster. Angela merkel talked about how multiculturalism is a bad thing. Multiculturalism is dead, you know, we shouldn’t go that way and so forth. But what other was this, this backlash against multiculturalism? Politicians were okay with diversity. So Merkel, castigated the concept of multiculturalism. But she was the head figure in something called “Die Charta der Vielfalt”. The Charter of Diversity that the top 500 German companies signed up to, to promote diversity in their businesses. They were okay with diversity, multiculturalism was concept that they had a backlash against. And so, you know, there is that that the toing and froing and some people have argued that the change in discourse right now this vilification, this harsh language used about certain categories like migrants, like trans people, is a is a backlash against years and years of this diversity meta narrative. I do think that that’s part of it. There’s always been a sector that has been, you know, disgruntled against the diversity thing, but I don’t think it’s just a straight backlash. It’s the the arc is is too long here. I think something else is going on that by appealing to the vilification of certain, certain categories of people. Again, trans, migrants, blacks or ethnic minorities, Ausländer, in Germany, that it’s that it’s doing other things. It’s providing a threat narrative that politicians can benefit from. Be afraid of these people, and we’ll both vote for us and we’ll come to your rescue. It has a status function. These people are lower than you, so your self-esteem is higher. You white Christian nationalists that we’re talking to or something. And it’s allowing a set of policies that favors one group over other groups. And so providing a kind of political constituency as well. So it has all kinds of especially political functions that’s why I see things going in this direction. So it’s very kind of Machiavellian. It’s not just a cultural backlash, but there are certainly elements to that, too. There are some people who think that all this, all these diversity, inclusion measures somehow put them at a disadvantage and other people and an advantage over them. And they didn’t like that they’ve carried a chip on their shoulders. And now somebody comes along with a public discourse that that elevates them and puts down this other thing that they had perceived as working against them. So, as I said, there’s all sorts of functions on why this this harsh categorical language works and how it comes about. And in my eyes, I see it as very politically motivated and with real political consequences right now. But I don’t know your take on that.

20:13 — Right-Wing Populism and the Political Landscape

Georg Diez (25:00)

I think we also brought some like we also have Michèle Lamont here to today and and not just you and me and this conversation. So, so maybe we should, as you know, included it to her, but I think it’s, interesting. Also, if you want to think about the future of difference, about these contradictions as you say, what is actually the interests of people that are using discourse about multiculturalism or diversity to, further, mostly, I guess, economic interests mostly. So, the US there was quite clear this discussion at least about certain the industrialized parts of the country. The same in Germany is not self-explanatory. So it’s clear that there are cultural and economic reasons in a complicated way, intertwined. But but I think if we want to talk about a construction of categories, and maybe that’s something that Michèle Lamont will say something about, the construction of these categories is tied to an imaginary. But then there’s always an underlying social realities. I wonder if we see this backlash now, or however you might call it, you see actually, like a explosion of diversity with ongoing migration. So there’s no stopping the process. And I wonder how this sort of tension will play out in the future because and that’s maybe going back to your initial story about your progress, the vision. I don’t think that’s dead the story of progress. I think it’s just massively contested. But I think, change goes on and I think it’s, it’s a reactionary imaginary to think that we can stop. Actually, this process has been started a long time ago.

Steven Vertovec (26:58)

Absolutely right. And I hope we’ll keep circling back to that, just want to pick up on where you left off there about, a kind of seeming progression or what I was saying at the time. Some sort of as inevitable cosmopolitanization in one direction. And whatever you call the, the anti cosmopolitan or reduced or exclusivist or simplified categorical track that we’re on now and you used the word backlash. I recently read a book by, Jeffrey Alexander, who’s a social theorist in the US, and he actually calls, the Trumpian MAGA portrayal of social categories in groups. He calls that a frontlash, that it’s not only reactive to those years of DEI and respect and recognition of other groups that has built up. It’s not just wanting to undo that. It’s wanting to take things in a forward direction for them. It’s not going back. Let’s go back pre-DEI or something like that, which some people have in their heads. No, no. Let’s create a society that is more exclusive and based around simplified categories that have particular valuation and particularly moral valuations built around each one of them. And again, that’s the kind of thing that Michèle Lamont talks about.

