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Ethnic and Racial Studies
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The language of diversity
Sara Ahmed
Published online: 02 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Sara Ahmed (2007) The language of diversity, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, 30:2, 235-256, DOI: 10.1080/01419870601143927
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The language of diversity
Sara Ahmed
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: Diversity; language; racism; equality; strategies; commitment.
Feminist and postcolonial theorists have been among the most
powerful critics of the multicultural language of ‘cultural diversity’
(see, Ang and Stratton 1994; Bhabha 1994; Hage 1998; Gunew 2004;
Puwar 2004). Ang and Stratton, for example, offer a close reading of
the documents that write the multicultural nation into existence. They
show us how multiculturalism posits difference as something ‘others’
bring to the nation, and as something the nation can have through how
it accepts, welcomes or integrates such others. This model of cultural
diversity reifies difference as something that exists ‘in’ the bodies or
culture of others, such that difference becomes a national property: if
difference is something ‘they are’, then it is something we ‘can have’.
Scholars in critical management studies and educational studies
have also offered powerful critiques of the language of diversity
(Kandola and Fullerton 1994; Deem and Ozga 1997; Kirton and
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 30 No. 2 March 2007 pp. 235 256
# 2007 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870601143927
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Greene 2000; Benschop 2001; Lorbiecki 2001; Blackmore and Sachs
2003). A specific concern is with how universities have embraced this
term. Some critics suggest that ‘diversity’ enters higher education
through marketization: the term is seen as coming from management,
and from the imperative to ‘manage diversity’, or to value diversity ‘as
if’ it was a human resource. Such a managerial focus on diversity
works to individuate difference and to conceal the continuation of
systematic inequalities within universities. These important critiques
attend to the word ‘diversity’ itself, which has been attributed with a
problematic genealogy, as having dubious origins, and uncertain and
potentially damaging effects. For Deem and Ozga, the word ‘diversity’
invokes difference but does not necessarily evoke commitment to
action or redistributive justice (1997: 33). What is problematic about
diversity, by implication, is that it can be ‘cut off’ from the
programmes that seek to challenge inequalities within organizations,
and might even take the place of such programmes in defining the
social mission of universities. For Benschop the word does not make
the right kind of appeal, as it does not so powerfully appeal to ‘our
sense of social justice’ (2001: 1166). For these scholars, among others,
the institutional preference for the term ‘diversity’ is a sign of the lack
of commitment to change, and might even allow organizations such as
universities to conceal the operation of systematic inequalities under
the banner of difference.
What do we do with such critiques of diversity? What do such
critiques do? I ask these questions in the light of my experiences of
writing what we could call a ‘diversity document’ for my university. It
was a useful experience for someone who has critiqued such policy
documents to be involved in writing one. I tried to bring what I
thought was a fairly critical language of anti-racism into what we can
probably agree is a neo-liberal technique of governance. I was taught a
good lesson, which, of course, means a hard lesson: the language we
think of as critical can easily ‘lend itself’ to the very techniques of
governance we critique. First, I realized how difficult it is to write such
documents without using ‘problematic’ language, or without retreating
into the aspirational language of liberalism. Second, I realized that
writing documents also means giving them up, or even giving them
over to the very organizations we wish to change. So we wrote the
document, and the university, along with many others, was praised for
its policy by the Equality Challenge Unit [ECU],1 and the vicechancellor was able to congratulate the university on its performance:
we did well. A document that documented the racism of the university
became usable as a measure of good performance.2 We are right to
cringe in such moments.
At the same time, the process of writing the document, which is not
as it were ‘readable’ in the letter of the text, encouraged me to re-think
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the strategic nature of diversity work. The conversations we had as a
group talking ‘about’ the document we were writing clarified for me
that importance of linking theory and practice through generating a
dialogue between academics and equality or diversity practitioners. It
also encouraged me to reflect on the significance of vocabulary not
by seeing words as repositories of meaning, but as enabling different
kinds of action within institutions. My work as a member of the
race equality team involved discussions of how different words (such
as diversity and equality) can work, how they get taken up, or get
blocked through the associations they have for different staff in the
organization.
So even if we agree that words like ‘diversity’ can be problematic
for what they ‘cover over’, or what they conceal, it does not follow
that ‘that’ is all that they do. In my earlier work, I also engaged in
a critique of the language of diversity, by reading documents for
what they say (Ahmed 2000). I now want to begin again, asking:
what does diversity ‘do’ when it is ‘put into action’? The article
offers a tentative response to this question by drawing on data
collected between January and June 2004 from ten interviews with
diversity or equal opportunities practitioners within Australian
universities. This is a small study, which was not intended to
generate representative findings, but to explore in detail how
diversity practitioners use the language of diversity within specific
organizations. Interviews were semi-structured, and were designed as
a space to facilitate conversation about the word ‘diversity’ and to
invite practitioners to reflect on the kinds of work they can do by
evoking that term. What effects does diversity have in such
institutional contexts? Does the repetition of the term give it
currency? And if it does, what does it mean for diversity to ‘have’
currency? Does diversity enable action within institutions, or does it
block action, or does it do both simultaneously? And if diversity
does not necessarily invoke social justice, then does it become
associated with equity and justice in practice? For it seems clear
that if ‘diversity’ does not have any necessary meaning, or if
diversity is ‘cut off’ from a specific referent, then it does not
necessarily work only to conceal inequalities. We might not know
what diversity does in practice in advance of its circulation within
organizations.
