ABSTRACT
The development of different sorts of ambivalent, agitating feelings may be crucial to producing successful challenges to racialising status quo, especially so where they are taken up by subjects usually defined as disruptive. This chapter focuses on responding to this set of issues by exploring the ways affect, as it relates to positioning, is mobilised as a means of sustaining diversity work as a politically and socially resistant practice. It draws on interviews with the same 11 members of the national educational network for Black and minority ethnic (BME) professionals and learners in adult and continuing learning (BME education network). Diversity workers often do identify themselves as women, as Black or as disabled. They are often positioned like this by others as part of everyday gendering and racialising processes. The disproportionate affective labour produced through unequally positioned diversity workers everyday feelings of shock, anxiety and fear creates fatigue, exhaustion and tiredness.
