Season 4, Ep. 2:

Below, you find links to all of the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.

Media

Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. (external link)  Alfred A. Knopf.

Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London (external link) . Cambridge University Press.

Corey, J.S.A. The Expanse (external link)  (ten book series).

Superdiversity. Interactive Website. By Steven Vertovec (external link) , Daniel Hiebert (external link) , Alan Gamlen (external link)  and Paul Spoonley (external link) .

Books & Chapters

Grillo, Ralph D. (2023). Superdiversity in comparative perspective (external link) . In,  F. Meissner, N. Sigona & S. Vertovec (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity. Oxford Academic.

Schiller, M. (2016). European cities, municipal organizations and diversity: The new politics of difference. Springer.

Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. Routledge.

Academic Works

Martínez-Ariño, J., Moutselos, M., Schönwälder, K., Jacobs, C., Schiller, M., & Tandé, A. (2019). Why do some cities adopt more diversity policies than others? A study in France and Germany (external link) . Comparative European Politics, 17(5), 651-672.

Nederhand, J., Avelino, F., Awad, I., De Jong, P., Duijn, M., Edelenbos, J., ... & Van Stapele, N. (2023). Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels (external link) . Cities, 137, 104257.

Schiller, M. (2017). The implementation trap: the local level and diversity policies. (external link)  International Review of Administrative Sciences, 83(2), 267-282.

Schiller, M. (2023). Local immigrant councils as a form of participation and governance: How institutional design and agency matter (external link) . Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24(4), 1773-1794.

Schiller, M. (2015). Paradigmatic pragmatism and the politics of diversity. (external link)  Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(7), 1120-1136.

Schiller, M., Awad, I., Buijse, N., Chantre, M., Huang, Y. C., Jonitz, E., ... & van Dordrecht, L. (2023). Brokerage in urban networks on diversity and inclusion: The case of Rotterdam (external link) . Cities, 135, 104219.

Vertovec, S. (1999). Conceiving and researching transnationalism (external link) . Ethnic and racial studies, 22(2), 447-462.

Vertovec, S. (2024). Contexts, categories and superdiversities (external link) . Ethnic and Racial Studies, 47(8), 1678-1683.

Vertovec, S. (2021). The social organization of difference. (external link)  Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(8), 1273-1295.

Vertovec, S. (2023). Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity (external link) . Taylor & Francis.

Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications (external link) . Ethnic and racial studies, 30(6), 1024-1054.

Vertovec, S. (2001). Transnationalism and identity. (external link)  Journal of Ethnic and Migration studies, 27(4), 573-582.

Vertovec, S., Hiebert, D., Spoonley, P., & Gamlen, A. (2024). Visualizing superdiversity and “seeing” urban socio-economic complexity. (external link)  Urban Geography, 45(2), 179-200.

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research, new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field, then we dig deeper to uncover the paths that brought them here, the turning points lived experiences and insights that shape the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire in the chat established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present and future of migration studies. From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next. Today, our conversation centers on Steven Vertovec, a leading voice in migration studies. Steven's work has reshaped how we understand the complexity of modern societies, especially through his influential concept of superdiversity. To best appreciate Dr. Steven Vertovec's journey, it makes sense to start at the beginning. Before becoming the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, a young Steven grew up in Chicago struggling to shake off an unfair reputation all the while trying to enjoy life as a child.

Steven Vertovec  

Oh, when I was a child, my parents were constantly brought into the school because I was labeled by the equivalent of child psychologists, as it were, by the school counselors and whatnot, I was labeled as a chronic underachiever. That is, that they saw potential, but I really enjoyed playing around and farting around with my friends. I was more interested in sports than anything else, and so I was regarded as a problem, both for the teachers and for my parents, especially. There was a lot of intensive work, then put into me by parents and teachers to try to pull me up to where they thought I should be.

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven's environment urged him to raise his standards, but it soon became clear that his surroundings were only limiting his potential.

Steven Vertovec  

I grew up in one of the western suburbs of Chicago, and it was rather comfortable, and it was a Catholic school in part of Chicago would naturally be quite diverse in itself, but nevertheless, it was a very white school, very suburban. And basically, I grew up and we never went anywhere on holiday or anything. And so by the time I was 18, I was really just busting to get out, physically and then intellectually as well, and that's why going to university and becoming an anthropology student at University of Colorado was one real way of trying to bust out of my comfortable, but rather kind of restricted horizon that I had grown up with.