Diversity and equity fatigue
The overwhelming response to my question about the ‘turn’ to
diversity was that this term ‘arrived’ partly as the result of the failure
of other terms, especially ‘equality’, to work. This turn to diversity,
in other words, was experienced directly as a turn away from other
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terms: we immediately get a sense from this ‘double turn’ of the
complicated nature of the emergence of diversity. We could, of course,
attribute the failure of ‘equality’ to work to the existence of continued
inequalities: it is the fact the push for equality has failed that is evoked
by the failure of the term. The term ‘equality’ fails because the
institutions have ‘failed’ to take equality seriously or have failed to take
on the term as part of an institutional commitment to social change. In
particular, practitioners within this sector discussed the historic
marginalization of equal opportunities and affirmative action units,
suggesting that universities were not taking such programmes seriously, or that such programmes had marginalized themselves by
failing to adapt or respond to changes within the sector. As one
interviewee put it, ‘I certainly don’t mean in any way to minimise or
denigrate my predecessor but I think to be totally frank that it had
become a bit dated and it had actually begun to alienate and become
marginalized from the business of the university’. We can see here that
the marginalization of equal opportunities is linked to the failure to
adhere to the business model of the university.
For most of my interviewees, the emergence of a diversity framework enabled them to have a stronger voice within the university, and
this re-positioning as more central and visible was generally seen as a
positive change in the sense that it opened up the capacity for action.
By implication, diversity enables action because it does not get
associated with the histories of struggle evoked by more ‘marked’
terms such as equality and justice. Diversity is not only a ‘new word’,
but it also gets linked with ‘the new’ within the discourses of the
university. Of course, this also suggests that diversity ‘works’ because it
secures rather than threatens the ethos of the university, with its
orientation towards education as a form of business. If this is the case,
we need to ask what kind of ‘work’ diversity ‘work’ is doing.
If ‘diversity’ emerges after the failure of the term ‘equality’ to work,
then ‘diversity’ itself might be read as symptomatic of the failure to
achieve equality. The politics of this turn to diversity is indeed
complicated and this was evidenced in the ambivalence expressed by
some of my interviewees about the ‘appealing’ nature of term, as well
as about the effects of what was called ‘equity fatigue’. Take the
following quote:
I think it [equity] became a tired term because it was thrown around
a lot and I think … well I don’t know … because our title is equity
and social justice, somebody the other day was saying to me ‘‘oh
there’s equity fatigue, people are sick of the word equity’’. … oh well
OK we’ve gone through equal opportunity, affirmative action they
are sick of equity-now what do we call ourselves?! They are sick of it
because we have to keep saying it because they are not doing it.
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[laughs] You know, you go through that in these sorts of jobs where
you go to say something and you can just see people going ‘‘oh here
she goes’’ [both laugh].
We can see here that the reason for ‘tiredness’ of the term ‘equity’ is
that it is ‘thrown around a lot’, that is, it has been repeatedly used, and
maybe even over-used. At one level, this seems to locate the failure of
the term within the practices of those who have used the term.
However, immediately this implication is qualified. The term has to be
used, and used repeatedly, because of the failure to hear that term or to
respond to the term through appropriate action: ‘we have to keep
saying it because they are not doing it’. In other words, the repetition
of terms is necessary because such terms fail to act. At the same time,
such terms fail to act because they are repeated. The repetition of the
term is in a way the repetition of failure: we ‘say’ the term because it
has failed, and it fails because we ‘say’ it. The circularity of this ‘loop’
is what produces the tiredness of the term: the term ‘slows down’, or
gets weighed down, by acquiring too much baggage, which produces a
kind of gut resistance (‘they are sick of it’). Rather than terms
acquiring currency through repetition, this implies that the more terms
are repeated over time the more resistance there is to ‘hearing them’.3
Indeed, such resistance also involves attributing the term to specific
bodies: the practitioner who uses the term ‘equity’ is not heard
precisely as the failure of the term is assigned to her (‘oh here she
goes’).4
In another interview, it was suggested that we need constantly to
‘switch’ terms to be effective ‘champions’ for social change. The
switching of terms is seen as useful as it stops people blocking the
message by assuming they have ‘heard it before’. As one practitioner
puts it, ‘we identify what we think is a winner and go with that. So we
didn’t want equal opportunity or affirmative action or any words that
I thought were dead in the water and also I personally think, I’ve done
a bit of PR and I think you are much better off with new terms and if
people aren’t hearing them because of the way you describe them then
I think that’s a plus to start with’. The resistance to hearing about
inequalities, and the need to act to challenge such inequalities is
viewed pragmatically: the resistance which has a ‘blocking’ effect is
itself a sign of inequalities, and diversity work is partly presented as
finding ways to ‘get through’ the resistance, or even use that resistance
(such as not hearing) to get the message through. Here, ‘not hearing’
becomes a ‘plus’; it allows the word to acquire new meanings. To some
extent, this detachment of the word from a referent opens up what it
can do.
This ‘opening up’ of the word diversity is also problematic, or at
least it involves risks. As another practitioner describes:
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because I think diversity again it’s a word that nobody actually
knows what it means, equity has some basis in being fair, people can
understand that even if they misunderstand it, but if you want to
start talking about diversity, I find that people say ‘‘well what do you
mean by diversity’’ and so you have people who are talking about
valuing diversity and people who are talking about counting people
who look different or … you know it’s not … maybe because it’s
still not a tied down concept. I don’t know.
