Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.
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Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.
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Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

by James M. Thomas
Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities

by James M. Thomas

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Overview

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781978800410
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 05/15/2020
Series: The American Campus
Edition description: None
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

JAMES M. THOMAS (JT) is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He is the author of Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-up Comedy Venues, and the coauthor of Affective Labor: (Dis)Assembling Difference and Distance and Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Under the Live, Old Oak Trees 18

3 Condensation and the Alchemy of Diversity 43

4 Go Your Own Way: The Organizational Structure of Diversity 79

5 Staging Difference, Performing Diversity 115

6 Diversity Regimes and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality 143

Appendix: Studying Inequality, in Situ 183

Acknowledgments 191

Notes 195

Bibliography 217

Index 231

About the Author 245

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