Engaging Superdiversity is edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebaek, Max Spotti and Jan Blommaert, and will be published in December 2016 by Multilingual Matters, Bristol, in the Encounters series.

As all of us know, there is a tremendous pressure in the academic system at present to operate as an individual in a competitive “market” of science focused on deliverables – or more precisely, a market of money for science and other more symbolic and status-related perks. All of these elements – individualism, competition and result-driven orientation – are fundamentally unscientific, and render our lives as science workers increasingly less interesting. Science is a collective endeavor characterized by solidarity and focused on processes of knowledge construction. Why else do we need references at the end of our publications, than to illustrate how we have learned from others in a perpetual process of critical and productive dialogue?

This critical reflex motivated, almost a decade ago, a small team of scholars to join forces in a consortium called InCoLaS (International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity) – a “dream team” of people who decided to care and share, to explore domains only superficially touched by inquiry, mobilizing and maximizing each other’s resources in the process,  and to do all this without a pre-set target or road map. After all, exploration is not the same as driving in a limo on a highway with the GPS on: by definition, you don’t know where it will take you. There is no “draft proposal”; there are ideas.

This mode of collaboration turned out to be immensely “profitable”, to use the terms of the market. Several high-profile publications emerged, and our buzzword “superdiversity” has become a modest celebrity in its own right, attracting what must be seen as the ultimate intellectual compliment: controversy. There are “believers” and “non-believers”, and both camps have had, over the past years, sometimes heated debates over the value of the word “superdiversity”.

We ourselves don’t really care about that word. Sometimes one needs a new word simply to examine the validity of the older ones – the word is then just a sort of stimulus to shed some of the attributes and frames inscribed in the older ones; and not the word is central, but the ideas it points to and the data it can help explain. Whether research is convincing or not rarely depends on which words are used to write it down; usually it depends on the quality of analysis and argument.

“Engaging Superdiversity” offers another set of studies on language and superdiversity, drawn from one of the key features of our collective mode of work: team workshops in which we listen and discuss the work of our team members – senior as well as more junior researchers – and insert their results in the collective explorative process described earlier. In these workshops, all of us are “free” – free to come up with unfinished ideas, unsolved problems, struggles with complex data. The joint work of critical dialogue, usually, results in products that are, to say the least, engaging.

This collection of essays, more than any other publication so far, gives people a sense of the ambiance in InCoLaS activities. It covers the terrains we find important – inequality, the online-offline nexus, power – and expands the theoretical and methodological framing of the process of exploration. There is a very large amount of new things in this book (for the benefit of the “non-believers” who question what is so new about superdiversity), and some of the chapters will, I believe, have considerable impact in the field.

I joined the editorial team rather late in the game, and my gaze is thus, perhaps, a bit more that of a detached spectator than Karel’s, Martha’s and Max’s. So let me say this. When reviewing manuscripts for journals, book proposals, or even student’s essays, I always make a distinction between work that is good and work that is interesting. Most work I see is good, in the sense that there is nothing wrong with it, other than that I would never read it: it’s not interesting. “Engaging Superdiversity” is good and interesting – extraordinarily so – and I am proud to see it in print.