Maggie Perzyna  

As an undergrad, Steven studied anthropology and religious studies, drawn to how people build connections across differences. That curiosity about what brings us together, even when so much sets us apart, has guided his work ever since.

Steven Vertovec  

I certainly didn't start out with migration in focus, but certainly of all kinds, ethnic, racial, religious difference was always on the agenda. When I was an undergraduate, I was a double major in anthropology and religious studies, and I became a research assistant for a rather famous professor named David Carrasco, he's now at Harvard, on Native American and white settler encounters, and particularly religious encounters, and basically, the more that I learned, and was really keen on learning what happens when people with two completely different world views, two completely different realities meet.

Maggie Perzyna  

The next part of Steven's academic journey takes him abroad. No longer stuck in the comfort of Chicago, he yearned for opportunities that tested his personal boundaries, all with the intent of learning what barriers look like for those living in other parts of the world.

Steven Vertovec  

For my PhD work, I worked in Trinidad not with Native American encounters, but with encounters between people with African heritage, people who were brought as slaves, and people with so-called East Indians, people brought from India as indentured labourers. And I wrote my PhD and my first book, all about those encounters between Africans and Indians in a third space altogether, which was in the Caribbean. And this fashioned all sorts of ideas I had, and work around the nature of religious identity, of ethnic and racial identity, and how these are actually quite malleable.

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven has written several books, including the most recent in 2022, Superdiversity, Migration and Social Complexity. But beyond the depth of his scholarship, it's often the short messages he writes to his family at the beginning of those books that hold his most personal lessons.

Steven Vertovec  

It's meant I've tried always to remain dedicated to family first and foremost, and I've had the real privilege, absolute privilege, in my career, to have jobs, which you would call sort of flexi-time. Ever since, really postdoc, I've been in control of my own agenda as I'm morphed into a kind of research manager and director and so forth, which has meant that I've been able to be there for a lot of those kid’s activities, you know, the concert at school, or the sports game or something like that. So, I've always been able to juggle things around, but it's also meant that in the evenings or first thing in the morning, at 5:30am, I'm already up working because I've got to do family things in other times of the day. So, it's been a lot of juggling. I've certainly always tried to put those kinds of family activities first, and sometimes my family have seen that I've been kind of exhausted doing that, but it's worth it. You know.

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven is one of the most referenced researchers in his field, and it stems back to the malleability of the topics he dedicates his life to.

Steven Vertovec  

That really struck me, that these things can be shaped and re-shaped and re-oriented and so forth over time in different contexts, and that started me on the long trajectory towards looking at diasporas, transnationalism, migration, diversity, superdiversity and so forth. It was those kinds of early studies as an undergraduate student, master's student and PhD student, that really captured my imagination and interest right through till today.

Maggie Perzyna  

One other thing Steven takes incredible pride in is the role he plays in helping shape the next generation of scholars and researchers. For Steven, those next in line are worth molding too. The version of Steven that people feared wouldn't reach his potential is now helping others realize their own goals, and that's something worth being proud of.

Steven Vertovec  

Don't like to boast about anything, but I do kind of boast that I know how to pick students and postdocs and colleagues to work with, and that's always been really gratifying. When people that I've chosen to be a postdoc or a PhD student at any of the research centers that I've run have gone on to do absolutely brilliant work, not because of me or something, but I hope that I've created at least a context where they've been able to thrive. The thing that I suppose I'm most proud of, too, is, you know, being able to have made things happen. You know, I've been in a position where I've been given resources by a large funding body or organization, and I've used that to make things happen. You know, book series, journals, research projects, events, and hopefully some of those have moved the bar a little bit. Have broadened our field, have added to our understanding. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Today, we're speaking with professor Steven Vertovec and Maria Schiller about the concept of superdiversity and how it's reshaping the study of governance of migration. Over time, the term has taken on a life of its own, and it's now intertwined in different disciplines. Maria is a professor of public governance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work focuses on how institutions respond to diversity in practice, particularly within city governments and public administrations. It's a pleasure to have you both on the show today. 

Steven Vertovec  

Well, thanks for having us. 

Maria Schiller  

Thank you. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven, you coined the term superdiversity back in 2007 with a specific purpose in mind. What did you originally hope the concept would do, and how does that compare to where it's gone since?

