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The research project A Part and Apart? Education and Social Inclusion of Refugee Children and Youth in Iceland (ESRCI) and the School of Education are pleased to invite you to a public lecture by Professor Steven Vertovec: „Migration and Social Complexity …and Iceland“. Prof. Steven Vertovec is one of the world's leading scholars on migration, diversity and social complexity. He is widely known for introducing the concept of 'superdiversity', which has become influential in studies of migration and diversity. The lecture will be in English. The event is free of charge.

Date: Wednesday 26 August 2026

Time: 13:00-14:30

Venue: Elissa Auditorium, Nordic House

Sæmundargata 11, 101 Reykjavík

Everyone is welcome.

Lecture abstract:

Migration and Social Complexity … and Iceland

Iceland's population has rapidly and remarkably diversified. This includes a proportion of foreign-born that has grown from under 5% in the mid-1990s to over 19% in 2026. However, public and policy discourse still seems to lean on an imported "multiculturalism" model that imagines bounded, homogeneous cultural groups. This lecture argues that Iceland's diversification is better understood through "superdiversity" — the intersection of social categories that reveals populations to be far more complex than group labels suggest. Drawing on a variety of approaches including the social psychology of identity complexity, it proposes concepts and practical tools — including classroom identity charts — for shifting public understanding away from simplistic or reductionist perspectives towards ones demonstrated to be more beneficial for social cohesion.

About Prof. Steven Vertovec

Prof. Steven Vertovec is Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science, Göttingen, Germany, Honorary Professor of Ethnology and Sociology, University of Göttingen, and Emeritus Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford. Previously he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). Since 2025, he is President of the International Panel on Migration.

Prof. Vertovec is author of five books including Transnationalism (Routledge, 2009) and Super-diversity: Migration and Social Complexity (Routledge, 2023), and editor or co-editor of thirty-six volumes including Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2003), The Multiculturalism Backlash (Routledge 2010), and the Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity (Oxford University Press, 2023).

He has acted as expert or consultant for numerous agencies, including the UK Home Office and Department for International Development, British Council, the European Commission, World Bank, International Organization for Migration and UNESCO.