Superdiversity in Latin America: Migration Crises, Social Complexity, and Unequal Diversification

Please click on one of the following links to download the poster.
English version | Spanish version

For more details please contact marina.adomeit(at)ips.mpg.de.

This two-day symposium brings together scholars from across Latin America, North America, and Europe to examine how the concept of superdiversity travels — and transforms — when applied to Latin American contexts. Convened by Heriberto Avelino (National Institute of Anthropology and History), Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez (Universidad de Colima), and Steve Vertovec (Max Planck Institute), the symposium takes the region‘s intensifying migration crises as its analytical point of departure, asking what migration-driven social complexity looks like when it is inseparable from colonial legacies, racial hierarchies, deep informality, and structural inequality.

The programme moves across five thematic panels addressing conceptual reorientations of superdiversity, decolonial and indigenous perspectives, intergenerational and transnational lives, mobility and intersectional diversities, and health, welfare, and governance. Presentations draw on cases ranging from Venezuelan displacement and Haitian regional mobility to Maya migration, Andean urbanism, and migration policy change in Chile and Uruguay. A recurring thread is the tension between superdiversity as an analytical lens for capturing social complexity and the risk that complexity-centred frameworks obscure the power relations and historical conditions that produce unequal diversification in the first place.

Structured breakout sessions will move discussions beyond individual presentations, inviting participants to reflect collectively on superdiversity‘s conceptual strengths and limits in Latin American settings and on the methodological challenges of researching social complexity across diverse national contexts. The symposium closes with a roundtable on the future of superdiversity research in the region, including publication plans and network development.