Call for Papers

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

3-7 April 2019, Washington D.C.

Session: Capturing and Visualizing Superdiversity in Urban Space

Organizers: Sakura Yamamura, Steven Vertovec (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), Alan Gamlen (Monash University)

One decade after its introduction, the superdiversity concept (Vertovec, 2007, 2017) has widely found echoes in migration research, but also in further fields, such as business studies or linguistics, whereas its usage in scholarship is as diverse as the term itself suggests. Particularly for geographers, the multi-variate diversification in and of urban spaces worldwide is inevitable, yet assessments going beyond choropleth mapping and heat maps on population statistics are still rather rare. Exceptions on the qualitative side are ethnographic approaches, such as the ‘trans-ethnography’ of super-diverse streets (Hall 2012, 2015), which however focus on single case studies.

Aiming to synthetize methodological approaches for capturing superdiversity in urban spaces, allowing intra- as well as inter-urban comparative analyses, this session calls for contributions, which suggest innovative methods towards the spatial analysis of superdiversity. Quantitative approaches, such as conceptual papers discussing the quantification of superdiversity, but also research based on qualitative methods, such as unique ethnographic assessments of superdiversity in urban space are welcome. The session also seeks out innovative visualizations methods for capturing urban diversification.

We welcome contributions covering (but not limited to):

o   site surveys in global cities

o   multi-sited and single-sited ethnography

o   digital mental mapping

o   capturing intimate, collective and symbolic city spaces

o   trans-ethnography of super-diverse streets and/or cities

o   quantification of diversity

o   indices on multiple deprivation and diversity issues

o   typology of displacement and gentrification

o   GIS mapping technology

o   infographics and visualizations of geospatial datasets

o   computer vision and image processing

o   scrollytelling data

If you are interested in participating in this session, please send your 250-word abstract to yamamura@mmg.mpg.deand alan.gamlen@monsch.edu by October 17. Notifications on the acceptance for the session will be sent out by 22 October. The participants then need to submit their abstract on the AAG website and provide the PIN to the organizers by 25 October to meet the AAG deadline.