Sara Ahmed argues that a commitment to diversity is frequently substituted for a commitment to actual change. Institutions will produce programs promoting diversity, or sponsor committees to study it, rather than actually engaging in affirmative action hiring or anti-racist, anti-discrimination actions. Ahmed traces the work that diversity does, examining how the term is used and the way it serves to make questions about racism seem impertinent. Ahmed's study is based in universities and her research is primarily in the UK and Australia, but the argument is equally valid in North America and for a wider range of institutions.

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.

"“Ahmed’s book is not a how-to guide to ‘what works.’ But On Being Included would be an excellent choice for a faculty-staff reading group about social justice in the academy, because Ahmed provides a rich resource for serious rethinking: ‘My aim is not to suggest that we should stop doing diversity, but that we need to keep asking what we are doing.’”" - Academe

"“Regardless of positionality and lived experiences, this text is engaging both intellectually and emotionally. Ahmed’s unflinching candor compels reflection and tough (hopefully productive) conversations far more effectively than a conventional ‘diversity document’.  This is a text that moves to confront and change the status quo.”" - Environment and Planning D

"“[T]he book links deeply theoretical questioning to personal experience, empirical findings in interviews, informal discussions and engaged participant observation. It provides the reader with many insights, some created within different varieties of collective intellectual labor that are referred to as discussions in a seminar, meeting or informal talk, that nourish the quest for reading that is simultaneously compelling and delightful. In its combination of theory and practice, the book offers food for thought to theorists and practitioners alike.”" - International Feminist Journal of Politics

"“On Being Included is one of those books that took over my life. It seemed like, for a while, I inserted this text into just about every conversation I had. ‘Oh, that’s similar to what Sara Ahmed talks about when she says … ‘ Maybe it’s because I want people to associate me with this brilliant author!  It’s also partially because this book is really smart about dealing with the ways that terms–specifically, diversity–are taken up within the institution (and she does a neat job of thinking through what institution means) and used to obscure particular kinds of work.”" - Theorizing Feminist Apparency blog

"“On Being Included does an excellent job of bringing to life, in highly perceptive ways, the experience of doing diversity work. As ethnography, its strength indeed may lie in bracketing other times and places. However, the resonance with other documented experiences in Britain and Australia contributes to the book’s value in offering not just a picture of diversity politics but a vivid account of the persistent features of contemporary organisational life when faced with projects seeking change.”" - British Journal of Educational Studies

"“Drawing from interviews and informal conversations with higher education diversity practitioners across the United Kingdom and Australia, scholar Sara Ahmed has crafted a keen meditation on the meaning of diversity in higher education and its implications for inclusion.... Focusing on what practitioners can learn about institutions as they work to transform them, her book will be of interest to anyone seeking to promote greater inclusion at their institution.”" - On Campus with Women

"“This book offers a grounded and open exploration of what it means to ‘do’ diversity, to ‘be’ diverse. It challenges the reader, both in style and in content, to reconsider relations of power that stick to the multiple practices, meanings, and understandings of diversity, and to reconsider how we engage, reproduce, and disrupt these relations.”" - Gender, Place & Culture

"“A key finding in Ahmed’s rich analysis of race relations is how diversity policies can become a mechanism for preserving whiteness. . . . Above all, Ahmed’s corpus of work on race and cultural studies continues to remind us that race is a ‘sticky sign’. . . . The wonder of Ahmed’s book is that it allows us insight into some of the more ephemeral ways whiteness, privilege and institutional discrimination come to operate as normative.”" - British Journal of Sociology of Education