#9 'The Diversity Worker' - 20/03/18
For our ninth session, we will be exploring the figure of the diversity worker through a reading of ‘The Language of Diversity', the second chapter of On Being Included (2012). The chapter is accessible here . Secondary reading: Kenan Malik – ‘What’s the problem with multiculturalism?,' accessible here . In 'The Language of Diversity' Ahmed highlights how diversity has commercial value, not only marketing the university, but making the university itself into a marketplace. We'll be discussing how diversity as a routine description poses a problem for diversity workers, as it maintains, rather than transforms, existing organisational values. Linking the diversity practitioner to Ahmed's other 'affect aliens', including feminist killjoys and strangers, we ask how does diversity organise, or stick to, certain bodies? What is the value of diversity within our own institutions? What does it mean to pose problems by exposing them? A...