The language of diversity

Abstract This article asks the question, ‘what does diversity do?’ by drawing on interviews with diversity practitioners based in higher education in Australia. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have offered powerful critiques of the language of diversity. This essay aims to contribute to the debate by examining how diversity workers work with the term ‘diversity’ within the context of education. It shows that diversity as a term is used strategically by practitioners as a solution to what has been called ‘equity fatigue’; it is a term that more easily supports existing organizational ideals or even organizational pride. What makes diversity useful also makes it limited: it can become detached from histories of struggle for equality. The article explores how practitioners have to re-attach the word diversity to other words (such as equality and justice), which evoke such histories. Diversity workers aim to get organizations to commit to diversity. However, what that commitment means still depends on how diversity circulates as a term within organizations. Keywords: Diversitylanguageracismequalitystrategiescommitment Notes 1. The Equality Challenge Unit ECU oversees all equality issue in Higher Education in the UK. Their website is available on: www.ecu.ac.uk. See Ahmed (forthcoming a), for a paper that draws on an interview with the former director of the ECU, Joyce Hill. 2. I was a member of the Race Equality Group set up by my employer to write its race equality policy and action plan, as required by the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000). While this article presents research based in Australian universities undertaken during my sabbatical leave in 2003/2004, I have since completed a similar study with diversity practitioners in ten British universities. This research focuses specifically on the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) and considers what it means for diversity and equality to become measures of organizational performance. See Ahmed (forthcoming a) for a discussion of the UK based study. 3. This bypasses the question of what it would mean to hear the term ‘diversity’. I will address this question later on. I am also qualifying my argument about sticky signs in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed Citation2004a), which links the repetition of terms to the accumulation of affective value. 4. At this point in the interview, we both laughed: the joke was that we both recognized this position too well, which is often the position of the feminist speaker who in being heard as a feminist is not heard (‘oh here she goes’). 5. EOPHEA refers to the Equal Opportunity Practitioners Higher Education, Australasia. EOPHEA aims, ‘to strengthen and support equal opportunity and affirmative action programs for staff and students in Higher Education’ (http://www.adcet.edu.au/edequity/EOPHEA.aspx). I used the web site of this organisation to contact the individuals and units involved in this study. 6. The decisions are forgotten in the sense that university comes to be inhabited as a specific kind of organization (say as being sandstone) as if ‘it had always been that way’, or as if becoming a university was an organic process, rather than being an effect of decisions made over time. 7. For a theoretical account of how collectives are formed through a shared orientation towards an ‘ideal image’ see chapter 5 of The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed Citation2004a). See also chapter 3 of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Ahmed Citation2006), where I extend this argument. 8. A similar issue was raised by a number of interviewees regarding the self-image of academics. Because academics tend to see themselves as good and tolerant people, they also tend to see themselves as not needing to be trained in diversity. In other words, a ‘self-image’ as ‘being good’ can block action, as it can block the perception of there being a problem in the first place. 9. See my critique of the discourse of ‘the global nomad’ in Strange Encounters (Ahmed 2000), which associates the ability to translate across difference with privilege. I also argue here that multiculturalism functions as a technique for managing difference, which actually remains predicated on likeness (where diversity becomes ‘the common ground’). 10. Gayati Chakravorty Spivak (2000) uses the expression ‘body count’, and I thank her for the example of her work and her willingness to ask difficult questions. The ‘body count’ model can both refer to the use of numbers of minorities as a way of assessing inequality, and the setting of targets for recruitment of minorities in promoting equality. Obviously, inequality is not reducible to a body count precisely given how inequalities are embedded in structures: for instance, getting more women, or more black staff, in senior management positions does not necessarily challenge gender and racial inequalities, though it can be part of the process of enabling structural change. At the same time, the ‘body count’ implicit in the gathering of data on the demography of organizations (as well as the distribution of staff within organizational hierarchies) can be a useful technology to support arguments, by exposing inequalities within organizations. 11. For an exploration of the metaphor of ‘softness’ in relation to discourses of nationalism and racism, as well as gender, see the introduction to The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed Citation2004a). Additional informationNotes on contributorsSara Ahmed SARA AHMED is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, London