Abstract
This article questions, at its starting point, the theoretical and epistemic assumptions around the emergence of the concept of (super)diversity, hailed in a growing body of academic literature as marking a “diversity turn”. In the second part, it highlights the issues raised by the organizational applications of the diversity paradigm in three main policy domains: migration, urban planning, and antidiscrimination. Finally, emphasizing the development of white-centered diversity conceptions, particularly in the European and French contexts, it invites a closer look at the intertwining of scholarly and practical elaborations of the diversity frame by considering knowledge as practice.
Highlights
Among academic circles, interest in the idea of diversity has recently propelled the social sciences to consider a real “diversity turn” in the study of race, ethnicity, pluralistic societies, cultural heterogeneity, and multiculturality
This article shall critically examine these developments by comparing the construction of a “generic diversity” norm (Doytcheva 2008; Clarke 2011; Cooper 2004)—in scholarly debates and throughout politics and public policy—with its specific uses and appropriation by social actors and organizations
I rely on an extensive literature review that brings together findings from multiple fields of research and analysis within a “globally comparative” approach (Wimmer 2006), and, secondarily, on a longitudinal empirical analysis of European and French policies on diversity and non-discrimination (Doytcheva 2008, 2015), in the workplace
Summary
Interest in the idea of diversity has recently propelled the social sciences to consider a real “diversity turn” in the study of race, ethnicity, pluralistic societies, cultural heterogeneity, and multiculturality. While in theory advocating a more fluid and inclusive society, these concepts and their implementation have turned out to be increasingly prescriptive in practice, as they are wielded by socially powerful groups to the disadvantage of marginalized, mostly racialized communities (Berrey 2005; Mayorga-Gallo 2014) This is what I refer to in this article as white diversity, lending to this notion a dual sense that is, first and foremost, grounded in the progressive elision of race and ethnicity from the space of diversity politics, as it has been notably documented in the case of France (Doytcheva 2008, 2015); Soc. Sci. I discuss in the concluding section the technologies of normalization and how they apply to manage and reshape the boundaries of race difference, defining who is worthy of inclusion and who is not
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