A few posts back, I talked about Charles Taylor’s view of multiculturalism as a proposed remedy to the ill of mis-recognition — being looked down upon by the majority in society because of your group status. While we can arrive at a general consensus on the problem of mis-recognition, there is some debate on how you resolve it. For my own benefit, I’m interested in thinking about whether the university as an institutional actor has the wherewithal to address misrecognition.

Nancy Fraser has an interesting article in New Left Review where she addresses this question of mis-recognition. Her main thesis is that identity politics as currently practiced creates a “problem of displacement” by elevating cultural claims of mis-recognition (negative portrayals of Latinos in films as an example) over claims of material or resource inequality. This problem of displacement is evident in the way universities do diversity, focusing mainly on addressing mis-recognition through the creating of cultural centers or by expanding course offerings to address cultural stigma. What receives less attention, Fraser (and I) would argue, is a discussion of how cultural mis-recognition is connected to material inequality.

Fraser’s solution is to rearticulate mis-recognition as an issue of status position. From this perspective, addressing misrecognition isn’t about whether or not a group’s culture is properly represented, but rather it becomes an issue of the relative status position of members of different groups within an institution’s interrelated set of power hierarchies. Viewing mis-recognition as reproduced through a lattice of socio-political institutions raises the bar for addressing mis-recognition.  Succcessful diversity efforts is then about how much parity your institution has in terms of power and resource distribution, not simply about how many “awareness weeks” a campus has.