Mette Louise Berg
Biographic Data
| ID | 183997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mette Louise Berg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mette Louise |
| FAMILY NAME | Berg |
| SIGNATURE | BERG M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7723-9085 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 160 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
‘We have something in common … it’s true’: Reflections on the politics and practice of solidarities in and through ethnographic co-research
This article reflects on solidarit ies as a subject and a mode of research in the context of the privatised UK asylum system. This system excludes those seeking asylum from belonging to and in the local communities to which they are dispersed. Against this background, our research explored solidarities as imagined, practiced, and (re)constituted in negotiations of migrant deservingness in the context of asylum dispersal. Inspired by ‘patchwork et…
Privatised asylum: The UK’s response to protection seekers fleeing Ukraine
Superdiversity, the "new bespokism", and hierarchies of belonging: The Homes for Ukraine scheme in the UK
Homes for Ukraine: Arrival Infrastructures and the UK’s “New Bespokism”
This article examines arrival infrastructures and arrival brokering practices emerging from the UK government’s response to people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. We focus on Homes for Ukraine, a private hosting scheme. The scheme is an example of the “new bespokism” that characterises the government’s approach to asylum. It has given rise to new geographies of settlement against a background of a “brutal migration milieu” (Hall, 2017) and provi…
Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity: Complexity, Difference, Sameness, and Mixing
This chapter discusses anthropological perspectives on superdiversity and includes reflections on why anthropology as a discipline has been reluctant to engage with the term. Superdiversity and its reception within the discipline is then compared with how semantically proximate concepts—namely migration, transnationalism, and multiculture—were received and developed. The long shadow of functionalism and its interest in stasis and bounded culture …
Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora - a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism - are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshado…
Super-diversity, austerity, and the production of precarity: Latin Americans in London
Intensified globalisation, upheaval, conflict and inequality are creating new patterns of global migration and mobility in the 21st century. As a result, the dynamics of urban diversity is changing: global cities like London are increasingly characterised by the super-diversity of their residents, including increasing complexities of legal status. ‘New’ diversity interacts with ‘old’ ethnic diversity to create complex patterns of difference, the …
Welfare micropublics and inequality: Urban Super-Diversity in a Time of Austerity
This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increasing socio-economic inequality for understanding urban super-diversity in a time of austerity. Using a methodology and conceptualization that avoids the methodological ethnicism and "methodological neighbourhoodism" inherent in some diversity research, we draw on quantitative analysis and ethnographically produced material from south London to ask wha…
Inaugural Editorial
Throughout history, migration has been at the heart of the transformation of societies and communities. At the same time, changing dynamics across social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental realms have influenced processes of migration and (im)mobility around the world in different ways, including by facilitating, forcing, preventing, normalizing, criminalizing, and securitizing the movement of diverse people and objects. As academi…
Introduction to the Issue
This introductory article to the inaugural issue of Migration and Society reflects on the complex and often contradictory nature of migration encounters by focusing on diverse dynamics of hospitality and hostility towards migrants around the world and in different historical contexts. Discourses, practices, and policies of hospitality and hostility towards migrants and refugees raise urgent moral, ethical, political, and social questions. Hospita…
Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialis…
Cubans in the United States and Spain: The Diaspora Generational Divide
For decades the Miami-based Cuban diaspora successfully represented itself globally as a monolithic bloc and influenced US policy vis-a-vis Cuba. Yet the success glosses over the diversity of the Cuban diaspora, not only in Miami, but in the United States more widely, as well as internationally. The first wave of emigres, who are known as “exiles, “ have for decades campaigned for a watertight embargo against Cuba and have on principle refused to…
‘La Lenin is my passport’: Schooling, mobility and belonging in socialist Cuba and its diaspora
Based on an ethnographic study of transnational networks of alumni of an academically selective boarding school in Havana, this article explores the nexus between mobility, schooling and belonging in the context of socialist Cuba and its diaspora. Drawing on Goffman’s work, I argue that the boarding school experience was transformative; it facilitated or consolidated social mobility for its pupils, which later, for many, led to geographic mobilit…
Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations
Introduction:Reimagining Migrant Generations Mette Louise Berg and Susan Eckstein [Published Winter 2015] We live in an era of globalization involving large-scale international migration and increasing transnational connectedness that have contributed to the emergence and growth of diaspora communities. In this context, questions of how diaspora migrants adapt to host societies and engage with their homelands are becoming increasingly important e…
Ethnography, diversity and urban space
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the 'diversity turn' within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as 'diversity' and more recently 'super-diversity' for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialis…
Diasporic Generations
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora – a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism – are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshado…
Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba. By Nadine T. Fernandez and Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s. By Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (ed.)