Steven Vertovec  

I've just written a book on that, so I could answer this question in great length, but I'll try to be quick. At the time I wrote the original Super diversity article in 2007, its intention was twofold. One was a kind of critique of multiculturalism. I had long written a number of pieces critiquing the concept as it was put into policy. I saw it as a rather flat way of looking at migration and ethnicity. Looking at groups as rather bounded, homogeneous holes, and I just think that didn't reflect the reality I was seeing in research. So, that was one critique. We were seeing things in the data that was coming to us from the government and from our own research that was just showing a much more complex picture out there. So, that was the first thing, is a critique of multiculturalism as it was being discussed in policy and public space. And the others, is kind of what you said in your introduction. To really start looking at internal diversity of groups, the fact that there were many new small groups that had never been in the UK before, to emphasize the intersectionality of multiple social categories represented amongst migrant populations, and to really emphasize this multi-dimensionality of things that were really affecting people's lives. So, it wasn't just ethnicity and national background. Various groups in the UK also had very different age profiles, gender profiles, educational employment profiles, legal statuses and so forth. And so I thought we needed to develop a kind of language, or a different approach, or lens, as some people say, for looking at social complexity in an ever-evolving migrant based society like the UK. Oh, and to where it's gone since then, the concept, as you mentioned, has taken on a life of its own. I kind of was hoping for it to be taken up by fellow migration scholars across sociology, political science, anthropology, geography and so forth, and it has been, but it's really found purchase in a variety of disciplines I never thought of before, especially sociolinguistics. But even things like business studies, education, sports studies, have all picked up the term in different ways. Sometimes in ways that I intended, sometimes riffing on the term and going in different directions. But I think that's it's all very interesting and exciting.

Maggie Perzyna  

Maria, how has Steven's work on superdiversity influenced your own research on local governance and diversity management.

Maria Schiller  

Great question. Steve's work has been hugely influential for me, and I think also to many, many other researchers out there who have been trying to grapple with questions of complexity and diversity and trying to make sense of that. And I think the reason for that is that what he managed to do was to capture in a single word a dynamic that many scholars have been trying to make sense of and were observing and with super diversity. I think that's indeed those two aspects that already were mentioned. So first, I think, is this demographic one, the diversification of societies, which, for instance, in Germany or Austria, where I grew up, I think, was just as much visible, maybe to different extent or different ways, than in London, where initially I think that the observation started on superdiversity, but also happened so it was really useful to make sense of processes. And the second element, I think, is really this going beyond an ethnic lens to examine multiple dimensions of difference, of interacting dimensions of difference. So, for me, when I first encountered this, I had just finished a Master thesis in anthropology at the University of Vienna, and I studied the migrant women's movement in Amsterdam, and I was interested in this intersection of gender and ethnicity and in urban contexts. And during my field work, I encountered this policy discourse around diversity, which really shaped those migrant women's organizations back then. It was actually then when Steve's publication came out, and it inspired me to develop a PhD proposal to really look further into understanding what this diversity means, how it is being negotiated and implemented in practice. And then what I did in my PhD is to look really how local officials working in newly established diversity offices make sense of it. So, in a way, you could say it has really been a key moment and a key inspiration for me to develop my PhD research and to develop that in my own way, to figure out practices of diversity policymaking.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, we've talked a bit about the utility of the concept and how much it captures, but then, Steve, you've also said that a lot of people have picked up on a 'superdiversity light', or just focusing on ethnicity or more visible forms of difference, which sometimes misses the deeper idea of 'superdiversity heavy' that you originally had in mind. Why does this difference matter so much?

