Divided over ?Diversity?: The Politics of Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan.

?Diversity? has become a fashionable and plastic buzzword over the past thirty years. With the recent U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning affirmative action at the University of Michigan, the concept of diversity has received even greater public scrutiny. The existing scholarly literature that examines discourses about diversity usually relies on macro-level, legal, or text analyses, overlooking people?s interpretations of diversity in their everyday practices. The proposed paper helps to fill in this gap. It draws on over a year of ethnographic evidence about how interests groups involved in the lawsuits against UM?including university administrators, pro- and anti-affirmative action activists, legal professionals, and political leaders?politically and legally mobilized around the lawsuits and then responded to the Court?s decisions. The paper builds on cultural analyses of the law and collective action by examining how various interest groups negotiate different socio-legal paradoxes around diversity. Preliminary findings show how nearly every group is in favor of ?diversity,? but they all confront challenges when defining this concept and putting it into practice. For example, outsider activists?both in favor of and opposed to affirmative action?talk about diversity by simultaneously endorsing it and questioning its relevance, meaning, or existence. The proposed paper concludes with a discussion of how ideas related to law acquire constituencies, constitute the categories through which people construct the world, and ultimately shape their efforts to address different social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]