If diversity is not tied down as a concept, or is not even understood as
signifying something in particular, there are clearly risks, in the sense
that people can then define ‘diversity’ in a way that may actually block
action. In this case, one definition of diversity is evoked, ‘counting
people who look different’, which would block any association
between diversity and equality, in the sense that such a definition
prevents the exposure of social and educational advantage. If diversity
is what ‘they have’, then social norms are reproduced at the same time
as they are concealed from view (the ‘we’ here is unmarked). The
openness of the term also means that the work it does depends on who
gets to define the term, and for whom. Diversity can be defined in
ways that reproduce rather than challenge social privilege.
So on the one hand, the capacity for the term ‘diversity’ to move,
and to be associated with a wider vocabulary of terms is what allows it
to work. But on the other hand, the capacity of the term to move also
signals how it can cease to challenge social privilege and advantage,
and even come to work in ways that might conceal such forms of
privilege. In the meeting with members of the Victorian Branch of
EOPHEA,5 the mobility of the term was identified as a problem: one
practitioner, for instance, discussed how the term had come to mean
‘the diversity of courses’, or even the diversity of flora and fauna,
within her own university. The confidence ‘in the term diversity’ might
best be explained as confidence in the capacity to ensure the
conditions of its use and circulation, which involves restricting how
it is used, as well as sticking it to other terms, such as equality and
justice. If the success of the term is that it can be ‘detached’ from
histories of struggle for equality, its success is also paradoxically
dependent on being ‘re-attached’ to those very same histories. We can
hence speculate that the success of ‘diversity’ depends on the extent to
which practitioners can determine the condition of its circulation, by
determining ‘what sticks’. This success may, in turn, be dependent on
the degree to which the university has already committed to or
invested in an equality agenda. The success of the term, that is, should
not necessarily be attributed to the term itself and what it ‘can do’, or
what it ‘can do’ should not be seen as intrinsic to the term, but as
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dependent on forms of institutional commitment that are already in
place, and which affect how it gets taken up.
Despite this, it is important to acknowledge that the use of new
words is one strategy used by practitioners to avoid what we could
describe as the strategic and defensive work of individual and
collective fatigue: the tiredness which ‘blocks’ hearing the message of
social critique. If tiredness is an effect of repetition, and is also
paradoxically what makes such repetition necessary, then one might
speculate that ‘tired words’ are also ‘signs’ of ‘tired bodies’, bodies that
are exhausted by the necessity of doing this kind of work. As one
officer put it, ‘those terms had got tired and I think that there’s a bit of
‘‘if one thing gets tired, looks like you’ve got tired as well’’’. The switch
of words has an energising effect for practitioners; it gives them not
only a new vocabulary, but also a new space, or even a new body,
which can be inhabited within the organization.
Diversity strategies
If one of the most repeated views was that diversity works to enable
action, it is also the case that practitioners used the term in quite
different ways within their institutions: indeed, typically practitioners
described themselves as ‘translators’, as translating ‘diversity’ into
different cases for different audiences. Given this, diversity work
requires knowledge about the different audiences or groups within the
university to find out ‘what works’: ‘its whatever works if a person can
only hear that case give them their language they can hear … some
people its compassion, sometimes its pragmatic, sometimes its fear,
sometime its … its whatever is going to be the appropriate handle for
that type of person’. This practitioner suggested that diversity work
requires expertise in psychology, or the ability to make judgements
about different types of people, defined in terms of what they can hear.
Some cases used by practitioners are based on a business model. But
while practitioners might use the business case model when appealing
to senior managers, they also tend to define diversity with a social
justice framework for themselves. One practitioner, for instance,
describes herself as both ‘a counter-hegemonic worker’ and a ‘whore’:
as willing to use any language, including the language of money and
compliance, in the interests of enabling the transformation of social
relationships of dominance and subordination, as a set of interests that
remain undeclared. As she puts it:
I mean I am a complete whore when it comes to using any means
that I can to get the stuff on the agenda to get things happening. I
don’t care. So if I have to mount the argument about productive
diversity because we can’t afford to lose people of talent and they
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need to be provided with opportunity to engage with the university
so that we can maximise our bottom line if you like, I’ll use that
argument, because the end effect is the same. If I’m in a situation
where people are kind of anti the feminist thing but they are pro
internationalism I don’t care, I will talk to them about the issues
around globalization and internationalism and the need for enhancing understanding of people of difference. I shall use those
discussions; I shall use those terms, because those are the terms
that they understand.
This practitioner identified her mandate as ‘enabling cultural change’
and defines her project in terms of outcomes, ‘end effects’ or ‘things
happening’. Other practitioners did not define their own model of
diversity by distinguishing between the political purpose of their work
and the language they use. In these instances, different cases are used
for different audiences (including the social justice and business case
language) without one case being attributed as ‘the real reason’, or as
the underlying motivation ‘behind’ the appeal. Diversity work
becomes here a question of ‘what works’, where what is meant by
‘diversity’ is kept undefined for strategic reasons.
What is interesting to note here is how quite contradictory logics are
used simultaneously: in other words, the business model and the social
justice model are used together, or there is a ‘switching’ between them,
which depends on a judgement about which works when, and for
whom. This ‘switching’ partly involves attaching the word ‘diversity’ to
other words, by mobilizing different kinds of vocabularies. In most
cases, practitioners seem to work ‘with’ the term diversity, by attaching
the term to the other terms that are valued by the universities in which
they work. That is, they make diversity appealing by associating the
term with the ideal image the university has of itself, that is, what it
imagines as its primary mission or its core values as an organization.
What is interesting to ask, of course, is how the university becomes ‘an
entity’, or even a subject, which is imagined as ‘having’ its own
character, and qualities. Clearly, the university can be imagined in such
terms only as effects of complex histories, as well as the physicality of
its space, and its position within local, regional and global economies.
