Luzilda Carrillo

LUZILDA CARIILO, then a graduate student at U. of California, Irvine, California, was awarded funding in April 2016 to aid research on ‘Making Corporate Inclusivity: Discrimination and Expertise in Post-Affirmative Action America,’ supervised by Dr. William Maurer. Since the 1990s, business scholars and popular intellectuals in the United States have theorized workplace diversity to produce organizational techniques to center the management of differences in thought and perspectives, rather than the traditional categories of race and gender. These knowledge practices have bourgeoned after the economic crises of 2008 and the systemic dismantlement of affirmative action policies, which sought to correct the historic effects of segregation through the development of race-based initiatives and programs. Through multi-sited ethnography, interviews, and archival research, the researcher investigated the intersection between scientific, economic, political, logics and affective dispositions. In particular, the researcher followed the work of an interdisciplinary network of management consultants and researchers, human resource professionals, and event coordinators as they created and employed diversity knowledge and techniques in workshops and trainings, organizational models, and research on workplace discrimination and corporate profitability. She asked how these corporate professionals made sense of their work, how they intervened in behaviors and practices, and how they justified the creation of new policies and programs across multinational corporations. This research examined how antiracist and capitalist projects have become entangled, and how they have opened and foreclosed possibilities for reimagining social justice.