28:31 — Moral Boundaries and Social Categorization

💬 MICHÈLE LAMONT — Harvard University

“I’ve written about the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries, and symbolic boundaries are basically, how the identity of groups that are different from our own is perceived and constructed. And a lot of this operates at the moral level, describing some group as worthy, some group as less worthy or simply unworthy. So here I draw on the classical writings of Goffman, which is all about, you know, stigma, how to define groups negatively. And very central to this is morality. So who is good? Who’s bad, basically. But those boundaries can be drawn on all kinds of other basis. So to illustrate, I’ll mention my book, <i>The Dignity of Working Men</i>, where for which I did interviews and among, workers, low status white collar workers and blue collar workers in New York and Paris, black and white in New York, white and North African in Paris. And, for instance, the interview, we’re very much, experimentally asking them in the context of the interview, to describe to us what kind of people they like and dislike, what kind of people do they feel inferior and superior to? And as I was doing this, it became clear immediately that morality was all over the place. They defined themselves as hardworking people who pay their bills, are responsible, try to keep their kids out of trouble, and being self-survivors and hard workers. And then I would ask, what kind of people do you dislike? I hate people who are sponges, people who are just taking advantage of this system. For instance, these black people who were just there on welfare, for instance, these low income people who are just sitting on their bottom all of all time watching TV. So the book is essentially how these moral boundaries are extended to social groups. But it’s not only about naming other groups as unworthy, because these conditions are, I describe in the book, necessary but insufficient to the creation of social boundaries. And social boundaries have to do with class segregation.”

Steven Vertovec (30:42)

So Michéle was just talking there about the role of morality in sort of painting a discursive picture of, of different groups. Some groups are placed higher or lower on the kind of moral hierarchy, and that has a real impact on everyday social relations and so forth. And, you know, just before the the clip, you know, I was talking about this idea of, the new right, having a kind of frontlash of trying to create a new society based around, hard and fast and simplified groups with the kind of moral hierarchies some are more worthy than others of access to resources, of political voice, of access to public largesse and so forth. And I think that’s where we’re at right now with a lot of these changes in public discourse. It’s trying to create a certain kind of society and not simply a backlash of trying to go back to a pre-diversity difference period.

Georg Diez (31:51)

Yeah. I thought it was really interesting to reflect on the current political moment, how right-wing politics and hierarchy are maybe necessarily connected to morality, but from your work or from Michelle’s work, how do you explain this relationship between social and symbolic in that sense of, I mean, this is maybe cultural and material in some way? She says class is social. So are the shifts that we see caused by material reasons and the sort of structure of society that is then actually capitalist shifts, shifts in terms of the real world as opposed to the imaginary. I’m sure that’s not the way that you would describe it, but but or is it, the other way around so that the imaginary starts long before and then you have like actual changes that, that bring these, this resistance to the fore. So because as we discussed, I think the resistance to change is always there. And racism, and the word that’s the concept that we won’t talk about so much. It’s always there. But what is this moment now? Why is this? Why is this happening, now?

Steven Vertovec (33:14)