One of the most interesting parts of the research process was ‘visiting’
the different campuses, with their different arranges giving each
university quite a distinct feel. In my field notes after my first
interview, I wrote the following:
This is a very different environment. There is no sandstone.
Somehow that goes with the kind of bodies that populate its lawns
and buildings. There are lots of black and brown bodies; I can really
see the difference. In the student union, the atmosphere is lively. The
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socialist workers are visible outside, and posters cover the walls
about women’s space, queer groups and anti-violence campaigns.
Although we can’t stick all of this together (buildings, bodies,
politics) somehow it goes together.
I am, of course, a visitor passing through, and not an inhabitant of the
university. And yet, the university is also, for me, a familiar space, a
space in which I am at home, even if each university provides a
different kind of space. Through marketing, universities not only have
a logo, and even a brand, but they also attribute themselves with some
qualities (and not others), as being a certain kind of organization. The
ideal image of the university has effects: if the university sees itself as
research-led for example, and as being elite and global, then this
orientation clearly involves forms of commitment in pursuit of that
ideal image. So the work of creating a university is about the
organization of commitment: the university ‘decides’ how to commit
its resources, or is even brought into being as an effect of such
decisions that are repeated over time, but which are forgotten in time.6
As Dick Hebdige put it in his early work on subcultures, ‘the buildings
literally reproduce in concrete terms prevailing (ideological) notions
are what education is and it is through this process that the
educational structure, which can, of course, be altered, is placed
beyond question and appears to us as ‘‘given’’, that is, as immutable. In
this sense, the frames of our thinking have been translated into actual
bricks and mortar’ (1979: 12 13).
It is no accident, then, that diversity practitioners are good readers
not only of what might appeal to different individuals within the
university, but also of the ‘character’ of the university: their ability to
get the university to commit to diversity and equality initiatives
depends on reading the university’s ideal image of itself.7 Clearly, some
ideal images for universities are historically more associated with
diversity than others: for the newer universities, the ideal image might
even be ‘about’ diversity, in the sense that they may see themselves as
‘diversity led’ organizations, and this could even be their marketing
appeal. To market oneself as ‘diversity led’ means to market the
university as ‘for everyone’, which creates difficulties in the face of
continued restrictions of access determined in part by government
policy. The effects of such ‘diversity pride’ seem to be uneven. One
practitioner, who describes her university as ‘a university that tends to
pride itself on its equity credentials’, also suggested that ‘sometimes
they are not acted on as well as they should be’. By implication, ‘being
diverse’ does not necessarily translate into ‘doing diversity’. Furthermore, if the university has an ideal-image as ‘being diverse’, then this
can block action and might even justify a refusal to commit to
diversity initiatives. As another practitioner puts it: ‘so people see that
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as being an equity university but that doesn’t mean that we actually do
anything, so we don’t actually have a lot of programmes in place, we
don’t actually have strategies in place to recruit students from low
socio-economic backgrounds like most universities have to because we
don’t have to do anything’. To be seen as ‘being diverse’ leads to the
failure to commit to ‘doing diversity’, as the organization says it ‘is it’,
or even that it already ‘does it’, which means that it sees there is
nothing left to do.8
For ‘research led’ sandstone universities, the appeal for diversity has
to be made on very different terms: partly as the ideal images of such
universities are often based on precisely ‘not being’ diversity led, in the
sense of not being orientated towards opening up the university to
socially disadvantaged groups. In other words, the appeal of such
universities is that they ‘embody’ social advantage. In such cases,
practitioners work to associate the word ‘diversity’ with the core
missions of the university (such as achieving an international reputation for research), which might mean associating ‘diversity’ with
‘attracting’ certain kinds of people to the university. In effect,
practitioners found ways in which diversity can be attached to
educational and social advantage, and they have done this primarily
through using the language of globalization, or internationalism. As
one practitioner puts it:
being a global university obviously we have to be good diversity
people or we might shoot ourselves in the foot marketing wise. …
being financially successful as a global university is being able to
deal with (for the want of a better word) a variety of people, so if you
are going to go global you have to be able to engage with global
citizens, some of them are like us and some of them aren’t.
The term ‘diversity’ gets stuck to the ideal-image of the university as
‘being global’. Importantly, diversity becomes a means by which
certain others, who are ‘global citizens’, can be appealed to: it is about
a variety of people, as a variety that takes some forms and not others.
The discourse of global citizenship is indeed a useful one: it associates
diversity work with the skills of translating across cultures and
between differences: this new population is elite precisely because it
can speak to diverse people.9 In other words, diversity becomes an
instrument or technique not only for attracting people to the
university, but also for dealing with differences within the lived
environment of the university. Diversity here is not associated with
challenging disadvantage, but becomes another way of ‘doing advantage’ within the context of globalization. If using the language of
‘global’ as ‘diversity people’ is detached from any social justice agenda,
it does not follow that in practice it simply maintains social advantage.
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Such language is used to make diversity appealing to senior managers,
but what then counts ‘in practice’, could involve other kinds of work.
We can see that diversity work appeals to the ideal image universities
have of themselves. But equally, diversity work requires that diversity
officers’ challenge rather than appeal to the ideal image the university
has of itself. For ‘diversity proud’ organizations the task may also
involve exposing the institutional failure to fulfil the conditions of
such pride, a failure that can be re-described in the economic language
of ‘cost/benefit’ even if it is not reducible to such terms. Indeed, the
language of cost is used in different ways: practitioners, when they
make the case for diversity on the ground of compliance, often talk
about the costs of not making a commitment to diversity.
