| Sumario: | The article proposes a pathway towards a theorisation of diversity. It is argued that diversity can be understood as referring to the complex outcomes of multifaceted processes in which various schemes of classifications are applied to persons and segments of populations. A growing interest in individuals and their qualities, combined with the development of information technologies, has stimulated a proliferation of person-related categories. Diversity offers an analytical lens for studying the relational qualities of various person-related differences, the interaction between categories of different scale and scope and their situational organisation. Thereby, it goes beyond notions of identity, on the one hand, and intersectionality, on the other. In the second part of the article, the outlined framework is applied to the cases of youth welfare practice in Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The focus of the case analysis is migration-related categories and how they relate to larger configurations of person-related differences in the field of youth welfare practice. It is argued that a diversity perspective, as suggested here, allows us to capture an element of opaqueness and ambiguity concerning migration-related differentiations that has implications for the understanding of ongoing debates about discrimination and racialisation.
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