On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), by Sara Ahmed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a book for those who wish to probe into the contradictions and dilemmas that shape how universities and other contemporary institutions do policy (or not).By focusing on text and interviews with diversity officers from 21 universities in Australia and the United Kingdom during 2003Kingdom during , 2004Kingdom during and 2009, Ahmed offers important ethnographic insights into how contemporary universities enact institutional ideologies within an audit culture.She uses a feminist and critical race theory framework, which challenged this reviewer in a variety of ways and ultimately offered thoughtful comment on the leadership challenge of contemporary universities.This contribution builds upon a substantial body of Ahmed's (2004) previous work in feminist, post-colonial and queer studies and focuses on her experience of institutions, as well as her time advancing equity and diversity policy within a university.On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life digs into the social complexity of the contemporary university, while drawing upon an extensive variety of influences (i.e., Butler, Bannerji, Derrida, Fanon, Husserl, Lyotard, Mohanty).Those who may find conceptual contentment within a structural-functionalist understanding of universities are unlikely to appreciate this work.This book offers insight into why universities are increasingly concerned with other universities and how it became important for the contemporary university, whether in the UK, Australia, or Canada, to expend increasing amounts of time and resources on self-representation.Many conversations within On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life are original, noteworthy, and reason enough to spend time with this offering.Each of the following points standout, as they illustrate the tricky social terrain in which universities must operate: (1) discursive text and the language of diversity; (2) commitment within audit culture; and (3) excellence as a heraldic and hegemonic device of university leadership.Ahmed focuses on text as a methodological consideration and in doing so asks the reader to consider whether or not the contemporary university is a reified and unitary subject.She differentiates between a textually produced reality of the university and a second reality constituted in the lived experience of individuals within it.This is a method that has been used elsewhere with great impact, such as Rankin's (2004) institutional ethnography of the nursing profession, where she explores the replacement of individual patients with discursively produced entities that exist in the text-based hyper-reality of healthcare information systems and institutions.Ahmed asks how we can know anything about what takes place within the contemporary university and 110
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".