Such costs can certainly be described in economic terms. But they
also evoke the ideal image of the university as the indirect costs of
‘looking bad’ to external as well as internal others. One officer hence
uses data to expose to the university how it is failing its ‘strong ethos in
terms of promoting the notion of being a socially just university’,
through which she makes clear that ‘it actually can’t afford not to
move into a leadership role in those areas’. In other words, data is used
as a technology for exposing the failure of the university to live up to
its diversity ideals: ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s embarrassing when it goes up’.
Practitioners use data as a public form of exposure. In other words, to
make diversity count the university is exposed as failing diversity as a
‘body count’.10
Here, diversity works to shape public feelings: making the university
‘feel bad’ is a way of enabling it to commit to ‘doing good’. Diversity
work involves working with as well as through emotions. Diversity
work is after all emotional work. My interviews were full of
descriptions of this emotionality: the frustration, tiredness and
depression of feeling like ‘your butting your head against a brick
wall’, as well as the ‘elation’ of when you get the message through.
Emotions also provide a technology that is used in making diversity
appeals. Sometimes practitioners need to make people/leaders/
the institution ‘feel bad’ (about not doing this or that), as in the
example described above. At other times, practitioners make people/
leaders/the institution ‘feel good’ (about doing this or that). As one
officer put it: ‘and you know the saying, you get a lot more with a
teaspoon of honey that a teaspoon of vinegar’. The politics of ‘feeling
good’ is clearly evident in the cultural enrichment discourse of
diversity, which one practitioner described as ‘the Thai food stall’
model. Diversity is here celebrated, and even consumed; it is taken
‘into’ the body of the university, as well as the bodies of individuals. As
bell hooks suggests, ‘within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes
spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream
white culture’ (1992: 21). The whiteness of organizations might be
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reproduced at the very moment they ‘embrace diversity’, as if diversity
is what adds spice and colour to ‘mainstream white culture’. By
implication, diversity is associated with the very arrival of Black and
Minority Ethnic staff: such that consuming diversity gets translated
into ‘eating the other’. The pleasures of consumption make diversity
‘appealing’, as something to be shared and enjoyed.
Diversity might ‘appeal’ insofar as it converts difference into
pleasure. And yet, diversity can still generate other effects. It could
be that diversity work ‘works’ by shifting between emotional registers.
Indeed, the question of what associations the word diversity has for
staff within organizations is partly about the emotional connotations
the term has for different people. Some of my interviewees suggested
that diversity works precisely because it is comfortable and lets people
feel better about difficult issues. Others suggest diversity can cause
discomfort, as it still gets associated (through its proximity to certain
kinds of bodies), to other more challenging terms (such as ‘women’,
‘feminism’, ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘anti-racism’, and so on), which are
challenging as they make more explicit the challenge to privilege. If the
word ‘diversity’ is mobile, as I suggested earlier, then it is important to
recognize that it is not free from baggage. Indeed, the word diversity
maybe ‘sticky’, it may stick to some things more than others, even if it
has different associations for individuals and groups. The question of
what we hear when we hear the word ‘diversity’ may be dependent on
complex psycho-biographical as well as institutional histories.
Practitioners also switch between compliance-based and valuebased arguments in making diversity appeals. In the case of the
former, the language of expertise is mobilized. As one practitioner put
it: ‘on a policy level, that required a lot of input with equity expertise
and I guess that’s what we … that’s how we position ourselves in the
university, as the equity experts and if there are things to be
operationalised around that then we shall ensure that we still have a
strong voice in that if we are not involved in the actual operational side
of it and certainly the policy setting is something that we’d consider to
be our prime responsibility’. Practitioners are positioned as having the
knowledge and skills necessary for the implementation of policy, in
other words, for the alignment of the university with the requirements
of law and government. At the same time, some anxiety was expressed
about the use of compliance-based arguments: ‘we try very hard here
not to talk about the legislation because nobody wants to know that
we’re being legislatively driven. It seems to be a message that we hear,
so we’re very careful about saying, ‘‘we’ve got this because the
legislation … ’’. We’re doing this because it’s good for the university.
Always.’ In some cases, then, diversity is ‘taken on’ precisely through a
resistance to the discourse of compliance, a resistance which requires
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linking diversity to what is ‘good’ for the university, where ‘good’ is
not reducible to economic benefits.
The appeal of the term ‘diversity’ also depends on how diversity
officers construct their own image within the organization. Most of my
interviewees discussed the challenge of being taken seriously partly by
evoking the historic failure of equal opportunities to be seen as serious
and credible, or to be seen as ‘a bit dated’. In a way, practitioners have
to produce their self-image in defence against this historic reading.
Practitioners respond to such a challenge in different ways, but share a
commitment to producing themselves as credible and serious in the
terms defined by the values and priorities of universities, including
those that inform academic culture as well as the culture of management. Diversity work hence involves aligning one’s self image with the
ideal image of the university. As a result, doing diversity work also
involves the performance of a certain kind of subjectivity; or we could
even say that diversity works as a technology of self, in which the self is
taken seriously by not being seen as ‘soft’, where soft is seen as a sign
of weakness, or emotions, and also of femininity.11 As one practitioner
describes, ‘it was not about, oh we should do it because it gives us a
warm and fuzzy feeling. It was about these are our performance
indicators, this is the reasons why, these are the reporting requirements
that we have and this is what we should be doing and here’s the data to
support that’. Data become a crucial technology also in the sense that
it aids the production of the competent self. Data are assumed to be
‘hard’, as a form of evidence whose ‘truth’ is detached from an
emotional orientation to the world (‘a warm and fuzzy feeling’). Such
a performance is, of course, strategic: to be heard, diversity officers
cannot afford to be seen as ‘soft’, as such a perception would allow
diversity itself to be seen as ‘soft’, and hence as having less value for
the organization.
