What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity: An Ethnographic Perspective

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Racial Justice in Higher Education: Making Sense of Lived Experiences on Campus

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the daily realities of diversity policy and practice at a large, public institution I call State University. Drawing on a 16-month ethnography, I explore what diversity means in the lives of those marked as diverse as well as those tasked with carrying out the university’s diversity policies and programs. I frame diversity as a discourse and set of practices by which the university organizes social relations. This paper offers a relational and anti-essentialist account of diversity in higher education capable of explaining how attempts to transform State University into a more equitable, just, and inclusive institution actually helped to recreate the very inequities diversity work supposedly addresses.

Author

• Raymond Kirk Anderson, University of Wisconsin - Madison