Overview

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.

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There are no other books of this rigor and 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

There are no other books of this rigor and calibre 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

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 in the Australian and UK academies. On Being Included is an insightful, smart reflection on the embodied, profoundly political phenomenology of doing and performing diversity in predominantly white institutions. Ahmed follows 'objects, texts, bodies, and practices' around, asking what work they/we do for the institution. Her wonderful facility with queering the most mundane, habitual formulations of diversity lead to thought provoking gems like: diversity workers as institutional plumbers, working to reveal blockages (racism) in the system; the violence of inclusion--of being 'folded into' whiteness; institutional stories that surface vs. those that recede (the archeology of diversity work); coming up against the wall of racism, rather than going with 'flow' of diversity disc

There are no other books of this rigor and calibre 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 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 Sara Ahmed's valuable new book is something of a departure from her previous work in phenomenology and cultural criticism, which has focused particularly on emotion and affect as understood by feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory. On Being Included is a practical book about institutional practices based on qualitative empirical research - a set of semistructured interviews as well as more fleeting encounters with diversity practitioners at a variety of institutions in the United Kingdom and Australia - and on her own experience as a member of her university's policy-writing race equality team and with a cross-disciplinary, externally funded research project. Meryl Altman, AAUP.org, January 2013 In her book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed sets out to explore what diversity does and what we do using the language of diversity. Throughout, diversity is approached as an open question. Rather than seeing it as a solution with fixed connotations, Ahmed follows it around to explore not only how it is circulated but also how it gets stuck...If diversity workers need to become the blockage points in order to disturb the habitual flows of the institutionality of whiteness and racism, this book itself functions to circulate the language of diversity as unfinished and unfolding actions, and as a blockage point that makes the reader pause to consider the haps and possibilities that might become possible. --NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

Author Information

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.

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