Steven Vertovec  

Thanks for pointing that out, because that's one of my great, I wouldn't say disappointments, but a lot of people have picked up the term as we were talking about in lots of different disciplines, and it has been picked up in in cities around the world, in the way that they describe themselves. But yeah, this distinction, superdiversity 'light' and 'heavy', that wasn't my own. That was a great colleague, Ralph Grillo made that distinction. That superdiversity light, as you said, is when other scholars or policymakers pick up the term and just focus on the fact that, let's say, over the last ten to twenty years, in many countries and cities and neighborhoods, you've had a great proliferation of the number of different ethnic groups or national origins, or religions, or languages. And they focus on that and of course, I'm glad for that attention, because that's a big part of what's been happening, this proliferation of modes of difference. But it doesn't go far enough. It kind of recapitulates that old multicultural idea of a rather flat society, of these kinds of watertight communities with hard boundaries and homogeneity in between. And that's not really the point. What Ralphf Grillo called 'superdiversity heavy' is my original intention. This, this very intersectional or multi-dimensional look at the fact that within any particular, let's say, national origin migrant group, you'll have different age and gender profile from others, very different legal statuses. Sometimes within the same national origin group, you'll have people who are citizens, people who are refugees, people who are on work visas, people who might be undocumented. And so that needed to be taken account of. For me, the most important thing about the original, or let's say, 'superdiversity heavy' concept, is its relationship to understanding social inequalities of what are some of the factors that, when combined, create different patterns of inequality than others. I think multiculturalism, as it was talked about in the UK back then, didn't really deal with inequality. It just dealt with cultural difference, which is important, of course, but I thought there was more to it than that.

Maggie Perzyna  

Right. So, Maria from your research inside city offices and public agencies, how do you see people coping with the real-world messiness of superdiversity?

Maria Schiller

Yeah, so my PhD research I embarked on in 2009, started, actually at the moment where in many cities, exactly that shift happened from sort of talking about multiculturalism and multicultural policymaking to diversity, superdiversity. So, what I did in that research was to shadow public officials over a few months in three different cities across Europe, in Leeds and UK, in Antwerp in Belgium and in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And basically, what I tried to do is to wet this anthropological endeavor of, you know, getting a deep insight into what they're doing, but also figuring out what is the policy discourse of diversity and how does it get meaning in practice. And maybe three big surprises that I would like to point out in terms of what was the real-world messiness of superdiversity. Well, first of all is the surprise was that in these bureaucratic offices, diversity units that were just being created, I actually encountered my own bias in the first instance that I had expected local bureaucrats to be white, male, middle class, neutral bureaucrats. But in fact, these offices were quite exceptional in bringing together a bunch of quite diverse people, some of them quite activists, with a lot of passion for this policy area, for sure. The second one is that even though these diversity policies have been done, already passed and have been implemented for a while, there seemed to be a lot of undefined. What does diversity actually mean? What should be done about it. How this should be achieved was actually negotiated every day by these officials. And maybe the third surprise in this reality was that whilst diversity was sort of a new policy term, only some of the activities of these people reflected actually these ideas of multi-perspectivity or going beyond ethnic approaches. But I also saw a continuation of earlier practices, what I then later on came to talk about as 'paradigmatic pragmatism'. I tried to give this some sense, also in these words, to understand what has been going on there. Namely, diversity has not been completely shift away from multicultural ideas, but they sort of competed in everyday action.

Maggie Perzyna  

Fantastic. Stephen, I'm just going to throw in a question here. I know that you've been working on a website that kind of visualizes some of the findings from your research together with Dan Hebert, Alan Gamlin and Paul Spoonley, I was wondering if you could share maybe some of the insights that you've gathered from those visualizations by seeing that information presented in that way on the website. 

Steven Vertovec  

Oh, thanks very much for pulling that one out. Yeah, we've done this for many cities around the world, kind of super diversity data visualizations, just trying to allow people to see this multi-dimensionality, to see the effects of what happens when you choose a number of different variables, like ethnic or national background, date of arrival, legal status, particular geographical placement in town, education history. You can combine all of these sorts of different things on these data visualizations and then see various kinds of outcomes. What's the likelihood of being in employment or owning a home or having access to education and so forth. And also, we can see this in different parts of the cities as well, where you have higher or lower diversity of incomes, higher or lower diversity of sheer number of ethnic groups living together and so forth. We've done this for the five largest Canadian cities, for Auckland and Sydney, and now we're rolling out the five largest American cities, and we've had lots of workshops with different kinds of practitioners, from health services, social services, policymakers and they really liked these things because, well, I mean, one of the main reasons I wanted to have these things created, I'm not a numbers guy. It helps when I can see a good, cool graphic. And moreover, these are all graphics that one can interact with. These practitioners and policymakers have really liked it because it really helps get them a rather different perspective and understanding of their constituencies that they deal with. And they really like doing it, and we're hoping that it'll be picked up by, let's say, high school teachers and university teachers as well, to help get across that diversity isn't just about the number of ethnic groups. It's the interaction of all these different kinds of variables.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, you've both emphasized that policy often lags behind social reality. What's one thing you'd urge policymakers to rethink if they want to meet the demands of a superdiverse society?

