Diasporas In Times Of Multiculturalism and Transnationalism

The magnitude and scope of contemporary processes of social, political and cultural change and their related, multidimensional and contradictory nature pose renewed challenges to sociological theory. Current processes of change transcend national frontiers and relate and interconnect societies. Globalization and transnationalism refer indeed to the new conditions derived from radical changes in the way time and space have ceased having  the same influence on the way in which social relations, identities and institutions are structured. The role of countries and borders between States become diffuse, porous and permeable and global connections are intensified by virtue of the fact that they are shared with great velocity in multiple places.

Amid these trends, migration became a source of social transformation. Contemporary migration encompasses steady as well as repeated and circular, bi-local and multi-local movements. Expanded mobility, multiple relocations, sustained interactions enhance exchanges of economic and social resources, cultural narratives, practices and symbols between communities and societies. Migration has widened the spectrum of encounters between individuals and groups carrying distinct communal organizing principles, historical trajectories, models and logics of the collective. It thus poses equally new challenges to Multiculturalis,

Aiming to account for singularity (as differing from exceptionalism ) we claim the need to focus on the collective dimension and on the institutional underpinnings of transnationalism and its structural effects in order to account for past and present cases of re- diasporization and explore the transition from ethno-national diasporas to ethno- transnational ones.