That ‘diversity’ lends itself to different interpretations, and that there is a mismatch between pronouncements on diversity and its applications, are well documented in the literature (Ahmed, 2012; Wekker et al, 2016; Bhopal and Henderson, 2019). What such critiques centre are the ways in which diversity may be rendered “tangible and operational” (Essanhaji and van Reekum, 2022, p. 883). While such efforts are laudable in their aim to unearth injustices, exclusions and the ways in which these manifest themselves in educational practices and discourses, their analytical potential is somewhat limited. What is called for is a deeper understanding of the ways in which discourses and practices of diversity engage with questions of sameness and difference, nationalism and the futurity of whiteness.

Against the background of the mainstreaming of a set of “xenologies” for “differentiating between human collectivities” (Wolf, 2016, p. 7), in various domains, notably but not exclusively the recent pronouncements on immigration and asylum in the UK, and epistemologies of “white ignorance” (Mills, 2007) as evidenced in the attacks on Critical Race theory by the former UK equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, and the call to include in the curriculum the “benefits” of the British empire, the question of diversity is rendered subservient, politically, to the purported needs of the nation. Conceived of as a homogeneous space, the return of ‘the national’ entails an assimilationist logic that constructs ‘the different’ as defective, one that must be subject to surveillance, disciplined and removed. This symposium draws together and frames interrelated discussions around these themes, while engaging with how whiteness is sustained and invested with the “right to exclude” (Harris, 1993) as well as practices of extraction evidenced by the experiences of “scholars of colour who are called upon to ‘diversify’ the curriculum and workforce” (Sriprakash et al, 2022, p. 45)

This symposium addresses some of ways in which diversity in the Irish, Scottish and English education contexts works to render differences invisible. Khoo’s paper seeks to review the recent institutional emphasis on race and ethnic equality in Irish HE through the lens of critical sociology of race in Ireland. Such analysis throws into sharp relief the ways in which whiteness as an assemblage of strategies, policies and practices constitutes and sustains Irish higher education. Swanson and Gamal’s paper argue that mandating the promoting of “fundamental British values” (FBV) in England’s school recasts the notion of diversity as “the failure of state multiculturalism” (Crawford, 2017) to be replaced by ‘rigid notions of internal uniformity” (Conversi, 2017, p.25). Concomitantly, diversity as a “thin and capacious” construct (Uberoi and McLean 2007, 46) is invested with demonic signifiers that threaten the cohesion of the nation. Coursing through these two papers is a concern with troubling the “exhibition of diversity” which works to center and invibilise differences (Wekker et al, 2016, p. 71). Lord and Oforji’s paper takes as a starting point the ways in which diversity itself has been conceived of in the European educational space. The inherent purported ‘goodness’ of diversity and its instrumentalisation in institutional targets and outcomes hides extractive practices. Lord and Oforji draw on their experiences of working in Scotland, of paying high international student fees and immigration to highlight the extractive intentions of the valorisation of diversity.

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