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Diversity in Question
2.00 pm start of sessions 1,2 & 3 - 3.45 pm tea - 4.15 -5.30 pm Sessions 4 & 5 - 5.30 pm Reception
This event took place on 17th November 2005 at 2:00pm (14:00 GMT)
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
The politics of diversity foregrounds current concerns with equality and social inclusion and diversity is a key issue in contemporary intellectual and political debates reconfiguring the politics of ?race?, ?ethnicity?, sexuality and disability. This symposium organised by CRESC and openDemocracy brings together scholars whose work focuses upon different aspects of diversity in relation to its theoretical and policy implications, questioning the routes through which such practices and interventions have been developed and challenging both the theoretical underpinnings of what constitutes diversity and the strategies that have been adopted.
Tackling the Roots of Racism: New Directions for social policy and ?race? equality
Reena Bhavnani is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Racial Equality Studies Middlesex University and a leading expert on cultural diversity whose work focuses upon the evaluation of governmental interventions and strategies to challenge racism. She has published extensively on ?race? ?ethnicity? and organisational culture, including her most recent book, Tackling the Roots of Racism: Lessons for Success, JRF and Policy Press
What are the causes of racism? And how successful are professional policy interventions in addressing these causes? Drawing from my new book funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I will critically assess ?taken for granted? assumptions about equality and difference interventions. There is virtually no evaluation research in Britain of successful interventions to tackle racism and the reasons why interventions have or have not been successful. I argue that British based ?professional? interventions could fall into two broad categories: the equality interventions and the multicultural interventions. My session will discuss whether these interventions are appropriate for tackling the causes of racism. Both the origins of racism and the ways different types of racism are reproduced in our daily current context are analysed. The assumptions underlying equality and multicultural interventions will be unpacked and related to typologies of everyday racisms: elite racism and situated racism. The main focus in the contribution will be on British research and policy evidence. However, examples of international interventions and lessons from their success will also be included.
Active citizenship and local government?s irrational sexual politics: fire-walls and new affectivities
Davina Cooper is Professor of Law and Political Theory and Director of AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, University of Kent. Her books include: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (CUP, 2004), and Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (1998, Rivers Oram/ NYU
Drawing on ESRC funded field research into lesbian and gay policy-making in British local government between 1990-2001, the paper explores how local government's evolving sexual utterances coexisted with ongoing forms of discursive and policy irrationality. The paper argues that such irrationality worked to contain sexual innovation, in various ways, but particularly by producing fire-walls that limited the possibilities for active sexual citizenship. Active sexual citizenship entails being able to traverse and breach different policy domains - to imprint from a distance - a practice restricted by the buffers irrationality generates. Yet, I do not want to argue this process is static or fully determined. On the one hand, cracks and fissures existed, stretched and exploited by agents of the new sexual project. On the other, local government mobilised other mechanisms to contain active sexual citizenship. Alongside the barriers of ultra vires doctrine, privatisation, and cabinet government, the paper considers the role played by changing modes of affectivity as a means of containing the capacity of a new sexual agenda to imprint from a distance.
When alienation turns to nihilism: the dilemmas posed for ?diversity? post 7/7
Max Farrar became a born-again sociologist in 1995 and completed his PhD in 1999. Previously he worked in Further Education, at the Harehills and Chapeltown Law Centre, for the Runnymede Trust, as a freelance writer/photographer, and as the course leader for the Certificate in Community Participation at Leeds Polytechnic. His book on Chapeltown The Struggle for 'Community' was published by Edwin Mellen in 2002. He now teaches at, researches and heads the Community Partnerships and Volunteering office at Leeds Metropolitan University.
After over thirty years of activism in and writing about the multi-ethnic inner cities of Leeds, the 7/7 bombings in London were no major surprise for me. There is nothing special about the Leeds Muslim communities, although the absence of a branch of the Asian Youth Movement in this city is significant. In Leeds, as elsewhere, Islamic militancy has grown inexorably since the Rushdie affair, and violence as a form of protest is the continuing story of inner-city Leeds. The 'celebration of diversity' trope has wilfully failed to include an examination of the difficulty of reconciling masculinist, anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and anti-capitalist tendencies in militant jihadi Islam with Western societies which are more-or-less committed to post-Enlightenment values and structures. When young men who are (from my perspective understandably) alienated from individualistic, consumerist capitalism turn to a religious critique founded on nihilism, the fissures in 'diversity' thought become hopeless contradictions. I argue for political and sociological support for those who are working for radical reform within Islam and for a shift from a 'celebration of diversity' to 'diversity with all its contradictions' as the progressive position in public debate.
Diversity: A Politics of Difference or a Management Strategy?
Judith Squires is Professor of Political Theory in the Politics Department, University of Bristol. Her publications include: Women in Parliament: A Comparative Analysis, (2001); Gender in Political Theory (1999); Feminisms (co-ed.) (1997). Her current research focuses on: the Politics of Gender Equality, which interrogates the emergence and impact of gender quotas, women?s policy agencies and gender mainstreaming; Developing Positive Action Policies, which explores the lessons to be learnt from North American ethnic minority positive action policies for Britain; and Equality and Diversity, which assesses the implications of the emergence of diversity management and the creation of a single equality body for the pursuit of gender equality in the UK.
There has been a shift in policy discourses from the pursuit of equality to the pursuit of ?equalities? and, increasingly ?equality and diversity?. The promotion of diversity has emerged as a central political priority, within both the UK and Europe. One reading of this emergent concern with diverse equality strands entails tracing the shift amongst political and legal theorists from liberal egalitarianism to a ?politics of difference?. By contrast, a second reading of the growing concern with diversity entails tracing the emergence of ?diversity management? amongst corporate human resource managers. Drawing on some aspects of this ?difference? theory, human resource professionals have become increasingly committed to ?diversity management?.
This paper asks whether one should view the emergence of ?diversity? as a positive development, reflecting the claims of marginalized cultural groups, social movements, and difference theorists; or whether, on the other hand, one should view diversity as a managerial policy, devised as a means to pursue economy productivity with greater efficiency. It suggests that both narratives have some merit. If one conceives of neo-liberalism as a ?post facto rationalization in which connections are made across political projects that were initially quite discrete and even contradictory? rather than as a totalising process or coherent programme it becomes possible to view the pursuit of diversity as a product of both a politics of difference and diversity management. This paper aims to explore the possibilities that are opened up by focusing on the contestation that is an ineluctable feature of the simultaneous working out of these projects.
Islam in Europe and the Question of ?Alternative Modernities?
Sami Zubaida is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College. London, and Research Associate of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS. He has held visiting posts in Cairo, Istanbul, Aix-en-Provence, Berkely CA and Paris, and lectured widely in Europe, America and the Middle East. His research and writing are on religion, culture, law and politics in the Middle East, with special interests in Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. He also works on Food and Culture, in Europe and the Middle East.
Publications include the following books: Islam, the People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East, London 1993; A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, ed. with R.Tapper, London 2000; Law and Power in the Islamic World, London 2003. His work has covered a wide area of sociological and political theory including law and power in the Islamic world and the politics of Islam and he has published many papers and articles on religion, nationalism, civil society and political regimes in the region, and more recently on Iraq and on Muslims in Europe.
Please select replay below: |
| 2:00 pm Diversity in Question sessions 1,2 & 3 |
| 4:15 pm Diversity in Question Sessions 4 & 5 |
The webcast was open to 800 users
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