04/16/2024 - IIH/SOC MIGRATION WORKSHOP SPEAKER SERIES: The New Minority People without a Migration Background in the Superdiverse City with Dr. Maurice Crul & Frans Lelie

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How do people without a migration background appreciate diversity and participate in majority-minority neighborhoods? Maurice Crul, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & Frans Lelie, Visiting Fellow in Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, have studied the participation and integration of people with a migration background in ethnically diverse city contexts. The ‘forgotten’ group in assimilation and integration research, up till recently, were the people without a migration background. This one-sided perspective has translated into major empirical and theoretical flaws in how we study social processes in ethnically diverse contexts. Without studying the diversity attitudes and practices of people without a migration background we miss out on the impact of the actions of the most powerful group in society. To tackle this, we developed the Integration into Diversity (ID) Theory as an alternative for existing assimilation theories and to measure the impact of people without a migration background on the diversity climate in neighborhoods and cities. In the European comparative project Becoming a Minority (BaM) we have interviewed people without a migration background in majority-minority neighborhoods in six European cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Vienna, Antwerp and Malmö). We will show what needs to be in place for diverse neighborhoods to work and to foster a successful practice of living together. This work provides important lessons for a progressive agenda for ethnically diverse cities, countering the increasing anti-immigrant discourse in Europe and the United States. Join us and get the book, The New Minority, People without a Migration Background in the Superdiverse City, here.

 

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