| Oct. 16: Brown Bag at USC--Diversity Skills: How Universities Reduce Social Justice To a Commodity |
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| Written by Lori Donath | |
| Wednesday, 08 October 2008 13:22 | |
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“Diversity Skills”: How Universities Reduce Social Justice To a Commodity A Brown Bag Discussion with Dr. Bonnie Urciuoli, Chair of Anthropology, Hamilton College Oct. 16, 12:30 – 1:45 p.m. Wardlaw 110, University of South Carolina Dr. Urcioli will lead a discussion of diversity issues in higher education on this theme. Please join us! Her recent work explores how liberal arts education is complicit in the process, initiated in the corporate sector, of shifting diversity from a quest for social justice grounded in the civil rights’ movement to a kind of social commodity. Policies in the U.S., Europe, and Asia reconfigure and reconceptualize educational processes in ways coherent with corporate structures and interests, and with American cultural beliefs privileging the individual, technology, rationality, private enterprise and the market. What started as an inclusive social movement becomes a market-valued line on an individual’s resume. Knowledge about diversity is abundantly commodified. Diversity has come to be understood as that which an individual possesses that contributes to the good of the organization...diversity accrues to an individual, not a group. What gives these cultural assumptions such power is their grounding in corporate, government and educational discourses. It is through such continual and repeated discourses that these values become a common sense network of understandings. Co-Sponsored by: Office of International & Comparative Education, Department of Anthropology, Linguistics Program, & the Department of Educational Studies Add your comment
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