The agency of “doing something”: Ethnographic research on subject positions at predominantly White institutions

Abstract

A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the promotion and proliferation of a discourse of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article considers projects emergent from a summer research fellowship offered to groups of faculty members and students. We compare the ways in which the group of students led by us and the group of students led by another set of faculty developed questions and explored aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We show that the other group began their efforts by foregrounding work on the production of inequality but ended up with a rather neoliberal subjectivity focused on the exploration of the self and one's feelings. Our group managed to avoid such an outcome, but, unlike the other group, our work got passed over for promotion on the College's website. Our insights seek to provide a context for the transformation of calls to “do something” in the academic institution in which we work into depoliticized representations of difference ripe for institutional display and promotion.