Doreen Massey (1944–2016)

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

"For the truth is that you can never simply 'go back', to home or to anywhere else. When you get 'there' the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For to open up 'space' to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the product of interrelations. You can't go back in space-time. To think that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories. It may be show more 'going back home', or imagining regions as backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some 'unspoilt, timeless' spot. The point is the same. You can't go back. You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to 'now', but where that 'now' is itself constituted by nothing more than--precisely--that meeting-up (again)." show less

This is a collection of journal articles around the topics of Space, Place and Gender. It is a little dated (the collection was published in 1994, but some of the articles go back to the late 1970s) and some of it is fairly dry and academic. Having said that it was an interesting read on some of the industrial restructuring that happened in the 1980s and how different regions lost or benefitted.