Digital Diasporas (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Samfunn
On the social ground beneath our feet: For a cosmopolitan anthropology
This article argues that for a truly cosmopolitan anthropology to come about, we need to reflect critically on the conditions of our knowledge production. Using the example of women's under‐representation within anthropology, and the marginalisation of the Caribbean, I argue that we need to think more about the social ground beneath our feet and recognise the differential access that anthropologists across the globe and at home have to the ongoin…
Gender, disembodiment and vocation: Exploring the unmentionables of British academic life
Anthropologists have developed an important corpus of work on embodiment and social agency. But what of the academic bodies involved in the production and reproduction of these ideas? Is an institutional habitus of scholarly disembodiment one consequence of contemporary academic practice? Drawing on research and our own experiences, we describe what we see as the 'disembodied vocationalism' fostered by departmental and institutional cultures. Usi…
Cubans in the United States and Spain: The Diaspora Generational Divide
For decades the Miami-based Cuban diaspora successfully represented itself globally as a monolithic bloc and influenced US policy vis-à-vis Cuba. Yet the success glosses over the diversity of the Cuban diaspora, not only in Miami, but in the United States more widely, as well as internationally. The first wave of émigrés, who are known as “exiles,” have for decades campaigned for a watertight embargo against Cuba and have on principle refused to …
Between Cosmopolitanism and the National Slot: Cuba's Diasporic Children of the Revolution
Although cosmopolitanism used to be associated with Western, elite practices, it has in recent years been used to describe a wider array of practices by non-elite and non-Western groups. This article explores the cosmopolitanism of Cuba's “children of the revolution” living in Spain. They are those now young adults who were born in Cuba after the revolution and who were brought up to become the socialist New Man. Theirs was a world of socialist c…
Reply to Comments
The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page
Homeland and Belonging among Cubans in Spain
Este artículo contribuye a los debates recientes en estudios de diáspora sobre la relación entre procesos de exclusión, experiencias de desplazamiento y memorias de país de origen existentes en la producción de subjetividades diaspóricas. El artículo concierne a la diáspora cubana en España, la cual consiste de aproximadamente 50,000 personas. Estas personas representan refutadas prácticas y discursos sobre origen y desplazamiento, sobre pertenec…
Ethnography, diversity and urban space
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the 'diversity turn' within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as 'diversity' and more recently 'super-diversity' for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialis…
Introduction to the Issue
This introductory article to the inaugural issue of Migration and Society reflects on the complex and often contradictory nature of migration encounters by focusing on diverse dynamics of hospitality and hostility towards migrants around the world and in different historical contexts. Discourses, practices, and policies of hospitality and hostility towards migrants and refugees raise urgent moral, ethical, political, and social questions. Hospita…
Welfare micropublics and inequality: Urban Super-Diversity in a Time of Austerity
This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increasing socio-economic inequality for understanding urban super-diversity in a time of austerity. Using a methodology and conceptualization that avoids the methodological ethnicism and "methodological neighbourhoodism" inherent in some diversity research, we draw on quantitative analysis and ethnographically produced material from south London to ask wha…
Tourism and the revolutionary new man
Cuba's economic restructuring in the past decade has involved the country's reinsertion into the global tourist market. One of the undesired consequences of the new tourism based economy has been the phenomenon of jineterismo, literally horseback riding, but used to indicate hustling or prostitution. Prostitution is associated with the pre-revolution era and is therefore a sensitive issue for the socialist government. At the same time, sex touris…
Super-diversity, austerity, and the production of precarity: Latin Americans in London
Intensified globalisation, upheaval, conflict and inequality are creating new patterns of global migration and mobility in the 21st century. As a result, the dynamics of urban diversity is changing: global cities like London are increasingly characterised by the super-diversity of their residents, including increasing complexities of legal status. ‘New’ diversity interacts with ‘old’ ethnic diversity to create complex patterns of difference, the …
Gender, disembodiment and vocation: Exploring the unmentionables of British academic life
Anthropologists have developed an important corpus of work on embodiment and social agency. But what of the academic bodies involved in the production and reproduction of these ideas? Is an institutional habitus of scholarly disembodiment one consequence of contemporary academic practice? Drawing on research and our own experiences, we describe what we see as the 'disembodied vocationalism' fostered by departmental and institutional cultures. Usi…
Privatised asylum: The UK’s response to protection seekers fleeing Ukraine
Inaugural Editorial