Maria Schiller  

What's wanting to urge policymakers. I'll give you three things, but I think they're integrated. So, the first thing, I would say is important to recognize and realize that terms can serve as a means to provide a vision in policymaking. So, a term like superdiversity can really give an idea of where we may want to go towards as a society. How living together in a city also could look like? To go beyond sort of ethnic defined groups, to think more of a society that is in itself complex and diverse. So, I think it's important to have these terms, but I think it's also important to be realistic that terms change very quickly, and they can get sort of recycled, but they can also be moved away with in policymaking. So, I think it's important that we stick, also as researchers, to super diversity as an analytical term that helps us to make sense of what's going on no matter what policy is doing. With policymakers, I would really urge them to think about, you know, what is the society you would like to design in the future, rather than discussing terms all the time and getting to a new term, but really thinking about what would a school look like? What would our healthcare look like if we wanted to have a society where everyone can live together peacefully, with equal chances and being able to lead a good life without experiencing discrimination. I'd rather urge them to do that, rather than to come up with a new term each moment. I have two other points, but maybe, maybe Steve wants to jump in here.

Steven Vertovec  

I would just want to add for policymakers and service providers. I think the main thing is to, you know, help them shift away from this kind of unidimensional look at ethnic groups or migrant groups or national origin groups, to a much more complex understanding of groups that, yes, their ethnicity, their cultural preferences, are certainly important, but that things like legal status, gender and age really play a big part in people's needs. It's not just all about ethnicity only. And there's a mayor in Mechelen, I think he's now a government minister in the Netherlands who adopted a superdiversity approach, and he was simply saying, look, now we've got so many different groups with so many different profiles. We cannot provide a cultural center for every one of these, we've got, like, 130 groups. So, we have to find ways of both recognizing the importance of people's group identities, we're not downplaying those at all, but to recognize that we also have to find other cross cutting or intersectional categories that can bring people together for common purpose and recognizing inequalities and differences in legal status and gender and so forth. As Maria has shown in her work, I mean, there are lots of policymakers who are actually successfully getting their heads around this and coming up with new ways of meeting needs out there.

Maria Schiller  

What I perhaps would add, based on the research I've been doing in the three cities back then, one thing I saw is that what is quite detrimental to the quality, perhaps, of policymaking around superdiversity, has been this real pressure on policymakers to basically come up with something new every couple of years. And this creates a lot of unsteadiness for the officials that are trying to implement these policies. And so, one of the things I've been observing is that the salience of the topic of diversity and super diversity sometimes makes it difficult for them to actually deal with this complexity on the long run. So, I would very much urge public policymakers to take it a little bit easy in the sense to relax in that the fact that complexity is out there and superdiversity is out there it will stay, means that we need a long-term approach. And maybe as a last point, I would really urge policymakers also to think about collaborating with civil society. So, Steve has mentioned that, of course, it does not make sense to you know now cater to all the specific communities, but civil society has also diversified and complexified. So, there are many new voices out there who want to be heard by local policymakers and municipal authorities. But oftentimes municipal authorities tend to keep working with the same groups or keep working with the same organizations. So, I think a challenge is also to keep up to speed with the complexities that are also built into the civil sphere. So, I think it's important to look at the new ways in which civil society develops and is sometimes far advanced, to the policy discourses out there. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Right. That's a really important point. So, as scholars working at different career stages, what does collaboration across generations make possible when thinking about concepts like superdiversity? Steven?

Steven Vertovec  

I've always said this, not jokingly, but in earnest. I've always relied on the young scholars that I've worked with, PhDs and postdocs and so forth to tell me, first of all what to read, because they have their finger on the pulse a lot more of what are new and breaking ideas, concepts, pieces of work. But also, just fresh perspectives and also things that are popping up digitally, like Maria was just saying, there's lots of new bases of intersection and cross-cutting and alliance taking place, and a lot of those are online, as well as in places like clubs and restaurants and sports clubs and so forth. There are lots of new things happening out there. And again, it's a lot of the young scholars who really have their finger on the pulse of this stuff. That's why I've always found it really important to have young scholars telling old dogs like me, you know, some new tricks.

