The centre for multilingualism and diversities research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract

There is an urgency in theorising how diversity is negotiated, communicated, and disputed as a matter of everyday ordinariness that is compounded by the clear linkages between diversity, transformation, voice, agency, poverty and health. The way in which difference is categorised, semiotised and reconfigured in multiple languages across quotidian encounters and in public and media forums is a central dynamic in how poverty and disadvantage are distributed and reproduced across social and racial categorisations. In the South African context, finding ways of productively harnessing diversity in the building of a better society must be a priority. The South African context with its history of apartheid and on-going contemporary post-apartheid transformation is a veritable laboratory for the study of forms of conflict and conviviality in diversity. South Africa is a society characterised by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic, where a large part of people’s daily life involves negotiating diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, while at the same time attempting to pursue aspirations of mobility in a context of continuing inequity.