Ongoing project
Diversity has been a key notion used to refer to the changing social, cultural, gender, race make-up of the Australia population. Diversification discourses are reflected in various institutions ranging from health services, community sector, government and higher education and are enacted via numerous mechanisms within those institutions. Yet, critical scholars of diversity have questioned the capacity of diversity as a discourse and practice to bring about racial, gender, and disability justice because the notion does not always attend to these dimensions of power and their intersections as expressed in everyday settings, and attendant implications for inclusion, belonging and sense of community. The current project will constitute different phases of data collection to explore the experiences and meanings of diversity from a variety of perspectives and levels of analysis to get a deeper, nuanced, and complex understanding of diversity within the context of university settings. Rather than depart from institutional categories and meanings of diversity, we are interested in the range of ways and the breath of social and cultural resources people draw on as they navigate, negotiate, and construct identities, places and meanings in relation to diversity and university. The aim of the research is to collect stories from a cross section of the university’s student population using interviews and creative methods about experiences and meanings of diversity within the university. The stories here are viewed as individual, social, and ideological, they are produced in social contexts, and racialized power relations. Stories reflect and reproduce existing relations, and they are sites for intervention (Rappaport, 2002; Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013).
Publications
No present publications.