Governing superdiversity: a critical commentary on intercultural understanding

ABSTRACT The proliferation of models of diversity governance signals not just persistent unease with diversity itself, but also a trend toward increasingly intensive investments in governance and governmentality across political, social, and media platforms. And, following Sara Ahmed (2012), we are cognizant that the institutionalization of diversity may reinforce as much as it may disrupt whiteness. In our response, therefore, we first consider Elias and Mansouri’s proposals in the context of diversity governance as a political project. In a second step, we explore how cultural difference is expressed in Elias and Mansouri’s idea of intercultural engagement. Third, we bring into better focus how communication is envisioned and deployed, activated and delimited in the interculturalism model that the authors promote. Ultimately, we argue that at the heart of intercultural understanding is a peculiar bundling of culture and communication that targets the interactional order of human relationality in ways consistent with a liberal social order reproducing its social inequities more than challenging them.