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Let's do diversity. Report of the University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission.

Authors:
Gloria Wekker at Utrecht University
Gloria Wekker
Marieke Slootman at Inholland University of Applied Sciences
Marieke Slootman
Rosalba Icaza at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Rosalba Icaza
Hans Jansen
Hans Jansen
Hans Jansen
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What about diversity and inclusion at the University of Amsterdam? In this report the Diversity Commission presents the study they conducted between March and September 2016. Based on qualitative and quantitative results we develop recommendations on how to make the University more inclusive, on how to further diversify staff and student body, to develop an inclusive language, and be more sensitive to the social and political context of research and teaching.
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... In my search for the possibilities of commoning I see the need to reimagine the economy, ecology and the future as key. This is what I interpret as teaching to transgress (hooks 1994) which I do in conversation with a growing number of teachers who are part of the movement to decolonise European universities (Wekker et al. 2016;de Jong et al. 2017). In different forums, on and off line, these conversations offer both a diagnosis of the racialized, gendered colonial legacies that constitute the modern university, and provide inspiring practical examples and methodologies, and interventions in curricula and the academy (de Jong et al. 2017). ...
... I mention here only some of the authors with whom I work in Europe who are challenging the colonizing conditions of teaching. There is in addition a vast literature in various languages which documents colonizing-decolonizing struggles of various universities in different contexts(Wekker et al. 2016). ...
Feminist Political Ecology practices of worlding: Art, commoning and the politics of hope in the class room
Article
Full-text available
  • May 2019
In the paper I argue that in a world where our lives are intricately interconnected and our environments are rapidly changing, commoning produces ecological imaginaries and understandings of places that could build a sense of global commons based on mutuality, reciprocity, and relationality. In exploring commoning in the international class room, my paper contributes to on-going dialogues community economies and feminist political ecology in the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), and the newly formed EU project Well-being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity (WEGO). In the article I first set out how I use commoning in my teaching. In section two I present my methodology, followed by section three where I present the community economies research network. In section four I present a case study of how I employ the community economies iceberg diagram in my teaching process using drawing /art-making to create an emergent commons-in-practice. In section five I discuss the productivity of bringing community economies and commoning to abroader feminist, ecological justice project followed by a conclusion.
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... These inequalities are visibly clear when I walk out of my university campus. I encounter more people of di erent ethnic and racial backgrounds in the city than among my students and colleagues (see Wekker et al., 2016). Moreover, as an anthropologist who has conducted research on racialized African migrants in Europe, the category of 'white' is useful for re ecting on my positionality in relation to my interlocutors and the privileges my academic position entails. ...
11. Becoming White?
Chapter
Full-text available
  • May 2023
This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.
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... The thing that makes it so difficult, with respect to academics, to people in media -who regard themselves as very progressive, 'We are non-racist by definition' -is that it is harder to hold them accountable for racist behaviour if it is all over the place. They project racism onto 'lower-class people' but have this excellent image of themselves -'We're good, we're fine' -whilst doing the most racist things (see Wekker et al., 2016). ...
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Intersektionalitätsinformierte Kompetenzen für Therapie und Coaching: Vorteile, Erkenntnisse und ein konkretes KompetenzmodellIntersectionality-informed competencies for therapy and coaching: benefits, insights, and a concrete competence model
Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2025
Zusammenfassung Diversität polarisiert. Anhand (inter-)nationaler Forschung wird hier gezeigt, dass Organisationen und Individuen von Diversität profitieren, aber nur wenige diversitätskompetent sind, weshalb es eine intersektionale Perspektive braucht. Da die Rolle von Diskriminierung und Intersektionalität für Coachings wenig beforscht ist, werden therapeutische Ansätze als Grundlage von Coachingmethoden für diese Kompetenzentwicklung vorgestellt. Nach dem kritischen Einführen basaler kultureller Kompetenzen wird ein evidenz- und theoriebasiertes Modell für intersektionalitätsinformierte therapeutische Kompetenzen für den deutschsprachigen Raum mit praktischen Implikationen für Coaching diskutiert.
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Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
Book
  • May 2023
This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.
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Weakening the Institutional Wall: Reflections on Race, Gender and Decolonisation in Belgian academy
Article
  • Jan 2019
This article wants to contribute to the emerging debate on decolonisation in Belgian universities by sketching the challenges posed by critical decolonial analyses and how these affect both academic institutions and the individuals working within them. In the first section, I provide an overview of the main critiques formulated by postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theorists on issues of difference and diversity in the academy. Starting with the critiques voiced towards discourses of “diversity” - which has become the dominant paradigm to address “difference” and inequality in education - I continue by discussing the analyses developed by postcolonial, feminist, and critical race scholars that may provide an answer for the persistence of the “institutional wall” which - despite firm commitments to diversity - forestalls any real change or inclusivity of “other” bodies, perspectives, and knowledges. In the second part of the article, I reflect on the dilemmas that arise for scholars driven by feminist and postcolonial perspectives, but who work within those same academic environments that actively thwart the realisation of the ideals put forward in these critical traditions. By reflecting on what can actually be done within this restraining environment, I make a distinction between tactics and strategies which - although not immediately able to completely subvert an entrenched legacy of institutional oppression and exclusion - may inspire further discussion and activism and may contribute to weakening the wall currently forestalling transformational change.
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Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development
Book
  • Jan 2009
Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engaging book reveals how once-tabooed issues, such as rape, gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive rights, have emerged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities and covers a broad range of gender and development issues, including fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies, from diverse viewpoints. The book's originality comes through the author's rich experience and engagement in feminist activism and global body politics and was winner of the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.
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The Technology of Gender
Chapter
  • Jan 1987
In the feminist writings and cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of gender as sexual difference was central to the critique of representation, the rereading of cultural images and narratives, the questioning of theories of subjectivity and textuality, of reading, writing, and spectatorship. The notion of gender as sexual difference has grounded and sustained feminist interventions in the arena of formal and abstract knowledge, in the epistemologies and cognitive fields defined by the social and physical sciences as well as the human sciences or humanities. Concurrent and interdependent with those interventions were the elaboration of specific practices and discourses, and the creation of social spaces (gendered spaces, in the sense of the “women’s room,” such as CR groups, women’s caucuses within the disciplines, Women’s Studies, feminist journal or media collectives, and so on) in which sexual difference itself could be affirmed, addressed, analyzed, specified, or verified. But that notion of gender as sexual difference and its derivative notions—women’s culture, mothering, feminine writing, femininity, etc.—have now become a limitation, something of a liability to feminist thought.
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On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
Article
  • May 2012
What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.
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Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking
Book
  • Jan 2000
This book is an extended argument on the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative scholars of Latin American studies. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of "colonial difference" into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding. The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one "civilizing" process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.
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