Throughout history, migration has been at the heart of the transformation of societies and communities. At the same time, changing dynamics across social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental realms have influenced processes of migration and (im)mobility around the world in different ways, including by facilitating, forcing, preventing, normalizing, criminalizing, and securitizing the movement of diverse people and objects. As academi…
Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations
Introduction:Reimagining Migrant Generations Mette Louise Berg and Susan Eckstein [Published Winter 2015] We live in an era of globalization involving large-scale international migration and increasing transnational connectedness that have contributed to the emergence and growth of diaspora communities. In this context, questions of how diaspora migrants adapt to host societies and engage with their homelands are becoming increasingly important e…
Homeland and Belonging among Cubans in Spain
Este artículo contribuye a los debates recientes en estudios de diáspora sobre la relación entre procesos de exclusión, experiencias de desplazamiento y memorias de país de origen existentes en la producción de subjetividades diaspóricas. El artículo concierne a la diáspora cubana en España, la cual consiste de aproximadamente 50,000 personas. Estas personas representan refutadas prácticas y discursos sobre origen y desplazamiento, sobre pertenec…
Superdiversity, the "new bespokism", and hierarchies of belonging: The Homes for Ukraine scheme in the UK
Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora - a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism - are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshado…
Future fields: Introduction
This introductory piece to the special issue "Future Fields" in Anthropology Matters explores the emerging intersections of anthropology and futures studies. Rice and Berg argue for the importance of anthropological perspectives in understanding and shaping future possibilities, highlighting the discipline's unique ability to analyze cultural change, power dynamics, and human experience. They suggest that anthropology can contribute to futures th…
A Supermarket of anthropology: Aaa 2002
Conference reviewed:Mette Louise Berg, A Supermarket of Anthropology AAA Meeting, New Orleans, 20-24 November 2002
Tourism and the revolutionary new man
Cuba's economic restructuring in the past decade has involved the country's reinsertion into the global tourist market. One of the undesired consequences of the new tourism based economy has been the phenomenon of jineterismo, literally horseback riding, but used to indicate hustling or prostitution. Prostitution is associated with the pre-revolution era and is therefore a sensitive issue for the socialist government. At the same time, sex touris…
Cubans in the United States and Spain: The Diaspora Generational Divide
For decades the Miami-based Cuban diaspora successfully represented itself globally as a monolithic bloc and influenced US policy vis-à-vis Cuba. Yet the success glosses over the diversity of the Cuban diaspora, not only in Miami, but in the United States more widely, as well as internationally. The first wave of émigrés, who are known as “exiles,” have for decades campaigned for a watertight embargo against Cuba and have on principle refused to …
Between Cosmopolitanism and the National Slot: Cuba's Diasporic Children of the Revolution
Although cosmopolitanism used to be associated with Western, elite practices, it has in recent years been used to describe a wider array of practices by non-elite and non-Western groups. This article explores the cosmopolitanism of Cuba's “children of the revolution” living in Spain. They are those now young adults who were born in Cuba after the revolution and who were brought up to become the socialist New Man. Theirs was a world of socialist c…
Reply to Comments
The full-text of this article is not available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page
Homeland and Belonging among Cubans in Spain
Este artículo contribuye a los debates recientes en estudios de diáspora sobre la relación entre procesos de exclusión, experiencias de desplazamiento y memorias de país de origen existentes en la producción de subjetividades diaspóricas. El artículo concierne a la diáspora cubana en España, la cual consiste de aproximadamente 50,000 personas. Estas personas representan refutadas prácticas y discursos sobre origen y desplazamiento, sobre pertenec…
On the social ground beneath our feet: For a cosmopolitan anthropology
This article argues that for a truly cosmopolitan anthropology to come about, we need to reflect critically on the conditions of our knowledge production. Using the example of women's under‐representation within anthropology, and the marginalisation of the Caribbean, I argue that we need to think more about the social ground beneath our feet and recognise the differential access that anthropologists across the globe and at home have to the ongoin…
Gender, disembodiment and vocation: Exploring the unmentionables of British academic life
Anthropologists have developed an important corpus of work on embodiment and social agency. But what of the academic bodies involved in the production and reproduction of these ideas? Is an institutional habitus of scholarly disembodiment one consequence of contemporary academic practice? Drawing on research and our own experiences, we describe what we see as the 'disembodied vocationalism' fostered by departmental and institutional cultures. Usi…
Diasporic Generations
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora – a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism – are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshado…
Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba. By Nadine T. Fernandez and Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s. By Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (ed.)