This point reminds us of the problems of working within organizations to enable change. In order to be heard, you have to take on the
values of organizations, including hierarchical distinctions between
hard and soft, which are not innocent distinctions, but can stand in for
social hierarchies (masculine/feminine, white/black and so on). To
resist taking on such values through one’s talk or self-presentation
might not do very much, as it can mean that one is dismissed or not
heard. So strategy means using the terms that would allow us to be
heard, even when we might critique such terms. The hope of working
within institutions is that we can separate our strategies from both
intentions and outcomes: that we can ‘take on’ such terms temporarily
to challenge the distribution of power within organizations, but not be
taken in by them. The risk of working within organizations as feminist
and anti-racist practitioners and academics is that we might become
our own strategies, or that the terms we use end up de-limiting what we
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do, or even that we come to reproduce the terms ‘as our own’. For me,
this is a necessary risk. I would not want to position feminism/antiracism or diversity work as innocent or outside the structures of
privilege that are reproduced within organizations. The risk is not only
that we might become the terms we take up, but also that we might
presume that we are ‘above’ the terms that are available for use. The
question of what to do, how to do it, and how to present one’s case for
doing it, is always one we need to ask in the present, as many of the
practitioners involved in this study have shown me.
The language of commitment
We can see from these examples how ‘diversity’ is made appealing
through being made into cases. Such cases are pragmatic in orientation, and they work to associate the word ‘diversity’ with the ideal
image the university has of itself, or to show the costs of not
committing to diversity as a breach of this image. Practitioners move
between registers to make diversity appealing: they move between the
business case and social justice case arguments, between a politics of
good and bad feeling, and between compliance- and value-based
arguments. Furthermore, diversity officers work to align their own
units, and even their own bodies, with the values that are embedded
within academic culture, and the management of the universities.
Diversity becomes physically embedded within the university through
these multiple alignments: leading in some cases, to diversity weeks,
prizes and events becoming part of the University Calendar.
At the same time, such alignments help to show us that diversity
work ‘works’ only insofar as it depends on how universities have
already committed their resources in terms of the key values that shape
the distributions of time as well as money. This is why diversity officers
are increasingly entering into the collective discussion about the values
of the university, for example, by becoming involved in the process of
writing strategic plans and mission statements. They intervene not
necessarily by making diversity ‘valuable’ on ‘its own terms’, whether
or not that value is defined in monetary terms, but by associating the
word ‘diversity’ with the other ‘terms’ that are used by universities in
defining their core missions. As one practitioner puts it: ‘we certainly
have used (the business) case over the years and increasingly that does
make more sense to people out there when they have to account for the
way that their budget looks. In universities I think that there’s a
tendency not to want to think in those kinds of commercial terms and
I think that’s a good thing and there is, certainly at … anyway, there
are conversations going around that are currently asking the question
‘‘what are our values, who are we as a university, are we doing all the
things that we said we do in our mission statement, etc’’’. Embedding
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diversity within the values of the university becomes, at least in this
framework, the goal of diversity work. This means talking about
diversity within the ongoing conversations ‘about’ what the university
itself is ‘about’.
Within all my interviews, a key concern expressed was how to make
diversity not only a core value alongside other academic values (such
as excellence), but also how to get the university to ‘commit’ itself to
diversity. Commitment itself might only be available as ‘signs’, which
are also ‘effects’. How do we know a university is committed to
something? At one level, we can tell levels or degrees of commitment
through what universities do, and how they allocate resources. The
distinction between ‘valuing diversity’ and ‘commitment’ is made
partly as a recognition that organizations, including universities, have
a tendency to say that diversity is a key value (and may even ‘brand’
themselves through this term), but that the ‘saying’ does not always
lead to ‘doing’. This would be a ‘lip service’ model of ‘valuing
diversity’, in which the claim to be diverse, or to aspire to diversity,
gives value to the organization, but where that claim is not followed
through by action or by the re-allocation of resources.
We could say that organizations involve the organization of
commitment. When diversity officers evoke commitment they often
describe it as something individuals have: the most common term used
for individuals with a commitment to diversity is ‘diversity champions’. These are the senior people within the university who are
prepared to stand up for diversity and indeed become ‘diversity
people’ who are ‘heard’ in these terms. Commitment becomes a way of
describing the emotional work of diversity: such people who are
committed to diversity in the sense that there are people who really
care about achieving social equality, and who express this care by how
they distribute their own time and energy within the organization. A
common theme within my interviews was how to translate such
individual commitment into collective commitment.
One practitioner, for example, talks about how her university’s
dependence on ‘equity champions’ sustains the vulnerability of
diversity as a framework for action:
I think one of the major problems over the years has been that we
have relied very heavily on equity champions throughout the
university and in an environment where universities are increasingly
becoming very funding conscious, those equity champions are still
doing their work but it has slipped on their list of priorities because
they legitimately have other very real worries such as the financial
survival of the university.
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The reliance on senior individuals who champion diversity and equity
is here identified as a source of weakness, insofar as the values of
equity and diversity are embodied by such people rather than by the
university. As such people come and go, or as they can and cannot
prioritize these values, then diversity and equality might also ‘come
and go’. I would also speculate that if such champions have
commitment, then the university itself does not have to: the university
can ‘not’ commit to diversity insofar as such champions ‘do this work’.
