Diversity as Immigration Governmentality: Insights from France

Milena Doytcheva
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Milena Doytcheva: Department of Sociology, University of Caen Normandy, Espl. de la Paix, 14000 Caen, France

Social Sciences, 2021, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-19

Abstract: This article aims to examine the ambiguous connections between immigration, diversity politics, and white supremacy in twenty-first century France by considering them both theoretically and empirically. It offers to elucidate the ways in which the recent growth and expansion of the diversity framework in Europe and France have gone hand in hand with the unfolding of particularly repressive migration policies, hostility towards migrants, and outright institutional racism. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal data on corporate diversity policies, based on semi-structured interviews ( n = 86), the article also relies on secondary data analysis from other policy domains (migration, education, urban development), favoring a globally comparative lens. First, I engage with some major trends of the recent reinvention of diversity at the EU level, underscoring the ambiguous effects of Europeanizing antiracism and nondiscrimination in a reverse sequence; second, I critically revisit the ways in which this European reinvention, combined with the legal universalization of equal opportunity, has given rise to the articulation of “white diversity” conceptions; then I explore their even more problematic nexus with governing migration. Finally, I call for a critical scrutiny of how universalized and thoroughly individualized notions of diversification may emerge as instrumental in upholding hegemonic whiteness, in the fields of race relations as well as international migration.

Keywords: diversity; immigration; governmentality; white supremacy; white normativity; EU; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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