Well, you won’t be surprised to hear me say it’s complicated, but it’s also a matter of what perspective you’re taking on things. So you would say from, let’s say, a Marxist percept you would say the changing in the material conditions lead to a rethinking of the groups of the symbolic. A Weberian approach would be more of mine and say, no, no, no changes in the discursive or kind of ideas sphere of what’s happening in our heads, the way we read the world, the way we package and classify the world, which we are doing all the time. We’re kind of programed to classify the world. That’s how we navigate our way through it. Social world and material world. The changes happen there first, and those have effects on the material. So the distinction in a lot of Michèle’s work about social boundaries and symbolic boundaries is obviously tied up with each other. and symbolic boundaries is obviously tied up with each other. The social boundaries are the real relationships. What kind of relationships do people have with each other? Do they even come in contact with each other? Are they geographically segregated? Are they segregated by occupation and class and so forth? That’s what she’s talking about in social relations. And the symbolic boundaries are these ideational ones. The ways that the groups are talked about. And that’s where the moral comes in, the moral order, the moral attributions of different groups. And then another part of her work that she gets into is, these are happening on different scales, as it were, they’re happening in individuals heads, they’re in individual interactions with each other. We are classifying each other. We are relating to each other. We are thinking of ourselves in terms of these everyday relationships, but then also on a larger societal wide scale, these things play out in different sorts of patterns as well. Again, occupationally, in terms of residential geographies, in terms of access to political power and so forth. These boundaries, the nature of groups, the way that people think of themselves and think of others play out, as I say on the micro level between us and on the macro level across entire societies. And just thinking here, we’ve got a quote from her talking about the micro and the macro

💬 MICHÈLE LAMONT — Harvard University

“And that’s where I approach this question that we’re discussing as a cultural process, because it’s iterative, as people interact constantly. We’re naming ourselves and we’re naming others and together, this is expressed at the micro level, at the interactional face to face level. In the functioning of public sphere. there’s all kinds of magnophones, if you want, that are there to broadcast and bring these definitions of group at the mezzo level at, you know, making them widely available. So if you look at a lot of what Trump has done since he was elected, he’s constantly creating these pecking orders, trying to influence, telling us white Afrikaners have been victim of discrimination in South Africa, and we need to bring them in. And other groups, trans people have been overly privileged by progressives. So, they’re not worthy. We need to marginalize them and stop letting them play in sports, you know, etc..”

Steven Vertovec (36:43)

So when I talked to Michéle she had some interesting things to say about the relationship between these kind of moral valuations of, different categories of people and people’s willingness to interact with each other. Let’s listen to what she says.

💬 MICHÈLE LAMONT — Harvard University

“I’m very interested in how this these moral boundaries translate into fewer and fewer face to face contact between groups that have enormous consequences, for instance, in terms of the political polarization of the country, if groups very rarely interact with each other, then it’s much harder for, you know, professionals and managers to understand what are the daily challenges of working class people and to vilify groups with which, I mean, this is classical social science, right? Contact theory tells us groups that interact are much less likely to engage in xenophobia or transphobia, etc. People like you and I, who have a background in cultural analysis, know very well that those boundaries can be changed and they can be made more or less flexible. Right. And more or less, rigid. So, I’m very much and I’ve studied and you have also very much so your work on Superdiversity, studied the process by which we can create a more inclusive society. So I think this line of thinking really has a lot of normative implication for what we can do to create a society that supports, you know, subjective well-being better and more. You know, a society where people feel they belong even in a context of a very diverse society. So that’s, you know, you and I are very much barking at the same tree there.”

37:14 — Contact Theory and the Fragmentation of Public Discourse

Steven Vertovec (38:26)

So you see there, Michèle’s drawing a direct connection between these moral valuations of categories. And let’s say, people’s willingness to engage with each other. And the more that these moralized categorizations take place and get into people’s heads through the public sphere and social media and all these things, let’s say the less willing people are to have actual contact with each other. And in that way, various kinds of intolerance, if not discrimination and hostile feelings, might actually grow, because we know from a hell of a lot of work in social psychology and other fields that the opposite is true. The more people have contact with each other, intolerance decreases. This is like a sociological fact. So if we’re coming up with these categorizations that are actually driving people apart, that will have serious and long term divisive effects in people’s willingness and ability to interact with each other, and that really becomes a problem as we proceed more and more into the future. I don’t know what you think about those things.

