Wijsgerig Perspectief - Volume 65, Issue 1, 2025

Sara Ahmed’s work On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life shows how diversity discourses shape institutional life within universities. Three related concepts in this work are ‘non-performativity’, ‘doing the document’, and ‘plumbing’. In this essay, we examine these concepts in the context of diversity policy within Dutch universities and municipalities. We draw from ethnographic fieldwork to expose how commitments to diversity fail to effect change, how policies circulate without profoundly altering institutional practices, and how administrators strategically navigate institutional resistance. By doing so, we give these concepts a specific situated understanding for the Netherlands. In addition, based on our material, we engage with and advance two arguments from Ahmed’s work. First, we argue that using data as ‘institutional switch’ lays bare bureaucratic anxieties about reproducing institutional racism. Second, we reveal how doing the document engages in a white politics of time. We end with a note about breaking the ‘brick wall’ and embracing alternative ways of being, thinking, and relating. This means finding each other despite institutional isolation, especially when institutions see us as ‘the problem’. This also means attentive listening, seeing, and learning from uncomfortable histories that shape our present. Only then we can dismantle whiteness.

This essay analyzes the complexities of a seemingly innocuous situation, namely when lesbian couples are asked whether they are sisters, with the help of Sara Ahmed’s contribution to queer theory. Ahmed shows such sister-confusion to be situated in a compulsory heterosexual world wherein queer movements become disorientating. To solve such disorientation, queers get ‘straightened’ in everyday encounters: a couple is dismissed as sisters, for example. Staying with disorientation, however, and lingering in the ‘queer moment’, can foster insight into how a heterosexual orientation is organized in daily life rather than ‘natural’. Ahmed argues that any ‘strange’ movement holds such potential to address the coercion that lies behind dominant orientations – not only heterosexuality but also, for example, whiteness. From this insight follows a choice between reproducing dominant paths or exploring different ones instead. Put differently, and in the spirit of Bonnie Honig, the figure of the stranger can open up our world. Whereas the sister-confusion poses a ‘hail’ to stay ‘in line’ with heterosexuality as a dominant orientation, Ahmed encourages us not to turn around in response and get stuck in its lines, but rather to continue exploring where else we might go.

Sara Ahmed was among the first academics to openly support students’ Palestine solidarity encampments. She asserts that such encampments function similarly to complaints, targeting mechanisms that perpetuate and normalise violence. Ahmed’s work conceptualises complaints as forms of resistance that expose institutional power structures, often maintained through ‘straightening devices’; mechanisms that align behaviors with institutional norms, encouraging certain practices while discouraging others.

The solidarity encampments exemplify Ahmed’s phenomenological approach and embodied feminist politics, highlighting how affect shapes social dynamics within institutions and can reconfigure them. This essay examines these protests as embodied complaints that disrupt the status quo and challenge established institutional orientations to effect policy change. Ahmed’s concepts of the ‘feminist killjoy’ and ‘straightening devices’ provide a framework to explore the impact of these encampments on academic institutions and the protesters themselves.

By analyzing situated moments from a roundtable discussion with activists involved in these movements, this essay reveals how institutional responses often aim to neutralise dissent and maintain existing power relations. The essay underscores the challenges and potential of embodied resistance in confronting institutional complicity in systemic violence.