Diversity

In theory

The concept of diversity has come to replace more political concepts such as “equal opportunities” and “social justice”. It refers to all kinds of differences between people, including axes of social inequality such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age and class, but also more individual dimensions like experience and opinions. Because of this, “diversity” does not so powerfully appeal to our sense of justice and equality. Moreover, the concept has been criticized for focusing on numbers and representation rather than workplace cultures and structures.

In practice

Critics have pointed out the gap between Higher Education institutions’ commitments to diversity and their actual practices; and demonstrated that even diversity practitioners themselves often experience diversity policies as non-performative “window dressing”. Moreover, individual learning about diversity is often insufficiently anchored in a collective organizational memory, so that diversity practitioners have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.