Georg Diez (39:35)

I was thinking before what you said about the long term, changes in how people perceive group identity. And I, I wonder if that goes to, to the point of your, your remarks and maybe points towards something that’s important to reflect on always, which is, the technological changes that we see. And you were so interested in the public sphere and how that is changing. I remember the late 80s, early 90s, there was a big debate in Germany about migration It’s too much, das Boot is voll. We can’t take anymore migrants. And there was a quick, ugly burst of violence. A couple of years in Germany, early 90s with, arson and murders and society didn’t change really, through that, much? I think so if the path of diversity continued because and maybe that’s in a different way, what Michèle Lamont alludes to because there was not contact, but there was an agreement in the public sphere. There was an alignment in the public sphere that people were kind of told in certain ways that this is how things are. So the at least it didn’t find the ways to means to voice or to opposition or to form group identities that are against other group identities. So the public sphere, for better or for worse, was homogenous, much more homogenous than society, and was keeping that in order. And now, with the fragmentation of public sphere, we see these contestations of group identities much more visceral and, ugly and sustained. So, so I think that’s an interesting point to think about social media and echo chambers in ways that aren’t about the content of the public discourse, because the content was racist all along, all along, but of the architecture of the of, of the public sphere, which creates these opportunities to be much more aggressive towards each other and have much less contact and with each other, have much less understanding about each other’s, modes of living and realities of I think what’s, what’s breaking up is this shared sense of reality. And that creates this potential for conflict.

Steven Vertovec (42:06)

Absolutely. And maybe that’s, that’s a place to come back to this, this concept of Overton Window, what’s acceptable in public speech. And, yeah, back then in the 90s when, you know, these violent acts, these these racist acts against, asylum seekers and migrants were taking place, there was still a broad public discussion that this is unacceptable behavior, this is fringe behavior. But now, as you say, with the breakup, the fragmentation, the fact that people can live in their own world, where some influencer might say this is actually acceptable behavior, this is an accepted, this is, expected reaction, and different normative, again, different moral qualities being put on treatment of others. That has really shifted the entire ballgame here. Absolutely.

Georg Diez (42:58)

I think it’s just important to say that it’s maybe not the substance of society that has changed, I guess, was enough bad people from my, our perspective, maybe racist people then. Just the way that the discourse is shifted - the lid is off in some way. So now a fringe minority can determine much more what is actually, hegemonic discourse. I think that’s what’s happening in the US. Much more radical voices are overtaking the mainstream as opposed to the other way round, so the mainstream. used to like, marginalize these voices. And now they come and influence the mainstream discourse.

Steven Vertovec (43:39)

But again, you know, this this makes me think of coming back to one of the the key lessons about social scientific studies of social categorization, how they work and so forth. As I say, you know, it’s known that, you know, our brains work by classifying the world. And that goes for the social world as well. Some have postulated that we classify others so that we might be able to have some expectation of when we encounter and relate to somebody, how that other person might respond. That’s kind of, you know, what some talk about as the function of of social categories to give us some way of navigating and getting through the world. And that’s why I would say, you know, I’m an anthropologist. We deal with the world of meanings, how meanings are constructed and related to, to real world materiality, social relations, economics. And so forth. And this is why I’m so concerned with this topic, because right now, again, as we’ve been talking about the way that those categories are being reshaped, reformed, talked about moralized value put on them and the fact that, as you’re pointing out within echo chambers, whatever we want to call them, people are able to underline and solidify and bolster certain readings of social categories. This has real world effects all the time. So there are people going around, and the way they are reading and navigating the world is very different from the way other people are doing that now. As you said in some previous day, we could say that there were many more shared meanings in a more homogeneous public sphere. Now that that’s fragmented, people are effectively walking around and living in different social realities because of the different categories that they’re carrying in their heads.

Georg Diez (45:47)

I know that you, as an anthropologist, think of a lot about stigmatization of groups and how group identity is built through that process. Would you say so for this, would you describe before this overarching, this consensus of what’s acceptable in society to talk about it as a modern phenomenon? And so if the stigma, stigmatization is a is a pre-modern phenomenon that comes back now in a way that sort of signals an end to, as you said so, this period that Ulrich Beck would have coined late modernity but still modernity. The cosmopolitan period, which is civilizational achievement of sorts. Cosmopolitanism is, modernity is. So I think these are all terms that are connected. So if this is breaking, this consensus of that you don’t stigmatize, or act on stigmatization. Is that a much deeper fracture that we are encountering, which is a fracture in modernity itself?

