Whiteness and the General Will: Diversity Work as Wilful Work

Professor Sara Ahmed, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London

This paper offers a different theoretical vocabulary for exploring how whiteness becomes institutionalized, as that which recedes into the background. I suggest that whiteness could be understood as a general and institutional will, as what all parts must be willing to reproduce. The paper explores willfulness as the rebellion of the part. It draws on a research project on diversity workers, as well as the experiences of being a person of colour in the institutions of whiteness.

Biography:

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College. Her books include: Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters; Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others (2006); The Promise of Happiness (2010) and On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (forthcoming, 2012).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk