This book bears the fruit of a group of sociolinguists who, over the last five years, have been exploring the notion of superdiversity. This introduction aims to report and reflect on these engagements, as well as to explore how the latter can trigger future engagements also from other social and human sciences. We argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. In order for this to happen, sociolinguistic superdiversity needs to be properly conceptualized. We argue that engaging the notions of ‘poiesis’ and ‘infrastructure’, recombined in the ‘poiesis-infrastructures nexus’ could constitute a first step in this process of exposing the sociolinguistically-enriched notion of superdiversity. The poiesis-infrastructures nexus is an attempt to rebuild the agency-structure equation by embedding it in a materialist ontology of creative production and the environments in which they take place. The poiesis side of the equation covers social and cultural praxis, iterations and transformations. Infrastructures comprise the normativities, ecologies and affordances that enable and constraint this social and cultural production.

The vantage point is a short, informal note on superdiversity by the late Gerd Baumann (personal communication, spring 2012). Writing when ‘superdiversity’ – hyphenated at that time – was beginning to boom, Baumann hailed its heuristic prospects and ethnographic challenges while rejecting its usefulness as a summary term. This introduction will largely take the same stance, happily building further on the hasty notes that bear witness to Baumann's tempestuous acumen. His nascent ideas undergird our introduction of the different chapters in this volume whose authors took on the task of engaging the notion of superdiversity during the same booming period (2011 to 2014) when Baumann was jotting down his views.