Opening Up a Space for the Political?: 'A study of diversity practitioners in Swedish academia'

Abstract

Analysing interviews with diversity practitioners at three Swedish universities, this article explores how diversity is deployed and the ways in which the articulations of practitioners might contribute to politicising issues of ethnicity and race. In the post-political era of New Public Management, audit technologies, quantification and bureaucratisation often render diversity apolitical, and deprive it of its political nature. These processes of depoliticisation tend to downplay political conflicts and ignore or even reinforce social hierarchies such as those based on norms of whiteness and middle-class masculinity. Paradoxically, in this interview study, it is shown how seemingly neutral, apolitical procedures such as mapping, counting and producing statistics led to debates that revealed underlying antagonisms, and opened up a space for rearticulating diversity that could provide a destabilisation of the whiteness of academia.

Keywords

• diversity
• academia
• (de)politicisation
• whiteness
• interview study