Distinguished Speaker Series Guest Lecture: Professor Steven Vertovec

Diversification and 'diversity': configurations, representations and encounters: A Guest Lecture by Professor Steven Vertovec, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen

Steven Vertovec is Director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen and Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology, University of Gottingen. Previously he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of the ESRC's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS).

Professor Vertovec has written four books and published thirty-one edited volumes including Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, The Multicultural Backlash and a five-volume set on Migration. He has acted as expert or consultant for numerous agencies, including the British Government's Cabinet Office and Home Office, the European Commission, the G8, the World Bank and UNESCO.

His work around "super-diversity" stems from the unprecedented degree of diversification - in terms of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic categories - evident in contemporary patterns of global migration. He has also observed diversification by way of changing migration channels, legal statuses and conditions, configurations of gender and age, and migrants' human capital (education, work skills and experience): together such changes have produced the condition known as "super-diversity".

Vertovec will explore his ideas around "super-diversity" in this, his first guest lecture for the University of Birmingham's College of Social Sciences.

Further information

To register for this event, please contact Ann Bolstridge, a.bolstridge@bham.ac.uk.

Refreshments will be available after the guest lecture.