Making diversity policies under political pressure

Critical diversity studies claim that diversity policies are often devoid of meaning – which is said to impede the efficacy of these policies for social justice. This alleged meaninglessness, however, is rarely treated as the result of bureaucrats’ affective imaginations of these policies. We know little about the feelings of bureaucrats that precede diversity’s discursive meaninglessness and about reluctance to act as a result of specific political imaginations. This article studies politically sensitive forms of manoeuvring that emerge in bureaucrats’ attempts to ‘safeguard’ diversity within municipal policy to make it ‘sustainable’ in a time of (far) right-wing upsurge. These forms of manoeuvring lead my inquiry into the ‘institutional work’ that diversity workers engage in across changing political tides. By following the process of making a particular diversity document in a Dutch city administration in the middle of a right-wing-voting rural area, I add ethnographic detail to studies on coping mechanisms of bureaucrats faced with political pressure. In showing how bureaucrats affectively imagine diversity policies – in retrospect, in the present, and into the future – I argue that backlash against diversity asks for new analytic tools to grasp the changing politically prefigurative meanings of what diversity policies were, are, and could be.