Maria Schiller  

Maria, yeah, I think also, at the same time, the space and freedom to experiment and do your thing. Think this is really something I learned, and I'm now trying to apply with my PhDs. To trust junior researchers and give them a bit the space to figure out their own thing, whilst equipping them with some of the ideas that have been out there beforehand and providing these guideposts. And then at some point also to get some challenging questions of you know, so what did you find? What is new? Or maybe, are you just repeating what it was already done? What is it that we now have learned that we haven't done before? So, having those challenging questions asked you at some point, I think, is a very important exercise, and is why we are in academia.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, as we finish off here, when you look to the future of migration and diversity research, what excites you and what still keeps you up at night, Steven,

Steven Vertovec  

Well, the whole future of difference. I mean, I'll be working on a new Sub Stack and podcasts myself on that question of futures of difference. And actually, Maria was one of forty participants at a big event in Germany we had here on the futures of difference as well. I'm concerned. What keeps me up at night is, of course, the massive discursive change we've experienced over the last ten years or so, especially Global North. But let's say, really globally, where some things that, some attitudes, some ways of talking about other groups, the so-called Overton window of what's acceptable, of what we can talk about, has shifted, and I just can't believe how some politicians, influencers, talk about other social categories and groups. And of course, this leads directly into all the discourse around migration itself. I'm concerned, if we continue down this track, what the world will look like, especially at a time when migrants are needed more than ever in aging societies, and what might be some interventions if we wanted things to go in a different direction? Those are my main concerns. And then, you know, there is the beginning of a shift in a lot of social scientific publication right now towards looking at the future. How do we study the future methodologically? And I would think that these sorts of lines of thinking and methodology will start to be applied in migration studies much more looking at different types of scenarios that might develop and what their implications might be for society, economy, politics, and all the things that we study. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Fascinating. Maria?

Maria Schiller  

What keeps me up at night is essentially the polarization, the tensions that we see in society, the echo chambers that appear in relation to diversity, which seems to be more and more, also a conflictive topic in policymaking. Whilst we know that in society, there's actually a lot of assent also too. So, what excites me at the moment is a book project and I'm finishing which looks into how conflict relates to collaboration. And if you look at this as a spectrum, what may be some ways how conflicts can be transformed into new alliances, new collaborative forms of engagement between civil society and state actors trying to deal with those issues. And maybe for the future, I'm very interested also to look further into the role of universities in dealing with diversity. I do think that we haven't looked a lot into how universities have also become places of difference and places where superdiversity is being negotiated, and they also play a role in the urban governance of diversity. So, I think for future research, I do see a little bit of a gap still to address this role of our own institutions in dealing with superdiversity. 

Maggie Perzyna  

All right. Well, thank you. You've given us so much to think about. Thank you for sharing. We're going to do a quick lightning round, so I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions, and it's kind of like the first thing that comes to your mind. We can ping pong back and forth, Maria. Let's start with you. Favorite book?

Maria Schiller  

Ooh, I think still, Americanah.

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven, favorite book?

Steven Vertovec  

Well, favorite academic book is probably Contesting Cultures, by my old friend Gerhard Bauman. Favorite leisure book, it's actually ten books. It's called, The Expanse, by James S A Corey. It's a novel series, ten novels.

Maggie Perzyna  

What policy buzzword should disappear? Maria?

Maria Schiller  

Integration.

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven?

Steven Vertovec  

Yeah, I'd go with that too. Actually, yeah, good one Maria!

Maggie Perzyna  

Favorite place that you've done field work or research? Maria?

Maria Schiller  

Antwerp. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Stephen?

Steven Vertovec  

II would say southern Trinidad.

Maggie Perzyna  

And as a final question, what's one thing about you that you can't learn from your CV? Maria? 

Maria Schiller  

Well, I've come to assimilate to Dutch culture and I'm now race-cycling around it. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Steven?

Steven Vertovec  

And for me, I love gardening. I'm always digging around in my garden.

Maggie Perzyna  

Flower guy or vegetable guy?

Steven Vertovec  

Vegetable guy.

Maggie Perzyna  

Awesome. Okay, thank you both so much. That was wonderful. Thank you both for taking the time and for sharing with us.

Steven Vertovec  

Thanks for all the work on this. 

Maria Schiller  

Thank you so much.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thank thanks so much to Steven Vertovec and Maria Schiller for joining me today and thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student Kristian Cuaresma, alongside executive producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you're enjoying Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.