The university may even appropriate their commitment ‘as its own’.
At the same time, without such champions, it is widely regarded that
there would be no commitment at all: the university only has
commitment to the extent that individuals within the university
commit to diversity. We could begin to challenge this impasse if we
re-locate ‘commitment’ from being ‘inside’ individuals or even
collectives and being to think about the distribution of commitment;
commitment itself becomes a resource that is allocated within the
organization. Now, it is important to stress here that if commitment is
distributed, then it is distributed unevenly. Some bodies and units
more than others are committed to this work whereby commitment
involves a designation of responsibility for that work. Indeed, one of
the central debates around ‘mainstreaming’ diversity and equity can be
re-articulated in terms of the politics of commitment. In one university
involved in this study, a decision was made to disband the equal
opportunities unit, and to re-locate this work within human resources.
This decision was justified as part of the project of integrating or
mainstreaming diversity.
I can certainly see the logic of this argument. In another interview,
having an autonomous unit is identified as a problem, insofar as it
allows other actors within the university not to take responsibility for
diversity and equity initiatives: ‘I think some of them [senior
managers] will be aghast that they are responsible for doing anything … you know ‘‘I thought the equity and diversity unit did that’’
and that’s one of the big problems when you have a very strong equity
and diversity unit then ‘oh well that’s their job’. In other words, having
an equity unit can allow the refusal of a more collective sense of
responsibility: if the unit does diversity, then it might follow that
others within the organization do not have to do it. The distribution of
responsibility for diversity, what I am calling the ‘organization of
commitment’, is uneven. It involves some individuals and units being
‘given’ this responsibility, in order that others not only do not have to
‘have it’, but can actually give it up.
At the same time, the project of ‘integrating diversity’ by not having
a diversity unit, which works on the principle that ‘everyone’ should be
responsible for diversity, does not seem to work. I would speculate that
‘everyone’ translates quickly into ‘no one’: unless responsibility is
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given to someone, then it is both refused and diffused within the
organization, as we can see from the following discussion with a
practitioner based in human resources.
b. Yes, well that’s another story too. The university did have an equal
opportunity unit, which had, let me see, about 3 or 4 staff. The
university decided to disband the equal opportunity unit. The
director’s position was made redundant. One of the staff members
went into a more student focused area and one of the other main staff
members came to us as an equity and diversity consultant and she was
very knowledgeable in what she did, very enthusiastic, would motivate
people, she’s a great trainer. But she left us in September 2002.
a. That’s a while back.
b. Yes, so what happened, I took on, one of her main roles which was
being the support or project officer for the gender equity and diversity
committee; this is a committee of the Vice Chancellor and it has senior
staff on it. So I took on that role and then I seemed to get other little
bits and pieces of her role, even though some of the other HR
managers were also looking after some of the equity issues it was
spread across.
a. So it wasn’t officially handed over to you.
b. No, no, because our general manager didn’t want me to be seen as
the equity person. We didn’t want that, because what we were trying to
do was share it across the board, because we were all feeling choc-ablock full of work anyway, that no one person had the time to take it
on in total, and we wanted to continue the efforts for mainstream
equity and diversity across the university. That’s why we didn’t want a
central focus.
a. So is that why there was no appointment made?
b. Yes, basically. I suppose in some respects it’s worked. In other
respects it hasn’t worked, because we haven’t been able to give it as
much attention as we would have liked.
The interviewee describes herself as the ‘care-taker’ of diversity, even if
she is not known within the institution as ‘the equity person’. In this
case, the project of mainstreaming is about ‘spreading’ and ‘sharing’
the responsibility for diversity, rather than giving it to someone. But
we can see that such an aim of shared responsibility has not been
fulfilled: the success of mainstreaming is limited by the lack of
‘attention’ given to diversity and equity. By implication, working on
diversity and equity requires an acceptance of the uneven distribution
of commitment, rather than a fantasy that ‘everyone’ can share
responsibility. Of course, this issue is complicated. On the one hand, to
depend upon the uneven distribution of commitment is to repeat that
unevenness (to allow diversity to be ‘given’ to some units or bodies and
not others), whilst on the other hand, to act ‘as if’ diversity is a shared
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responsibility is both to conceal the unevenness and to diffuse any
commitment.
As another practitioner describes:
if we were really successful, we’d do ourselves out of a job. That
would be the aim, to not need a unit like this because the
mainstream is so complete. When the HR Director at this university
took up this mainstreaming (or should that be, became an advocate
to mainstreaming) I think that was a dire day, because none of the
universities are ready for that kind of concept where it’s embedded
in every HR policy and everything that everybody does, and it
carries itself. Because none of the universities are at that stage.
Because you just cannot get to all of the people.
Here, mainstreaming, even as an ideal, becomes a problem in the sense
that universities are not ready for it: to act as if mainstreaming is the
case, because it should be the case, can be counterproductive because
the conditions are not available in the present to make it the case. It is
because diversity and equality are not mainstream that we need to
have support, specialisms and drivers. You need to have responsibility
given to some people including leaders, as well as experts who have
knowledge as well as commitment, who provide as it were the
compulsion to act. One of the problems with the language of
mainstreaming is that it gets taken up as if it does happen as well as
should happen (as if diversity and equality are already mainstream),
which allows organization to avoid appointing specialists in the area,
or avoid giving diversity and equality the ‘additional’ institutional
support it needs. In other words, the language of mainstreaming can
be used to avoid making an organizational commitment.
