Race and ethnicity III

Abstract

Geographic research and our practices in the higher education environment have long been concerned with diversity. Yet diversity is difficult to define and measure, and diversity efforts increasingly go unsupported. Furthermore, geography has been bedeviled by a stubborn lack of meaningful diversity in terms of who we are and what we do. More broadly, multiculturalism and affirmative action oriented toward increasing the numbers and success of underrepresented minorities are largely viewed as failed policies. Thus it has been suggested that diversity has effectively been silenced; alternatively, that it be diversified, or simply waited out. Others seem to view diversity through a hopeful lens, as an aspirational horizon. In this scholarship, encounters across diversity, whether fleeting or more managed, kindle the possibility of curiosity, understanding, and reconciliation.

Giving Ethnic Diversity its Spatial and Temporal Meaning – Examples from Slovakia

“…As far back as 1982, diversity lacked "formal definition, logical development as a concept and its measurement" (Patil -Taille 1982: 548), and still today, diversity is more or less still without specific conceptualization and theories, so it comes "without baggage" (Vertovec 2015: 4), or can be labelled as a "tofu-term" 4 , since it has no flavor until it marinates in an institution-specific sauce. (Price 2014: 1) Diversity should be seen as "legitimate discursive space" in which people from various positions and backgrounds live and express their identities (Arnaut 2012: 7), or as "heterogeneities along the boundaries" (Faist 2015: 265), but definitely seeing diversity in terms of ethnicity only is not sufficient; it needs to accommodate more variables (Vertovec 2007(Vertovec : 1025, some of which are discussed and further outlined below. Such a 'superdiversity' (a concept elaborated by Vertovec 2007; Arnaut 2012; Crul 2016 etc.)…”

The Map, the Other and the public visual image

“…As Harries (2014) puts it, 'It is not easy to name racism in a context in which race is almost entirely denied.' Despite a long programmatic prioritisition of diversity in critical research and political action, a broad orientation towards the refusal of positive discrimination, affirmative action, the use of racial-specific criteria with the purpose of enhancing equality, the celebration of diversity and multicultural policies is acknowledged (Price, 2014). The reluctance to explicitly talk about race and racism in political and scholarly arenas is associated with the idea that we are living in a world that is 'beyond race' or in a 'post-racial' era.…”

“…This paper, however, follows a different approach regarding the 'crisis of diversity'. For Price (2014), if imagining a non-racial future can be considered a form of wishful thinking that distracts from urgent realities, an alternative form of wishful thinking on behalf of diversity could be embraced 'not as a misguided strategy, but as a form of hopefulness'. Following Price, examining diversity through a hopeful lens means shedding light on the 'aspiration horizon' that acts within diversity itself, particularly through the 'different stories' of diversity, which characterise everyday life, encounters, practices, moments of micro-politics and shared experiences.…”

“…Even if 'race' and 'ethnicity' Social & Cultural Geography 473 remain very contested terms among social scientists (Dwyer & Bressey, 2008;Knowles, 2010;Price, 2014), the idea of race and ethnicity as definable categories is widespread in societies such as America or Britain, as the presence of racial and ethnic questions on national censuses (Prewitt, 2013) and the production of derived racial and ethnic maps frankly reveal. Racial dot maps have recently been produced from the urban (see the Mapping has also been used as an eloquent way of protesting against racial inequity.…”

Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black geographies

“…For this first of three reports on Race and Ethnicity in Geography, I want to begin with one of the most significant moves in the last 5 yearsthe inception of the field of Black Geographies, written largely (though not exclusively) by Black 1 geographers. As Patricia Price (2011Price ( , 2013Price ( , 2015, Laura Pulido (2015Pulido ( , 2017Pulido ( , 2018, and Anne Bonds (2018Bonds ( , 2020 have all shown before me, Geographies of Race and Ethnicity have been largely focused on geographical knowledge that bears witness to the spatialities of coloniality and exclusion based on race and ethnicity. However, in large part, such spatialised exclusion rests on the exclusionary foundations of (post)colonial formations of geographical knowledge, which are themselves reproduced through exclusionary conditions of geographical knowledge production (see, for example, Clement, 2020;Wang, 2021).…”