Digital Diasporas (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Samfunn
Ethnography, diversity and urban space
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the 'diversity turn' within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as 'diversity' and more recently 'super-diversity' for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialis…
Cubans in the United States and Spain: The Diaspora Generational Divide
For decades the Miami-based Cuban diaspora successfully represented itself globally as a monolithic bloc and influenced US policy vis-a-vis Cuba. Yet the success glosses over the diversity of the Cuban diaspora, not only in Miami, but in the United States more widely, as well as internationally. The first wave of emigres, who are known as “exiles, “ have for decades campaigned for a watertight embargo against Cuba and have on principle refused to…
‘La Lenin is my passport’: Schooling, mobility and belonging in socialist Cuba and its diaspora
Based on an ethnographic study of transnational networks of alumni of an academically selective boarding school in Havana, this article explores the nexus between mobility, schooling and belonging in the context of socialist Cuba and its diaspora. Drawing on Goffman’s work, I argue that the boarding school experience was transformative; it facilitated or consolidated social mobility for its pupils, which later, for many, led to geographic mobilit…
Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations
Introduction:Reimagining Migrant Generations Mette Louise Berg and Susan Eckstein [Published Winter 2015] We live in an era of globalization involving large-scale international migration and increasing transnational connectedness that have contributed to the emergence and growth of diaspora communities. In this context, questions of how diaspora migrants adapt to host societies and engage with their homelands are becoming increasingly important e…
Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space
This article is an introduction to a special issue on ethnography, diversity and urban space. It places the ‘diversity turn’ within studies of migration and multiculture historically and discusses the implications of concepts such as ‘diversity’ and more recently ‘super-diversity’ for scholarship, policy and identity politics. It argues that diversity is a helpful concept for studies of migration and multiculture because it avoids the essentialis…
Inaugural Editorial
Throughout history, migration has been at the heart of the transformation of societies and communities. At the same time, changing dynamics across social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental realms have influenced processes of migration and (im)mobility around the world in different ways, including by facilitating, forcing, preventing, normalizing, criminalizing, and securitizing the movement of diverse people and objects. As academi…
Introduction to the Issue
This introductory article to the inaugural issue of Migration and Society reflects on the complex and often contradictory nature of migration encounters by focusing on diverse dynamics of hospitality and hostility towards migrants around the world and in different historical contexts. Discourses, practices, and policies of hospitality and hostility towards migrants and refugees raise urgent moral, ethical, political, and social questions. Hospita…
Super-diversity, austerity, and the production of precarity: Latin Americans in London
Intensified globalisation, upheaval, conflict and inequality are creating new patterns of global migration and mobility in the 21st century. As a result, the dynamics of urban diversity is changing: global cities like London are increasingly characterised by the super-diversity of their residents, including increasing complexities of legal status. ‘New’ diversity interacts with ‘old’ ethnic diversity to create complex patterns of difference, the …
Welfare micropublics and inequality: Urban Super-Diversity in a Time of Austerity
This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increasing socio-economic inequality for understanding urban super-diversity in a time of austerity. Using a methodology and conceptualization that avoids the methodological ethnicism and "methodological neighbourhoodism" inherent in some diversity research, we draw on quantitative analysis and ethnographically produced material from south London to ask wha…
Anthropological Perspectives on Superdiversity: Complexity, Difference, Sameness, and Mixing
This chapter discusses anthropological perspectives on superdiversity and includes reflections on why anthropology as a discipline has been reluctant to engage with the term. Superdiversity and its reception within the discipline is then compared with how semantically proximate concepts—namely migration, transnationalism, and multiculture—were received and developed. The long shadow of functionalism and its interest in stasis and bounded culture …
Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain
Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora - a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism - are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshado…
Homes for Ukraine: Arrival Infrastructures and the UK’s “New Bespokism”
This article examines arrival infrastructures and arrival brokering practices emerging from the UK government’s response to people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. We focus on Homes for Ukraine, a private hosting scheme. The scheme is an example of the “new bespokism” that characterises the government’s approach to asylum. It has given rise to new geographies of settlement against a background of a “brutal migration milieu” (Hall, 2017) and provi…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (16 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (10 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (9 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Cuban History and Society (7 works)