On Being Included

Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

De: Sara Ahmed

Narrado por: Diana Blue

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.

©2012 Duke University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Great Book. Please find a new reader.

Spot on analysis and inspiring content. The narration, however, is so robotic and such an unnatural cadence, I almost stopped listening many times. But the content is so interesting, I pushed through. So I simultaneously don’t want this book to end and also can’t take another minute of the narration. I have never had an experience on Audible like this. Really frustrating.

narration unlistenable

it seems like the content would have been really interesting, but I found the delivery absolutely impossible to follow. it was so unnatural that I just could not keep up with it.

“You’re not Helping”

I was looking forward to this work, until I heard the first sentence. While I think of myself as social justice criminologist type, pettiness like this work does not help in achieving the ends we all are looking for.