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institutional passing

📖 Definitions

"Institutional passing: survival within an institution, let alone career progression, might depend on not challenging norms or might even depend upon the extent to which we can increase our proximity to them (by conducting ourselves in the right way, proximity to whiteness often translates as proximity to a certain style of respectable middle-class conduct). You go up by appearing (more) like those who are up. It would be too easy to dismiss this work as assimilation. The idea that those who embody diversity should pay increasing costs for not inhabiting institutional norms would further the injustice of how those norms support and enable the progression of some more than others." (Ahmed, 2017, p. 128) "Institutional passing can involving minimizing signs of difference from institutional norms. Or institutional passing can involve maximizing signs of difference from a set of expectations about what those who are different from norms are like." (Ahmed, 2017, p. 131)

🔗 Relations

📚 References

  • Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. New York: Duke University Press. https: doi.org/10.1215/9780822373377.