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Abstract
Starting from the proposition, in both my own work and that of Steve Vertovec, that there is something about superdiverse neighbourhoods or societies that is qualitatively different from those that are merely diverse, this paper asks whether it is possible to identify religious superdiversity within quantitative population data, such as the census in England and Wales, in order to test such a proposition. In doing this the paper will ask whether it is possible to find any evidence for superdiversity, as Vertovec defines it, in data sets such as the census and whether such data can help to identify where to set the boundary between ‘diversity’ and ‘superdiversity’. The paper will then explore what would need to be measured in order to designate an area as superdiverse in religious terms and whether the census data can offer any material that can be used for this purpose. The author concludes by suggesting that we need a range of methods, both quantitative and qualitative, to define any area as superdiverse and that it is only in this way that we can begin to test the kind of hypothesis offered by the author at the start of the paper.
Additional information
Martin Stringer is Professor of Liturgical and Congregational Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely in the area of contemporary religion, focusing primarily on the use of ethnographic methods in order to understand the language around religion. He is currently the co-lead for religion and culture at the Institute for Research in Superdiversity (IRiS) at the University of Birmingham and has recently published Discourses on Religious Diversity, Exploration in an Urban Ecology (Ashgate, 2013).