borderlands e-journal www.borderlands.net.au 1 VOLUME 11 NUMBER 3, 2012 REVIEW Desiring diversity at university Sara Ahmed. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Thor Kerr Curtin University, Australia Diversity has become a pervasive feature of university policy statements in Australia, the United Kingdom and other nations. But what does diversity do and how does it perform in terms of addressing inequality in a university? Sara Ahmed answers these questions in a thesis supported by 21 interviews with diversity practitioners and her own experience. By interrogating diversity as a set of practices, Ahmed’s book explores how diversity policy can become a substitute for action against practices of exclusion in an institutional setting. On Being Included presents an argument for diversity workers to articulate exclusionary practices otherwise concealed by the appearance of diversity. This book argues for diversity to be a form of critique, not a public relations solution. Implementing diversity policy in an institution of higher education can be a tenuous and troubling process (Chan, 2005, pp. 142-151). Being more than the presence of a set of categories – typically beginning with race and gender – diversity extends to questions of inclusion and difference within a community (pp. 130-131). Sara Ahmed has examined this tenuous troubling process in her new book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, from the perspective of diversity practitioners working for universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. According to Ahmed, the ambiguity and inspiration of diversity has enabled it to be readily incorporated into university policy. Perceiving this integration through the lens of Ernesto Laclau (2005, pp. 76-120), we could think of diversity performing as an empty signifier: Diversity being reproduced throughout a university policy network so long as