Steven Vertovec (46:56)

Well, first of all, looking back in history, of course, various kinds of stigmatization has always been there. If we look at the history of antisemitism over 2000 years, obviously you have a highly stigmatized group, but it’s taken different kinds of permutations, different meanings. The concept of Jew was was filled out and conceived differently over the years, but always with a kind of stigmatizing function with real social, economic, political, other outcomes as well. But to say that that’s always been there, I don’t want to get into too much about hard wiring. I’ll just put my cards on the table. There’s a branch of social science, evolutionary psychology and so forth, and there are people in this field that suggest that we are hard wired to favor our group and castigate and be afraid of and be antagonistic towards others. But that’s how we survived over the years, from back when we were in small bands of hunter gatherers through to the present, and I don’t buy that at all. My view of history is, we have a lot more cooperation throughout history than conflict. Of course, we have massive, horrible conflicts,

47:32 — Stigmatization, Modernity, and Uncharted Futures

Georg Diez (48:20)

but we have lots of people living together.

Steven Vertovec (48:24)

But also it’s again, we have to understand the nature of social categories. They are not hard and fast. There has been much more overlapping and segmentation and situational and changing meanings of what it means to belong to different categories. And that is our history, not some built in, this is the social category. It’s fixed forever and we’re antagonistic to others. In-group, out-group, all of that kind of stuff. I don’t buy that. And I know anthropologically we can demonstrate a lot of that as well. So I’m quite confident in saying that. Now about modernity, late modernity, post modernity, that’s not usually the kind of, language or theoretical frameworks that I work with. But let’s say if we’re using modernity, high modernity and the role of social categories in this kind of rationalistic fordist machine like understanding of society, you could say, yes, of course. Then stigmatization takes a rationalist, fordist machine like attitude, and that’s Nazism. That’s high modernity for me. And how social categories in high modernity worked, whether late modernity, post modernity, is associated with that cosmopolitanization, that diversity metanarrative period that we described at the beginning of this talk. That’s debatable. I could probably live with that. But the question is, we’re over that now. We’re into some other phase, and there are social theorists trying to think outside now of the modernity, late modernity, post modernity thing, saying we’re into uncharted territory now. And that gets to the heart of this podcast series as well. What kind of futures might happen? Are we on a course to continue this castigating simplified, reduced moral hierarchies of categories? Or do somehow we channel back to a cosmopolitanizing frame, and understanding of multiple open-ended categories and so forth? Or is there something else ahead of us altogether that we haven’t conceived of yet? This is a discussion worth having, I would say. So, one thing we’d have to say that if we are to change course from whatever we’re calling this, this moment, now, populists new right understanding of groups and categories back to somewhere else. The question is for all those groups that have been stigmatized now to use the category you raised, can we destigmatize those groups? And again, the work of Michèle Lamont has been instructive on this. Yes, we can destigmatize groups, and there are various ways of going about that. Maybe if we listen to what she said about this and then talk about her reading of destigmatization.

💬 MICHÈLE LAMONT — Harvard University

“In <i>Seeing Others</i> I describe this process of destigmatization as resulting from a collaboration between, frankly, knowledge producers, people like us, but also a legal expert, medical expert, journalist. Everyone who’s specialized or who has authority with producing knowledge that has to do with the, you know, what social reality looks like. And I discuss the case of people with HIV Aids. When the Aids crisis started in the early 80s. They were, you know, people who had Aids were deeply stigmatized because it was viewed as a disease that followed from sexual promiscuity. And then over to for a following 40 years, medical researchers and many other people, journalists, social scientists, produced, you know, really contested this and said, no, actually, everyone could get Aids. And it’s not about, you know, being promiscuous. And other health problems such as obesity, as remain extremely stigmatized in part because these alliances are not made. So I really think in terms of network. And if you think of the pushback in the US against the vilification of, the groups that Trump is attacking, you know, trans people or, you know, even the issue of abortion and, you know, reproductive rights in women.”

