'Valuing diversity': a cliche´ for the 21st century?

Abstract

The notion of ‘valuing diversity’ is attractive. It offers the possibility of reconceptualizing human difference as something to be celebrated in a plural society, and it appears to present a departure from the categorical thinking that has resulted in the separation and hierarchization of particular groups. It suggests that everyone is different, everyone is unique, and everyone is valuable for who they are. Or does it? In this paper, I show how the discourse of valuing diversity is deployed in a girls' comprehensive school. Whilst the staff at the school are concerned to make the school's practices more inclusive, they are also obliged to meet the requirements of the standards agenda, which emphasizes, above all else, normative examination results. Analysing the experiences of two autistic students reveals that notions of valuing diversity can only be deployed in relation to students who have already been identified as falling short of the required ‘standards’. It thus operates to re-inscribe a binary division between able and disabled. This paper explores the complex discursive web through which a seemingly progressive piece of terminology has become a cliché: a cliché that has been co-opted into a 21st-century-style reproduction of relations of domination and subordination.