Opposing Trends in Antiracism in North Atlantic Rim Universities: Converging Interests or Public Non-Performativity?

Abstract

University senior management teams are reacting to an evolving trend of identifying and eliminating institutional racism in universities along the North Atlantic Rim. They are tasked with designing and constructing processes for the implementation of remedial antiracist policies, in conjunction with minority employee interest groups, in a putatively inclusive but also hegemonically White environment. Evidence is presented from an international academic survey of non-managerial university minorities, comprising mainly academics and conducted in 2021. This reveals a trend whereby Sara Ahmed’s model of performativity and non-performativity in antiracism is shown to be contingent upon the reputational interests of university senior management, as predicted in Derrick Bell’s convergence theory. This article presents a new synthesized model to explain and predict the trend of non-performativity in university antiracist practices, and then identifies further strands of research that might focus on closing the convergence gap to make antiracism leadership more substantive.

Keywords

• antiracism
• convergence theory
• institutional racism
• performativity and non-performativity
• university senior management teams
• higher education institutions