52:02 — Destigmatization and Cultural Change

Georg Diez (53:03)

So I think that’s really interesting. And hopeful example actually of how you can destigmatize groups that are stigmatized before. And I think that’s interesting how she points out to the fact that, culture plays such a big role as an agreement of, sort of, norms and moralities that are in flux and I wonder how if we talk about the future of diversity, how this is also, a generational thing. I mean, it’s also important to point towards younger people having extreme, views. Specifically, there’s a divide between men and women of certain, age and of young in the younger age groups. But generally, I guess conservative people are older and or reactionary or people. So I wonder if that shift that we talk about, going forward is maybe also a generational shift that points to this question of how Aids was, first seen as a moral disease And then so through culture, through pop culture, through other forms of images, narratives, films that change more than the substantial economic structures, to your point. So, what’s the relationship? It’s complicated. What’s the relationship between always, I guess, culture and, material? Basis?

Steven Vertovec (54:35)

Yeah. No, the generational difference, especially, as you said, thinking towards the future. That is a crucial one that we really have to address. And thinking of, Michèle’s points about destigmatization and the role of knowledge producers in her work. She also talks about cultural producers as well, people in Hollywood or who make TV shows or music industry or the visual arts and so forth. Having a key role. And again, generations have different approaches to those. I have to say that, you know, some years ago it was almost a kind of assumption that we’ll be right on the kind of cosmopolitan front, because young people, more and more young people are simply growing up in diverse classrooms and neighborhoods and workplaces. And through that contact, they will naturally have these cosmopolitan attitudes. But I think as you point out, as well, largely or let’s say, not least through social media and the creation of manners, spheres and other kind of new right that are targeted towards younger generations. That assumption no longer holds that that the new right agenda, this frontlash, is also taking place in younger people under 30s and so forth. And so if this is to be addressed, knowledge producers have to look across all of those. And for some reason, I’m just thinking of, the changes in, everyday culture of how, let’s say, 20 years ago, we saw a great change in, the representation of different groups and categories in things like television and movies, many more black, Asian and other characters in every day TV shows, many more, gay and lesbian characters who are just part of every day television series. And so forth, and become unquestioned after time in advertisement and so forth. And now, as part of that new movement, recently, I’ve read that there’s a American politician who has been questioning having too many black and brown faces in commercials on television. And again, that would have been unthinkable to even flag this up 15, 20 years ago. And, again, I don’t think that many younger people growing up with so many black and brown faces on television would even question that. Now, when someone puts that in their head, maybe they do start to question that. So indeed, as we ponder futures of difference, generational change, generational perspectives are crucial. Knowledge producers, influencers role of social media is hugely crucial. But I think one of the key points to bear in mind is these trends can change. And as I suggested, a lot of the current change to where we got to now is very politically motivated. I don’t know if political motivation will bring us back to another track or even create a third alternative, but certainly these kind of cultural and moral perspectives or readings of society will certainly have a role. Now, one of the key issues as we move into the future, as in in the past as well, is migration. We know that migration that every society practically on Earth is going to need more migrants because of shrinking populations, and that’s going to have a direct effect on all of these dynamics of social categories that we’ve been talking about generational differences, moral positioning and so forth. And this is something we’ll talk about in the next episode, especially with, my friend Dan Hebert.

55:34 — Generational Perspectives on Social Difference

Georg Diez (58:46)

Looking forward to that. So I hope everyone will tune in again to hear from Dan as we talk about migration and put it in this frame of changing dynamics around social categories and futures of difference. The Futures of Different podcast

About the Guest

Michèle Lamont is a sociologist at Harvard University whose research examines how societies draw and redraw the boundaries between social groups. Her work on moral boundaries and social categorization has shaped how scholars understand the cultural dimensions of social inequality.