In some ways it might be useful not to think about commitment as
an emotional investment (in the sense of ‘to be committed to
something’), but as a series of actions that are reproduced over time.
Within universities, commitment can be ‘read’ through the allocation
of resources, which, as I suggested in the previous section, include
decisions about what counts or what is valuable about the organization, as well as within it. As we have seen, getting the university to
‘commit’ to diversity involves making cases that appeal to the ideal
image the organization has of itself, otherwise known as its brand or
marketing appeal. Getting the university to commit still depends upon
the commitments of actors within the organization. Achieving
commitment depends on commitment, which is one of the ‘loops’
that explains the difficulty of intervening within the reproduction of
power and privilege within organizations. Many comments by diversity
practitioners pointed to this paradox: they remain dependent on the
ongoing work of committed individuals even when diversity and equity
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have been embedded within the strategic missions and operational
procedures of the organization. This is why the work of diversity seems
‘never-ending’: even when universities allocate resources to diversity
and equity initiatives that ‘allocation’ seems to depend on individual
persistence, and on individuals who keep saying that diversity counts
even when it has, as it were, ‘been counted’. The expenditure of time,
energy and labour of diversity champions is necessary, even if it also
reproduces hierarchies within the university through the uneven
distribution of commitment. The depletion of resources is partly
manifest in the depletion in the energies and capacities of overcommitted individuals and units. If diversity and equity work is less
valued by certain universities than other kinds of work, then it is also
the case that the commitment of some staff to this kind of work
sustains their place as ‘beneath’ others within the hierarchies of
organizations.
The complex relation between individual commitment and collective
action is what explains the importance of leadership to the politics of
diversity and equality. Statements of commitment by leaders can
matter insofar as they challenge the presumption that diversity is the
responsibility of diversity practitioners, or of the bodies of those who
are seen as different. As one practitioner says, ‘if the vice president is
saying for justice then it stops it being a bad word then doesn’t it?’ So
the circulation of words like ‘diversity’ has different effects depending
on who is saying them. Expressions of commitment to diversity can
allow such terms to accumulate affective value. As another practitioner puts it:
when the senior leadership is in tune, is keyed into a certain set of
issues that filters down the line and people get to know about it; it
gets discussed. If they don’t value it, people down the line don’t
value it, or if they do, it doesn’t translate into organizational culture
because there’s nowhere for it to go.
This quote suggests that the circulation of key terms, such as equality
and diversity is essential, in the sense that discussion about what these
terms can mean can generate a public culture, which takes place
around the terms. Whether or not the leadership makes public its
commitment to diversity seems to affect ‘where’ that word can go, or
how it gets ‘taken up’ within the organization. When leaders do not
repeat that term, then it seems that the term has nowhere to go.
Yet, we know it is more complicated. The circulation of the term
‘diversity’, which we can re-describe as allowing the term to have
‘somewhere to go’, is not the outcome or goal of diversity work. For
the currency of the term can also be what blocks action: what allows
the fantasy that the university already ‘does it’ or ‘has it’. So while the
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term might need to circulate, if things are ‘to be done’, it needs to
circulate in such a way that the term does not get cut off from histories
of struggle which expose inequalities. For diversity practitioners, this
means repeating the word ‘diversity’ in ways that allow others to hear
the (often) concealed associations between the word ‘diversity’ and
other words that are marked through the struggle against the
reproduction of social and material inequalities, such as ‘equality’
and ‘justice’. In other words, diversity work is not only about
accumulating the value of diversity, as a form of social currency, but
also re-attaching the word to the other words that embody the
histories of struggle against social inequalities.
To return to my earlier argument, the success of diversity and equity
policies is dependent on the capacity to determine how such terms
circulate within organizations. It is hence not surprising that doing
diversity work might work only when the terms get ‘taken up’ by those
who have most capacity to affect change within an organization.
Words such as ‘diversity’ do then enable action, and even social
change, but the actions they enable depend on how they get taken up,
as well as who takes them up. In other words, the ‘take up’ of such
terms is dependent on institutional histories that may be forgotten or
concealed in the present.
Following words like diversity around is useful as it allows us to
show the intimacy of the ‘textual’ and the ‘institutional’ in the work
that such terms do, as well as what they fail to do. It is certainly the
case that new forms of public are created around the term diversity,
through the circulation of that term. At the same time, it is important
to note that terms such as ‘diversity’ do not always do what they say.
We need to contest any such presumption that ‘saying diversity’ is
‘doing diversity’, just as we need to suggest that diversity itself is not
something that can be simply done. Following the term ‘diversity’
around instead allows us to identify the conditions in which such terms
challenge social and educational advantage, which paradoxically
depends on both detaching and re-attaching the term ‘diversity’
from the other terms that are marked in the struggle against inequalities and injustice.
If we follow words like ‘diversity’, then we end up returning to the
very spaces in which we live and work. For me, feminist and
postcolonial work happens in such times and spaces: in the flesh of
the organizations we inhabit. As I suggested in my introduction, doing
diversity work means giving up our words, or even giving them over to
the very organizations we wish to change. The risk of this work is a
necessary one. Words such as ‘diversity’ might allow the organization
to accumulate value, by re-branding itself as being diverse or even as
being committed to diversity without, as it were, doing anything. Or
they might not. They might yet cause more trouble.
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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) 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 2004a), 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 organization 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 2004a).
See also chapter 3 of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Ahmed 2006),
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.
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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 2004a).
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SARA AHMED is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, London.
ADDRESS: Department of Media, Goldsmiths College, Lewisham
Way, London SE 14 6NW, UK. Email: B/[email protected]/
256 Sara Ahmed
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