On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life - Hardcover

Ahmed, Sara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822352214 ISBN 13: 9780822352211

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2012

Synopsis

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

About this title

About the Author:

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her books include The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism.

Review:

“Ahmed’s book is not a how-to guide to ‘what works.’ But On Being Included would be an excellent choice for a faculty-staff reading group about social justice in the academy, because Ahmed provides a rich resource for serious rethinking: ‘My aim is not to suggest that we should stop doing diversity, but that we need to keep asking what we are doing.’” - Meryl Altman, Academe

“For those of us interested in diversity work, Ahmed’s On Being Included provides a novel way of thinking about diversity. In her readings of institutional documents interwoven with the voices of diversity workers, Ahmed cautions us to think about diversity as a tool deployed to further crystallize institutionally sanctioned racist practices that recede to the background of everyday life.” - Andres Castro Samayoa, Somatechnics

“[A] unique account of diversity as an institutional practice and also of what people do and feel when they do not quite fit the norms of an institution or
are ‘out of place’. Ahmed captures the experience of diversity in liberal institutions through the image of a coming up against a brick wall and an important part of this book is the ‘physical and emotional’ labour of confronting that wall.” - Karim Murji, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Regardless of positionality and lived experiences, this text is engaging both intellectually and emotionally. Ahmed’s unflinching candor compels reflection and tough (hopefully productive) conversations far more effectively than a conventional ‘diversity document’. This is a text that moves to confront and change the status quo.”
- Corin de Freitas and Alex Pysklywec, Society and Space, Environment and Planning D

“Despite having read widely within the field of diversity and higher education, it is rare for a book to so powerfully call to mind my own identities as did this one. . . . This work is most appropriate for an educational anthropology course or unit focused on applied work within higher education. . . . It would also be useful for researchers looking for a new theoretical approach to how discourse and documents perform within institutions or, more provocatively, how they fail to do so.” - Lauren Miller Griffith, Anthropology and Education Quarterly

"Just when you think everything that could possibly be said about diversity in higher education has been said, Sara Ahmed comes along with this startlingly original, deeply engaging ethnography of diversity work. On Being Included is an insightful, smart reflection on the embodied, profoundly political phenomenology of doing and performing diversity in predominantly white institutions. As Ahmed queers even the most mundane formulations of diversity, she creates one eureka moment after another. I could not put this book down. It is a must-read for everyone committed to antiracist, feminist work as key to institutional transformation in higher education."—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

"Sara Ahmed's sensitive and respectful analysis of the complexities faced by diversity workers in higher education institutions arrives at a moment when we urgently need ways to rethink institutional dynamics and the animating effects of policy regimes and processes. This is a vital book: vital as a compass guiding the eye, heart, and mind to the knowledge that can emerge from the labor of institutional transformation, and vital in the sense of being life-giving to those involved in the process."—Gail Lewis, coauthor of Citizenship: Personal Lives and Social Policy

"There are no other books of this caliber examining the institutional culture of diversity in higher education. Sara Ahmed not only offers a rigorous empirical study of how diversity operates in the real world; she also develops a brilliant theoretical framework exploring the affective reproduction of inequality. At the same time, as a black feminist, she draws on her own embodiment of difference and experience as a diversity practitioner."—Heidi Safia Mirza, author of Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail

“Ahmed’s book is not a how-to guide to ‘what works.’ But On Being Included would be an excellent choice for a faculty-staff reading group about social justice in the academy, because Ahmed provides a rich resource for serious rethinking: ‘My aim is not to suggest that we should stop doing diversity, but that we need to keep asking what we are doing.’” (Meryl Altman Academe)

“Regardless of positionality and lived experiences, this text is engaging both intellectually and emotionally. Ahmed’s unflinching candor compels reflection and tough (hopefully productive) conversations far more effectively than a conventional ‘diversity document’.  This is a text that moves to confront and change the status quo.” (Corin de Freitas and Alex Pysklywec Society and Space: Environment and Planning D)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0822352214
• ISBN 13: 9780822352211
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256