Stuart Hall (1) (1932–2014)

A thorough and detailed examination of how diversity work is done in an academic institution. Moreover, it focuses on how diversity work is conceptualized and experienced by those who do it. The research centers around interviews of diversity professionals. Damningly, they speak of their own work as repeatedly beating their heads against a brick wall.

The book delves deep into the Kafkaesque maze of justifications and rationalizations that make up the meat of this labor. The first job of a show more diversity officer is to create a diversity policy. Once the policy is created, it needs to be reviewed, approved, and disseminated. Naturally, after that, it will have to be frequently revised. The job then quickly becomes a matter of creating and moving papers around. If the papers are publicly lauded, then the institution is considered "good at diversity".

It's not long before complaints of racism or bias can be refuted simply by pointing to this paper which clearly states the institution's commitment to diversity. "We can't be racist" or "You can't have experienced racist behavior" because that would violate the institutional policy. The work of the diversity officer in many ways becomes to prove that the institution is not racist, rather than correcting the racist structure of the institution.

Despite the necessarily superficial and ineffectual nature of this work, diversity practitioners still face tremendous hurdles to accomplishing even this much. Blame is shifted easily from the one who has committed an offense to the one who witnesses it. Despite having a top notch diversity policy, academic institutions continue to be remarkably white and male. And naturally, the racism that pervades the institution remains unchecked and frequently unremarked upon.

This is not an uplifting or optimistic book, but it is an extremely clarifying look into the belly of the beast. I found it extremely enlightening and it helped me put into words issues I've sensed but been unable to fully grasp. show less

This is an academic (but very readable) look at the act of doing and being diversity in an institutional context. The foundation of Ahmed's book is a series of interviews with diversity professionals at universities in the UK and Australia, as well as her personal experience as a woman of color in the institutions where she's worked. Ahmed doesn't give the reader any easy steps to take, but instead brings us a clear look at how institutions work and what that means for the people or groups show more who are trying to change an institutional culture that reproduces and favors whiteness.

Much of what she talks about reflects concerns and experiences I've heard from friends and colleagues of color. Other topics shone a light on things I'd never thought about, but that I recognized as an obvious part of the institutional foundations I've experienced. Ahmed's narrative includes looking at the language we use to describe this work (including why "diversity" is such a beloved term), how whiteness as the norm impacts workers and students of color, what actually goes on in committee meetings, the way an institution can be personified, how documents can help and hinder communication, and she ultimately explores some philosophical approaches to thinking through these efforts in a fresh way.

Although there are aspects of the interviews and assertions that are unique to a UK context, most of what Ahmed discusses is just as applicable to institutions in the United States. And while her philosophy and academic background can sometimes make this a dense book, her clear writing style makes it an easy read (and one that made me want to underline every spot-on sentence). I'd really recommend this book for anyone interested in picking apart the successes and failures of institutional diversity efforts (particularly in higher education). show less

Stuart Hall grew up in a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, came to Britain on a Rhodes Scholarship in the early fifties, and stayed on for the rest of his life as an academic and left-wing political critic. He was one of the founders of cultural studies as an academic discipline (at Birmingham University) and later became what the Guardian once called "the progressive insomniac's icon" through his prominent role as (emeritus) professor of sociology in the Open University, in which he show more appeared in many late-night TV lectures and seminars.

Familiar Stranger - a slightly odd mixture of memoir and heavyweight cultural analysis - is an account of his life up to the point where he moved to Birmingham in the mid-1960s. There's a lot about the history and social structure of postcolonial Jamaica and where his particular kind of family fitted into that, and also about the experience of Caribbean people as migrants to England, mixed in with more personal memories of his own experiences and the people he knew, which of course gets especially interesting when he gets on to his days as a postgraduate student when he was editing the New Left Review and mixing with everyone who was anybody in CND, the communist party and the left wing of Labour. As you would expect, there are some very thought-provoking insights about the cutural legacy of colonialism and slavery and the condition of emigrant, but there's disappointingly little analysis about what went wrong with the British left. Perhaps that will be in the next volume.

According to Bill Schwarz's introduction, the book is the fruit of some 20 years of discussions and interviews between the two of them and was planned from the start as a collaborative effort (Hall was a big collaborator and rarely published anything as sole author). However, Hall died before they had really nailed the structure of the book, and the publishers vetoed the planned dialogue format and asked Schwarz to recast it as a first-person "ghosted autobiography", which presumably explains the slightly clumsy jumps between quite personal reminiscences and heavyweight academic prose that is clearly crying out for (absent) footnotes. Probably not everybody's taste, and I doubt that this will be in the Christmas bestseller charts, but definitely interesting. show less

In diesem Buch werden einige Grundbeziehungen, wenn man so will, der diskursiven Formation der "Cultural Studies", wie sie sich in den 60ern und 70ern in Großbritannien entwickelt hat und im Folgenden Ausbreitung in die USA, nach Australien und Asien gefunden hat, offengelegt. Stuart Hall selbst erscheint darin eine Art Schlüsselposition einzunehmen; - nicht nur durch seine Verstrickung in die Analyse von Jugend- und Subkulturen, sondern auch durch seine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit show more rassistischen Phänomenen der medialen Alltagskultur. Anhand von Interviews und Texten in Form von Artikeln wird in diesem Buch ein Näherungsversuch an die Cultural Studies unternommen, die vor allem als wissenschaftliche Praxis mit stark interventionistischen Charakter betrachtet werden. Dabei steht in dieser Art von Praxis stets die Selbstreflexion des Forschenden und die mögliche Anpassung oder Veränderung seiner Forschungsinstrumente im Vordergrund. Nicht zuletzt vor dem Hintergrund seiner eigenen Biographie werden die Studien von Stuart Hall als engagierte wissenschaftliche Arbeit einsehbar, die es zu verdienen scheint, eine weitere intensive Auseinandersetzung im Wissenschaftsbetrieb zu erfahren. Eine solche scheint vor allem aufgrund des mittlerweile quasi institutionalisierten Charakters der Cultural Studies auch sehr notwendig. show less