[THREAD]
The inspiration for my latest book came back in November of 2012. I was in my first semester as a VAP at the University of Mississippi. On the night of November 6th, after the election was called for Obama, several white students on campus rioted. https://twitter.com/Insurgent_Prof/status/1262519245264609282

They gathered in the historic circle outside of the Lyceum, where James Meredith was escorted by federal marshals to enroll at the university 50 years prior. Students burned Obama-Biden signs in effigy. They played Dixie from car stereos. They said "The South shall rise again"

All I knew at the time was that this was happening during the same year the university was commemorating the 50th anniversary of Meredith's enrollment, and the riot that took place in 1962 in response to the university's forced integration.

All semester - all year, really - there were many announcements, messages, programs, etc. that framed the 50th anniversary as a moment to reflect upon how far the university had come (some messages talked about the need to go further, but never said what that meant or how)

So when that riot took place on election night, I wanted to know how a university - any university - with such a public commitment to diversity and inclusion could be the sight of such disgusting racial violence. It struck me as a paradox, and sociologists love paradoxes.

I'm trained as an ethnographer - that means that many of the questions I'm most interested in are "how" questions. Questions of process, of organization, and of how people make meaning and sense of their social worlds.

I started to imagine a research design that could get at some of the 'how' behind the paradox. I found a university - Diversity University - that was in the beginning of stages of organizing its own diversity initiative.

I thought getting in and studying how they organized and put into practice their institutional commitment to diversity would help me better understand how that process unfolds, and also where the cracks in the process might show through

I even applied for funding, from the @ASAnews Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline Award. And I got and FAD grant! I think I was one of the only VAPs to ever get the award. This was in 2013.

That FAD grant allowed me to train and hire a graduate student in our department - LaTierney Frazier - to help with initial fieldwork, setting up interviews, and then transcribing interviews.

Another graduate student, Shonda Taylor, also helped with interview transcriptions after LaTierney graduated.

A little over a year later, I applied and received an investment grant from the University of Mississippi's Office of Research and Sponsored programs.

That investment grant allowed me to hire @im_whalen. Together, we combed through Diversity University's institutional documents - its emails, announcements, web pages, policies, memos, etc. Together, we coded hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents.

My fieldwork, interviews, and analysis of the institutional discourse of diversity were complimentary of one another. Fieldwork allowed me to see how people thought about and talked about diversity and inclusion as it unfolded.

Interviews allowed me to ask questions that emerged in fieldwork, and allowed those I spoke with to elaborate on the things they were doing, and I was seeing. They helped me figure out if what I was seeing was what was really taking place, or if it was something else.

And the analysis of institutional documents helped me situate people's actions and sense-making within an organizational context. We don't live in bubbles. Our actions and sense-making is structured by the organizations and institutions we live in and move through

All told, I spent about two years in the field studying how Diversity University organized and put into practice its diversity initiative.

I presented initial ideas and analysis at several conferences - the @SouthSocSociety meetings were particularly stimulating. I wrote, and rewrote, a lot of my ideas as they continued to develop and became refined.

The BIG contribution my book makes is the concept of a diversity regime. A diversity regime is a set of meanings and practices that institutionalizes a commitment to diversity, but in doing so obscures, entrenches, and even intensifies existing racial inequality.

Diversity regimes obscure, entrench, and intensify existing racial inequality because the commitment is simply to the commitment, not to actually making fundamental changes in how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed.

For this insight, I'm in deep intellectual debt to the philosopher Sara Ahmed, and her book On Being Included. Ahmed has also been an intellectual inspiration for a lot of my previous work on affect, affective labor, and affective economies.

I'm deeply grateful to all of the faculty, staff, and students at Diversity University who trusted me enough to speak with me about their experiences, and helped me develop enough understanding about what was happening to write an entire book about it.

Ultimately, I hope my book does a few things: I hope it inspires universities to take seriously multiculturalism and racial equity. I hope my book helps administrators see where their efforts are going right, and where they are going terribly wrong.

I also hope my book helps move public discourse away from empty expressions of "diversity", and toward more concrete demands for racial equity and racial justice.

Diversity regimes aren't just exclusive to college campuses. They're a core feature of contemporary organizational life. To that end, I'm really excited about some recent scholarship that is putting my work into conversation with that of @victorerikray, who I deeply admire.