Revisiting Diversity: On-campus Inclusion Projects and the Seeds of Organized Resistance

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 13. Social Movements and Race

Abstract

Researchers have highlighted the ways in which diversity and multiculturalism are situated within neoliberal projects that restructure civic institutions such as universities through market-driven and individualistic ideologies of success and failure. Reminiscent of Black bodies on plantations, bodies of color are incorporated into the university through a process that appropriates, and commodifies difference. Scholars argue that these efforts obfuscate and sustain structural inequalities and multiple forms of oppression. These critiques of diversity overlook the microprocesses of resistance performed by students, faculty, administrators, and others who engage in anti-racist, abolitionist, and other emancipatory projects on college campuses. Through 30 in-depth interviews with 30 left-wing activists who had at one point passed through higher education, the authors illustrate how diversity-driven initiatives within higher education (i.e, ethnic studies departments, multicultural centers, and non-white student groups) afforded students of color and other minoritized groups opportunities to cultivate a critical understanding of structural inequality, to belong and thrive within the constraints of predominantly white institutions, and to engage in acts of organized resistance for the first time. Rather than discarding the concept of diversity wholesale, the authors argue that engaging with the contradictions concomitant in diversity discourse and initiatives afford scholar activists a theoretical tool to understand how nativism and white supremacy operate in this current political moment, as well as how non-dominant groups resist, engage, and imagine possible futurities.

Authors

• Cam Owen

• Miguel Abad, University of California-Irvine