Edited by two leading scholars in the field, this new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Sociology, is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research. Serious work on multiculturalism flourishes as never before, and this ‘mini library’ meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output.
Perhaps more than other critical concepts, ‘multiculturalism’ is hotly contested; there are sharply different—and perhaps ultimately irreconcilable—approaches to a variety of multicultural conceptions and projects. Rather than seek to establish some kind of consensus on classic works, this collection explicitly brings together the best and most influential work to have emerged from all sides of the debate.
The first volume in the collection (‘Conceiving Multiculturalism: From Roots to Rights’) assembles key research to trace the concept of multiculturalism from long-standing arguments on tribal co-existence, humans rights and civil rights to the rights to recognition. Volume II (‘Multiculturalism and the Nation State: Who Recognizes Whom?’) collects the most important thinking to explore the tensions between national, ethnic, and religious identity politics. Volume III (‘Multiculturalism in the Public Sphere’), meanwhile, brings together the best research which examines the difficult choices to be made between ideas of social integration and contending notions of community rights, not least in schools and in the marketplace.
The scholarship assembled in the final volume of the collection (‘Crises and Transformations’) juxtaposes work dealing with the most urgent crises in multiculturalism—such as the revival of virulent nationalism—with the best classic and contemporary thinking on the new realities of transnationalism.
The collection is supplemented with a full index, and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. Multiculturalism is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.