Trying to Transform

This chapter reflects on diversity work as the effort to transform institutions by opening them up to populations that have historically been excluded from them. Drawing on interviews with diversity practitioners, it considers how practitioners keep coming up against brick walls even after they have been appointed by the organizations they aim to transform. The chapter reflects on how diversity work (including feminist work) is strategic work: practitioners have to work out where the blockages are before they can develop techniques for unblocking the system. Diversity work and feminist work are also understood as pushy work: you have to push harder to get something through because of institutional resistance to transformation.