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WiSe 20/21: Diversity and Inclusion in Institutional Contexts

Jennifer Ailed Chan de Avila

Comments

There is a lively current debate around the need to promote, celebrate and ‘manage’ diversity in institutions. Diverse organisations are heralded as more productive and inherently ‘better’. This course aims to engage critically with the factors that both promote and hinder inclusion in the institutional context while also providing the students with practical notions and tools for advancing inclusion policies in their respective spheres of influence. As a starting point, the group will get familiar with the literature on institutions in order to identify what are the obstacles and opportunities that they pose for the advancement of inclusion policies. For this, we will review the role that institutions play in the political practice and analyse social inclusion policies advancement. Subsequently, we will critically engage with the concept of ‘Diversity’ and see its possibilities and limitations. For this, we will revise different theories, definitions and ways to measure diversity as well as a contemporary critique of the language of diversity and alternative theoretical contributions from affect theory as well as critical race and postcolonial studies. The course places great importance on incorporating an intersectional perspective when trying to do inclusion work. Finally, we will engage in a hands-on exploration of how diversity is ‘managed’ in the daily praxis through the analysis of concrete diversity strategies in the examples of different public organisations in the European Context. close